Sitting there, Emma wore a white T-shirt that said “Oakwood Basketball” across the front. This past high school season — her senior year at Oakwood High — she was the captain of the team and by mid-February she had surpassed 1,000 career points.
She’d end the season in the top three in the Southwestern Buckeye League (SWBL) in scoring (15.3 points per game.), rebounds (9.1), assists (5.8) and steals (4.5.) and garner first team All-SWBL honors, as well as All-State recognition.
Earlier on this afternoon, she had been working with kids at the Dayton Flyers Women’s Basketball Camp on the nearby UD campus.
In two months, she’ll begin her college basketball career as a 5-foot-10 guard at Wittenberg University.
As she was talking, a pair of cardinals flittered back and forth in the nearby trees, providing a chorus of two-part whistles and trills that sounded like they were giving her some melodious cheers.
She could hear them — just as she could hear someone using a leaf blower in the distance — and both instances were feats in themselves, as impressive as some of her hoops heroics.
Early in her life she would have heard none of that background noise — and likely not some of the questions I was asking her if I wasn’t looking straight at her so she could read my lips.
“Yeah, I grew up saying ‘What?’ a lot,” she said with a laugh.
She had significant hearing loss as a child and it intensified with each coming year.
Nancy sensed there was a problem, although Emma passed all her school hearing tests through second grade.
As for her daughter’s speech impediment, Nancy said she and her husband, Doug, were told it was simply a matter of “speech development” that could be addressed with special classes.
“I felt like a loser mom,” Nancy said with a shrug and a grin. “I knew there was something, but she kept passing the hearing tests in school, so I wasn’t sure.
“But at home, if she was across the room from me and had her back to me, I could call her name and she wouldn’t respond at all. I figured something was going on with her hearing, but I had no idea of the extent it was.
“Finally, in second grade, one of here teachers told me, ‘There might be a little more going on here than we know.’
“And the next year at Smith Elementary, it just happened that one day the regular nurse was out and a nurse from Children’s (Dayton Children’s Hospital) was filling in and she pulled Emma out for a hearing test.
“Afterward she called me and said ‘Emma, might be taking cues (to help hear), but she didn’t pass this hearing test.’
“And I said ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. Now we know.”’
Emma was fitted with hearing aids in third grade and a year later, she received a cochlear implant in her left ear, which had the most severe hearing loss.
The procedure involves a surgically-implanted neuroprosthesis that provides a person with profound sensorineural hearing loss with sound perception. It bypasses acoustic hearing by providing direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve.
The implant has two main components.
The outside part is worn behind the ear. It’s a sound compressor that contains microphones, signal processor chips, a battery and a coil that transmits a signal to the surgically-installed implant that has a coil to receive the signals and converts them to electronic impulses.
There is an array of electrodes placed in the cochlea and they stimulate the cochlear nerve and, well, like the other day, you suddenly start hearing birds and leaf blowers.
When she was in the ninth grade, Emma got a cochlear implant on her right ear, as well.
“The technology, it’s crazy stuff and I’m thankful,” she said with a smile. “I mean you can go from being completely deaf to hearing everything.
“It was like magic.”
Athletic family
The five Neff children all have athletic talent.
Oldest son Markus played baseball at Cedarville University.
Kylie, who’s next in line, was an athlete of note at Oakwood whose college softball dreams were rerouted because of injury and COVID’s erasure of a season.
Best known are the twins:
Andy was a 6-foot-7 forward who played five seasons at Wright State and is about to begin his coaching career with the Oakwood High freshmen team. Alex is an outfielder who began his career with the Wright State baseball team and then transferred to UD, where he’s coming off surgery and still has a year of eligibility remaining.
Emma is the youngest and she has overcome the most to excel in both basketball and soccer.
“We’re very proud of her, very thankful and, mostly, we know we’re very blessed,’ Nancy said. “She amazes us all the time.
“She has hearing difficulties even with the implants — she doesn’t hear things the way everybody else does — but she perseveres.
“And she’s used her other senses to her advantage in sports and everything else she does.”
Emma worked hard to get good grades even though there were times she couldn’t hear the teacher or had trouble making out certain words.
She bolsters her hearing by reading lips, but that’s why COVID was such a detriment for her. Everyone’s mouth was covered with a mask and their voices were muffled.
There are some cautions when you have cochlear implants. With all the electronics involved and those surgical implants, you don’t want to be involved in a lot of forceful contact. No boxing, things like that.
“Yeah, mom doesn’t like it when I take headers in soccer,” Emma laughed.
“Yes, you’re not supposed to,” Nancy said softly. “You’ve got a lot of important stuff going on in there.”
Then with a shrug, she added: “But she tells me, ‘Mom! It’s part of the game!’”
Nancy said there were times in basketball where Emma was hit hard enough that the outer portion of one of the cochlear implants — held in place by a magnet and a piece of tape her daughter places over it — had been knocked loose and fell onto the court
“And no foul was called,” Nancy said shaking her head. “I’d be like ‘Wait! That doesn’t just happen on its own!’”
Here hearing device is not supposed to get wet either, so if it’s raining during a soccer match, she takes those outer pieces off and hands them to her coach.
“When she plays then, she plays deaf,” Nancy said.
In contrast, when there’s no restriction, she’s able to hear her coach directly — especially in basketball versus soccer where there’s wind noise — thank to a device called an FM system.
“My coaches actually wore them,” she said. “I’d put pieces directly into my ears like microphones. And they’d wear these things like a necklace and whatever they said would go directly into my ears. I can hear everything they say.”
Of the colleges that recruited her, Ohio Wesleyan wanted her to play both soccer and basketball.
She eventually narrowed her choices to Otterbein, Cedarville and Wittenberg and chose the Tigers because she liked the school, the basketball program was successful and she’d be close enough to home that her close-knit family could come see her play.
Coaching future?
Before she heads to Wittenberg, she’s been invited to the University of Illinois in the first week of July to try out for the USA Deaf Soccer Women’s National Team.
“I know the talent there will be crazy high, but I’m going in with an open mind and high hopes,” she said. “I’ll give it my all and enjoy the experience, too.”
Once she gets to college — where she’s joining a Wittenberg team that went 21-5 last season and won the North Coast Athletic Conference regular season title with a 13-1 league mark — she plans to study exercise science.
“The idea is to become an athletic trainer, and if that doesn’t work, maybe something in sports administration,” she said. “Ultimately, I’d love to be a coach.
“There are a lot of options, but right now I’m just not sure what.”
And there’s that word again:
“What.”
But now, instead of signaling something she has missed, it signifies myriad opportunities in front of her.
No wonder the cardinals were singing her a joyous song.
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