Kennedi Holmes had an extremely difficult childhood. She thought it was her fault.
“Me getting in trouble 24/7, I thought I was a bad kid,” the Crandall basketball standout said.
Her mom Laura Holmes, who is the girls basketball coach at Crandall, thought she just had a hard-headed daughter.
“We all had this guilt for a while because we have yelled at this child for not listening and grounded her and taken things away from her,” she said.
It wasn’t discovered until second grade that Kennedi was partially deaf in both ears. It was a fluke that the hearing loss was discovered, as a teacher noticed Kennedi trying to read her lips in class instead of appearing to listen to what was being said.
“We never thought it was a hearing problem,” Laura said. “She struggled in school, she couldn’t read very well. Fifth grade was the first time she ever passed the STAAR test. She was behind the other kids from birth to second grade, but we didn’t put two and two together.”
Now at junior, Kennedi has made a remarkable recovery.
The 5-7 guard averages 11 points, 4 rebounds, 3 steals and 2 assists for a 21-11 Crandall team that has clinched a spot in the playoffs for the 30th consecutive season. She’s a starting setter on the volleyball team. She’s an A/B student in the classroom. She’s starting to get recruiting interest from college basketball programs.
And she doesn’t wear hearing aids or do sign language. With about 70% hearing in each ear, she taught herself how to read lips.
“It was actually easy,” Kennedi said.
One in eight people in the United States (13%, or 30 million) aged 12 years or older has hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations. About two to three out of every 1,000 children in the United States are born with a detectable level of hearing loss in one or both ears, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Despite being “blown away” by what she could hear with hearing aids, Kennedi only wore them from second through fifth grade because she was getting bullied at school.
“We moved to Crandall in sixth grade, and she asked me if she could not wear them. Kids are kids, and they poked fun at her. Because of the stigma of the hearing aids, she did not want to wear them,” Laura said.
Added Kennedi: “I would come home from school in tears because people didn’t like me because I didn’t have normal hearing.”
How severe is her hearing loss? “What we hear, to her it’s a whisper,” Laura said.
Kennedi can’t hear sounds like birds chirping, water running or a coach yelling instructions to her in a loud gym, and she still pronounces some words incorrectly. But she can have a normal conversation, and her teammates help her communicate with coaches while she is on the court.
Kennedi has an offer from Seward County Community College in Kansas and is getting recruiting interest from UNT Dallas (where former Plano state championship coach Rodney Belcher coaches), Wayland Baptist and Texas State. She plans to wait until her senior year to make her college decision, but she already knows what she wants to major in.
“Business,” she said. “I want to do real estate.”
For now, she is in the business of showing others how to overcome major life obstacles.
“Her confidence and her independence are incredible and have never wavered,” Laura said. “She has never felt sorry for herself and just kind of rolls with the punches. To find out that you can’t hear after that long, and then you start to find out why you are behind and you can’t read and people make fun of the way you say words ... it did not diminish her life.”
On Twitter: @DMNGregRiddle
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