Faith Lutheran cornerback plays in silence

By Christopher Drexel

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008 | midnight

Imagine a high school football game with no sound.

The band plays and the cheerleaders cheer, but there are no exuberant voices or melodies in the air. The quarterback's lips move, but the signals being barked out are muted. No screaming coaches or players.

Just silence.

It's the way Adam Finlayson experiences high school football every Friday night. The junior cornerback for Faith Lutheran has been deaf since infancy. With the help of cochlear implant — a part internal, part external device that sends digital sounds to his brain — Finlayson is able to hear and speak with relative ease when he's in school.

But because a piece of the device doesn't fit under his football helmet, Finlayson's actions on the field are based solely on vision and instinct. Still, he doesn't look at himself as being disadvantaged.

"A lot of my friends say it's got to be pretty scary not to hear anything, but, for me, I don't think it's scary," Finlayson said. "I think it's very relaxing. You don't have to hear anybody screaming or any aggressive sounds. So I just play my own game. I play in silence. And it's good."

Never discouraged

Finlayson's parents suspected he might be deaf when he was a year old and hadn't started to speak. Doctors initially found fluid in his ears and put tubes in his ears to drain it — but he remained silent. Then a test revealed hair cells in the cochlea of his ear were damaged or not developed properly.

For the next three years, doctors had Finlayson try a variety of hearing aides with no success.

"We did lots of intensive speech therapy for my little active, normal-in-any-other-way toddler," said his mother, Karyn Finlayson. "Try as he could, he just wasn't hearing enough to make sense of the sounds that were coming in.

"We did a little bit of sign language, but we were still enthusiastic about him becoming part of the hearing world because he showed a desire to speak," she said.

Doctors finally recommended the cochlear implant, which Finlayson had fitted during a procedure in Los Angeles at age 4. His mother was told her son was the first child from Nevada to receive the device, which electrically stimulates auditory nerves inside the ear rather than simply amplifying sound like a standard hearing aid.

After the procedure, Finlayson, his mother and his older sister, Chelsey, moved to St. Louis so Finlayson could attend what was rated the best school in the country for deaf children. There, his mother allowed him to first play football at age 7.

In the coming years, with his hearing and speaking much more developed, Finlayson and his family returned to Las Vegas. He began attending Faith Lutheran Middle School when he was in sixth grade and continued playing football as well as basketball, baseball, lacrosse and golf.

"I had parents tell me, 'You're really taking a chance having him involved in a contact sport like football,'" Karyn Finlayson said. "But Adam was always so enthusiastic about sports, I didn't want to hold him back because I've looked at him as a child first and his being deaf after that."

Being deaf hasn't hindered Finlayson on the playing field or in the classroom. He has a 3.75 grade point average and is the first member of Faith Lutheran's student resource department — a class students with special needs attend every other day to get help with school — to be part of the National Honor Society.

Kirsten Lopez, the school's student resource coordinator, said Finlayson's work ethic allows him to excel despite his disability.

"He really wants to grab on to whatever there is to grab onto in life and participate in as much as he can," Lopez said. "In a lot of ways, kids don't realize he has a hearing impairment because he is so outgoing. But he is inspirational. He's a kid others look up to because he is respectful and a great leader."

Courageous corner

It's difficult to notice Finlayson's inability to hear during football games. The Faith Lutheran defensive coaches use hand signals when calling alignments, so Finlayson knows where to line up just the same as his other 10 teammates on the field. After that, he has no issues going one-on-one with receivers.

"He has to visually make his reads. He does that by watching if the linemen are setting up for a pass and keying on what the receivers are doing," Faith Lutheran coach Jake Kothe said. "He makes some amazing plays out there because he's physically able to do it. So (hearing) isn't an issue. He's good enough to start as a junior for us."

Joe Portaro, a quarterback for the Crusaders who has known Finlayson for four years, said he couldn't imagine playing the game without sound.

"I think it takes a lot of courage for a kid to come out being deaf and play a sport like this," Portaro said. "But when he's out there playing, you can't really tell because he's so good at defense. I don't know how he does it. I couldn't read lips like he does. And he's always working harder than everybody. He's an inspiration to me and for everyone else to do their best."

Finlayson said a key to his success in school and sports is not thinking of himself as disabled. That's one reason why he loves sports so much.

"I don't want to be in a deaf world," Finlayson said. "I want to be in a normal world, a hearing world. I want to not have everybody know I'm deaf or that I have special needs. I want to be a regular guy, so everyone treats me like a regular guy. I like that."

Christopher Drexel can be reached at 990-8929 or [email protected].