Abington grad Cam Lexow’s new playing career at Gallaudet brings an impactful experience of using ASL

What Cam Lexow is doing this year is remarkable in plenty of ways.

It’d be one thing if the Abington graduate had simply changed colleges to start graduate school. It’d be another if Lexow had changed sports for her fifth year of eligibility. It’s another to go from a place where speaking and hearing is normal to one where it makes her an outlier.

All of that is a part of what Lexow is doing this year. As a graduate student at Gallaudet University, a federally chartered institution for the deaf and hard of hearing, Lexow is playing basketball for the first time since senior year of high school after her first act as a soccer player at the University of Virginia. She’s doing all of it using a language she started learning only three years ago.

For most, it would be an impossible scenario.

Most people aren’t Lexow.

“It is everything I hoped it would be and more, if I’m being completely honest,” Lexow said. “When I first came, I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew it’d be a lot of sign language, and I’d be one of the people who wasn’t the best at sign language because almost everyone there is a native signer.”

Lexow, a 2019 Abington graduate who played varsity soccer and basketball all four years, is hearing-abled. She is the only player on the Bisons who can say that, so all communication with her teammates is done through American Sign Language.

An introductory class in ASL her sophomore year changed Lexow’s trajectory. Majoring in psychology, she knew she wanted to continue her studies in a way that would benefit others, and an opportunity to become ingrained in the Deaf community would help her do it.

Less than 10% of all students at Gallaudet are hearing-abled, and the majority of them are in the graduate program. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision to go through the stringent applications process for the university, which is located in Washington, D.C., and, with the guidance from her mentors in the ASL program at Virginia, Lexow knew what it would entail.

“It’s definitely a new energy,” Lexow said. “I was so excited to be here. Even when I was still at Virginia and first heard about Gallaudet, then decided I really wanted to go there, I’ve been working toward it.”

She’d also been an athlete all her life and wanted to continue that at her next stop. The former Gatorade girls’ soccer player of the year appeared in 48 matches across three seasons with the Cavaliers, but going from Division I to Division III in soccer didn’t quite have the pull. She also started to miss basketball.

The last time she suited up in a basketball uniform was March 15, 2019, in a PIAA quarterfinal loss that not only effectively ended her high school playing days but her basketball career.

That almost changed in the winter of 2020-21. With UVA decimated by injuries and COVID-19, Lexow was close to walking on to the basketball team until the season was canceled.

When she started looking into Gallaudet, Lexow also looked at the basketball program. Bison coach Stephanie Stevens, who’s been with the program for 10 years, was naturally interested in adding a Division I athlete.

It didn’t take long for Stevens to realize, though, she’d be adding more than just an athletic presence.

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“She is a special person who loves to play ball,” Stevens said. “But when she’s not playing ball, she’s just a great human being. It’s so welcoming and refreshing to get another player, especially with the Division I experience, even if it was in soccer, as part of our team, and they’ve been so great with Cam, they just all mesh.”

She has played and started all 15 games for the 9-6 Bison and averages a team-high 35.5 minutes per game. She has been named the United East Volt Division’s defensive player of the week and has 50 steals this season to go with 13.7 points per game, good for second-best on the team.

“I’m always looking to get back out there and challenge myself,” Lexow said. “It’s a different fitness level, going from soccer to basketball, but I worked really hard and trained for this. Once I step over that line, it’s game time, so I kind of just do what I do.”

Everything the Bison do is relayed through sign language. Stevens, who also is hearing-abled, calls out plays in sign on the sideline. She gives instruction in timeouts using ASL, and the players on the court are constantly signing to each other to call out plays or set a defense. Stevens and Lexow also sign back and forth, keeping the same mode of communication they would use with any other member of the team.

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Naturally, spending most of her life as a vocal communicator meant Lexow would have to learn to do things differently, or “turn off my voice,” as she put it. While she’s comfortable signing, Lexow is the first to say she’s not fluent or as skilled as her teammates who have been doing it their entire lives.

“Communication is very important. It’s totally different from an all-hearing basketball team, where you cannot look at someone but they’re calling, ‘screen, screen, screen,’ so I would definitely say something that was — not a culture shock — but I was having to ask people what they said,” Lexow said. “I didn’t fully understand because of how fast they were signing what they’d said, and they were very patient with me. That’s something I think I’ve improved on, even in little increments, being receptive to what my teammates are saying to me.”

While she can still hear an official’s whistle or any of the other noises that occur during a college basketball game, she stressed that doesn’t give her any sort of advantage. As a non-native signer, Lexow said she still botches a sign here and there, and her teammates are quick to riff on her about it in good nature.

“They don’t need help,” Lexow said. “I feel like there’s this big misconception that deaf people can’t do things and that’s not really true at all. They can do everything.

“The only time I’m helpful to them is when they don’t know what happened when the whistle blew and I can tell them it’s a foul or explain what happened. All of them are great basketball players who know how to get the ball in the hoop.”

Stevens added: “Cam’s that kind of person who gets along with everybody, and that’s how it’s been, it’s just been so easy. She’s our family.”

On top of changing universities, changing sports, and turning her voice off, Lexow is also enrolled in the graduate program for clinical mental health counseling. So, how are classes going so far?

“4.0 right now,” she said with a wry smile.

Lexow echoed that the entire experience is everything she’d ever dreamed of. She doesn’t think she’s ever been happier, she said, having found a new family with a team that’s given her much more than anything she’s given on a basketball court.

“Being immersed in the Deaf community is right where I need to be in order to achieve what I want to do,” Lexow said. “I want to be able to give access to deaf, hard-of-hearing, deaf-blind, and be able to counsel the Deaf community in their language and be educated in Deaf culture. The only way I’m going to do that is being in their environment.”

This story was produced as part of a partnership between The Inquirer and City of Basketball Love, a nonprofit news organization that covers high school and college basketball in the Philadelphia area while also helping mentor the next generation of sportswriters. This collaboration will help boost coverage of the city’s vibrant amateur basketball scene, from the high school ranks up through the Big 5 and beyond.