How many times have we heard the sports cliché about a team as family?
In the case of the men’s basketball team representing the United States at the 24th Summer Deaflympics, currently underway in Caxias do Sul, Brazil, it’s not a cliché. The Valencias, from California School for the Deaf, Riverside are well represented, featuring brothers Noah, 24, and Jory, 17.
Noah scored 71 points in a game for CSDR in December 2015, setting an Inland high school scoring record that lasted less than a year. Chino Hills’ LiAngelo Ball scored 72 the next November to break it, and his brother LaMelo, now with the Charlotte Hornets, shattered the mark less than three months after that by going for 92.
Noah, 6-foot-1, averaged 31.4 points, 10.1 rebounds and 4.2 assists as a senior at CSDR, then played four seasons at Gallaudet, the nation’s preeminent university for the deaf in Washington, D.C.
Jory, 6-2 and currently finishing his sophomore year at CSDR, has blazed his own athletic path. He was part of the Cubs football team that went 12-1, reached the CIF Southern Section eight-man championship game and earned nationwide recognition, and he was among the team captains who were part of the ceremonial coin toss before the Rams-Cincinnati Bengals Super Bowl LVI a few months ago at SoFi Stadium.
Jory can play a little hoops, too. He was the National Deaf Interscholastic Athletic Association Division I Player of the Year this past season, averaging 18.7 points, 8.5 rebounds and 6.3 assists.
Can he hang with the older guys?
“I joined the high school teams when I was in middle school,” Jory said through American Sign Language interpreter Sabrina Torres. “I played with older teams and it’s just become part of who I am. The age is nothing to me. I just play ball.”
And yes, he’d go one-on-one with his older brother, and with his father, Jeremias, who was Noah’s coach at CSDR and is now the school’s athletic director and also the director of USA Deaf Basketball.
“All the time,” Jory said. “And, of course, only a couple of times I was able to beat them one-on-one.”
“Never,” Noah interjected. “Absolutely never.”
Ah, brothers.
“We can consider ourselves the 12 best (deaf) basketball players in the USA,” Noah signed. “So once we’re on the court it’s all brotherly love.”
They have familiar faces surrounding them. Steve Valencia-Biskupiak, Jeremias’ brother and Noah and Jory’s uncle, is a 6-8 center who has four children attending CSDR, and who previously competed in the Deaflympics as a handball player in 2005. Esau Zornoza, a 6-2 small forward, is a substitute teacher at the school. Derek Keels, a 2010 CSDR graduate, is a 6-4 defensive whiz with a 6-8 wingspan. And 6-3 Raymond Nelson scored 27.3 points per game for CSDR as a senior in 2010-11.
So how did so many players from one place wind up on the national team?
“It’s fate, I think,” Noah said. “Our head coach, Jimmy Newsome, is from Riverside and this area, so he keeps an eye on each of us who play. And we still play club pickup ball … we have different leagues that we play in.
“(Because of COVID-19) we weren’t able to have a successful tryout, so Jimmy was able to hand-pick seven of us to play on the team.”
Not everyone is enthused, of course. The day that USA Deaf Basketball tweeted the roster for the Games in early April, a critic tweeted back: “Nepotism at its finest.”
Nepotism at its finest.
— ridorthe9th (@ridorthe9th) April 11, 2022
But the familiarity shouldn’t hurt when the team takes the floor for its first game on Wednesday against Kenya (8:30 a.m. PDT, available on the X Play TV YouTube channel).
“We try to find any game that we can participate in,” Valencia-Biskupiak said. “Any time there is a floor available with a couple extra guys, we’re there. We will play wherever it is, whatever it is; where the competition calls, we show up.
“So I consider that practice as well. I take advantage of every opportunity that we get. It helps us quite a bit because it’s not the same individuals that we’re playing every single time. Every time we show up to a gym, we play against people with different sizes and speeds and skill sets. And that truly benefits us in preparation for Brazil.”
Noah Valencia recalled the World Deaf Championships in Poland in 2019, when the U.S. defeated Lithuania for its first championship.
“We did not have a single practice prior to that event,” he said. “We arrived two or three days before that event, (with) new systems and new players playing against each other. We started off a little rocky and it was not great, but in the end, we were able to play our best and realized that we needed to make sure that we had a week of time to really practice and prepare ourselves for that gold medal.”
(He neglected to point out that he was the tournament MVP.)
Zornoza agreed that having some practice time since getting to Brazil helps. But, he added, “We already have that chemistry. It’s there and it’s set. Adding those extra players, you’re just blending it in easily. … We understand each other’s game. Now, all we have to do is show up and put it in action.”
Basketball is far from the only attraction at these games, which began with Sunday’s opening ceremony. There are 11 additional participants from this region: Anessa Campos (Riverside), Emily Cressy (Huntington Beach) and Ashley Derrington (Playa Vista) in women’s soccer, Chad Johnson (L.A.) in men’s soccer, Samantha Fujii (L.A.) in swimming, Zane Fleming and Rory Osbrink (both Riverside) in cycling, Joanna Rocha-Sheney (L.A.) in women’s basketball, and Giuletta Maucere (Riverside), Sarah Tubert (Burbank) and Kyla Waiters (Costa Mesa) in women’s volleyball.
Maucere and Osbrink are staff members at CSDR, while Fleming is an alumnus from the class of 2009. So it’s been quite an academic year for the K-12 school located adjacent to Arlington Ave., which along with CSD Fremont is one of two such deaf institutions in California.
CSDR had a memorable football season, an appearance on the Kelly Clarkson show, an introduction to around 112 million viewers at the Super Bowl, and now this.
“Everyone here is a part of that,” Zornoza said.