Dedication and Deafness: Spurgeon brings exceptional drive to Lady Eagles

KNOXVILLE — When Azariah Spurgeon watches college basketball, she has a few favorite players.

Former Iowa standout Gabbie Marshall is one of them, namely for the way she defends.

“She is fun to watch,” said Spurgeon after a game at Bearden High School this summer. “She was all over the basketball, took a lot of charges, always where the ball is.”

As she said that, Spurgeon had just filled those same roles and more for the Lady Eagles, driving their defense against the Carter Lady Hornets with her laser-eyed, relentless approach.

“She is a pest,” summarized Lady Eagles coach Cody Lowe that day. “And I mean that in a good way.”

But once that defensive mindset is put aside, there is a visible difference between Marshall and Spurgeon — a difference that also exists between Spurgeon and her Cosby teammates.

While other players wear ponytail holders or thinner headbands, Spurgeon rocks a blue, wraparound Jordan headband — her “Rambo” look, as her dad calls it — to secure her cochlear implants, which she has worn since she was a child.

The implants are essential for the incoming freshman, who was born Deaf.

These days, Spurgeon has ways to work around her inability to hear — but that was not always the case.

Her development as a person and player has involved years of speech therapy off the court, time spent working on her craft at home, and more than a few awkward moments in school for Spurgeon to arrive to this point — right on the cusp of her high school career, the moment she and her parents have wanted since she first fell in love with the game.

But to understand her future with the Lady Eagles, as well as the output she brings from the elementary level, one must first grasp the drive that has brought Spurgeon past every limitation she has encountered.

“It has been a journey,” summarized her mom, Whitney Spurgeon. “But she is phenomenal.”

‘No hearing’

When Spurgeon was born in March of 2010, she failed her newborn hearing screening.

The family was sent to East Tennessee Children’s Hospital for further testing.

There, the Spurgeons were assured that plenty of newborns fail that test and do fine on the ABR, the Auditory Brainstem Response test for newborns.

“And she did not,” Whitney Spurgeon said. “She failed as far as the equipment could measure. Absolutely no hearing.”

“It was super heartbreaking,” Whitney Spurgeon added, “looking at your newborn knowing she couldn’t hear anything you said.”

Still, the Spurgeons pressed on. They researched all the information they could, then decided that a cochlear implant would be the best course of action.

So a young Azariah wore a hearing aid — “which didn’t help much,” her parents said — until the age of one, at which point she had surgery for the implant.

She got another one nine months later, and she has worn them ever since, while also going to speech therapy underneath Neyland Stadiun at The University of Tennessee.

“And it’s been a process, because when they turn her implants on, it’s like a new way of hearing,” said her dad and elementary coach, Josh Spurgeon. “She doesn’t hear like we do.

“She had to train her brain, so she’s been through years of speech therapy to hear that way, then to speak.”

Today, one would not be able to tell that Spurgeon ever had an issue with her speech.

In fact, she even has a bit of the twang that comes from living in East Tennessee, a rarity for someone with a cochlear implant.

But the hearing aspect has still been an issue — not just in the gym, but in social situations at school.

“When I was young, kids didn’t really know a difference,” said Spurgeon. “They think you are normal, but once you get older, they might ask what (the implant) is, not really aware that I really can’t hear.

“They will whisper something and not realize I can’t hear them, and I’m saying ‘What?’ several times, and they just say never mind. They don’t realize how much it affects me, that I can’t hear that well.”

Outside the classroom, Spurgeon — who is one of six kids — grew interested in dancing as a child.

It was not until fifth grade, after seeing her brother Ezra play basketball for a few years, that she decided to step onto the hardwood.

“Ezra was always big into basketball, and she never really played in the yard with them much,” said Josh Spurgeon. “Then one year, she said, ‘I want to try basketball.’ And she was naturally aggressive and was a good dribbler.”

A natural defender

The combination made Spurgeon an easy choice for point guard, as her early ball handling skills opened more scoring opportunities for her Smoky Mountain Elementary teammates.

Early-on, Spurgeon struggled in her own attempts to put the ball in the basket.

So she had to ramp up her defense in order to give herself more chances to score.

“It’s great as a coach, because you preach defense continually,” said Josh Spurgeon. “Kids want to shoot threes and get as many points as they can. But at first, she was very weak as a shooter. Couldn’t even hit a free throw. So the only way she scored was to get a steal and get a wide-open layup to score.”

“I think that’s one thing that drove her to play tough defense,” he added. “That approach of, ‘I’ve got to get the ball to get a basket,’ and it carried over.”

Spurgeon harassed opposing players throughout her career in elementary basketball, growing to the point that she averaged 23 points a game — for a total of 403 in the season — last year as an eighth-grader.

Her approach is built on competitiveness and desire, honed through years of tough one-on-one matchups against her brother, now a freshman for the Cosby boys program.

Those characteristics were on full display in Knoxville this summer, as Spurgeon dove for loose balls, sprinted down the court on fast breaks, and even slammed into the maroon mat on Bearden’s gym wall at one point in pursuit of an extra possession.

In short, Spurgeon was all over the floor, using her defensive approach to ingrain herself into the Lady Eagles’ lineup as a 14-year-old.

“It just depends who I’m playing,” she explained, digging into the fierceness that fuels her. “If I’m playing someone who doesn’t handle pressure well, I get on top of them. But if it’s someone who’s a little faster or can handle a little better, then I’ll stay back, because I have help from my teammates.”

“She’s the nicest kid off the court,” added Whitney Spurgeon with a laugh. “You’d never know she was like that on the floor.”

So startling is Spurgeon’s defense that Lowe has deferred to her methods when he might otherwise offer different instructions to an incoming freshman.

“You want her to get good defensive positioning and pull her back,” explained Lowe, “but then I’ll say, ‘There’s no way she’ll get to that loose ball,’ and she does. So I’m just going to let her do her thing and let her have fun.

“Because she loves it and loves getting in passing lanes and creating easy baskets, which is something we haven’t had the last couple years. We haven’t had a lot of fast break points, and she has really helped us with that.”

Handling the noise

While Spurgeon has found success in her defense, the offensive side has been made tougher because of her lack of hearing.

She can read lips, but that only goes so far within the intense moments of a game.

“Adjusting has been hard, because you don’t realize how much you have to communicate until you can’t hear,” she said. “When I was younger, they didn’t communicate because you just played, but to run plays, you have to constantly look at your coach and know.”

“A lot of times, (Lowe) will be telling her to do something — and I had the same struggle — and she can’t hear because of the background noise,” added Josh Spurgeon. “So if she’s not looking at you, she doesn’t know what you’re saying.”

To compensate during her elementary years, Spurgeon and her dad would use game-specific language to communicate.

“We had everything down,” said Josh Spurgeon. “Defense and offense were by numbers. A one would be man-to-man defense, and two was a 2-3 zone.”

Similarly, Cosby has relied on signals throughout Lowe’s tenure to account for the noise in their home gym.

In that way, the Lady Eagles are already built to handle Spurgeon’s impact, making her transition to high school that much smoother.

“That will really help with her learning curve,” said Lowe, who said he has adapted in some ways this summer to ensure Spurgeon can understand him.

“I’ve gotten really loud and I don’t cover my mouth as much,” he said. “I make sure she can see me, I talk loud, and I try to enunciate my words so she can see my lips and see what I’m trying to say.”

‘The exception’

There are, of course, exceptions to these occurrences in the middle of a game.

For the moments in which she cannot read lips or exchange signals, Spurgeon’s teammates have helped to bridge the gap.

In the process, they play a part in the development of a player who seeks to win at Cosby and perhaps even beyond.

Shortly after she started playing, Spurgeon began dreaming of a career in college.

Spurgeon said her ideal choice would be UT — which saw the impact of another Deaf player in legendary Lady Vol Tamika Catchings — since she would like to pursue audiology in the same place where she has worked so hard to learn to communicate.

But regardless of where Spurgeon lands after high school or what comes after this, one thing is for certain.

For the next four years, Cosby fans will bear witness to the rise of one of the most unique stories that Spurgeon’s doctors — and the Lady Eagles’ program — have ever seen.

“Even to this day, the doctor that did her implant surgery, he calls her a rock star and uses her at seminars,” said Whitney Spurgeon. “Because she is the exception to people that have had implants.

“Anything they said she couldn’t do, it was just like, ‘Watch me.’ That’s just who she is. God has really taken care of her, and she’s a great kid with a good head on her shoulders.”