My alarm clock woke me up, and your alarm probably woke you up, too.
Did you hear your kids talking at the dinner table last night? Did your waitress ask you a question about your order at the restaurant?
Imagine putting earplugs in and trying to hear all those things.
You wouldn’t.
Warsaw girls basketball coach Lenny Krebs told me Saturday morning on Tiger Talk that he hears things at about 20 percent of the volume that a person with normal hearing could.
Since he was little, he learned how to read people’s lips and their intentions through their actions to figure out what they were saying to him. How good was he at it? He says he made it all the way until third grade before anyone figured out that he had trouble hearing.
“I got my first hearing aids, and I was home when the phone rang,” Krebs told me. “And I jumped out of my chair because I didn’t know what that sound was. I had never heard the phone ring before.”
Imagine playing a team sport and not being able to hear your coach, or your teammates, or the referee’s whistle or the buzzer on the scoreboard.
He not only learned to play basketball in the Fairfield school system despite his hearing loss, he used it to his advantage.
“If you watch the game films of me in high school and college, you see me reach for my ears every time I went to the free throw line,” Krebs said.
He was turning off his hearing aids.
“The fans were screaming at me, and all I heard was silence,” he said with a smile.
He attended junior college to play basketball, but he described a nightmarish scene that he had to get out of – and he did, which led him to Jim Kessler and Grace College.
And that’s where I ran into him for the first time, and we have been friends ever since.
I first latched on to him because I felt kinda sorry for him, and I was very curious about him. But I quickly realized that he was not at all interested in any of that. He wanted to be treated like anyone else, which was fine but he was NOT like anyone else. He was unique, he was cool, and he was a really solid basketball player.
He stayed around the area as an assistant coach at NorthWood, so we stayed in touch, then he became the head coach at Goshen 15 years ago.
Now he’s here in Warsaw.
So imagine being in a profession that requires you to be able to communicate with your co-workers, your staff, people from other offices and you can barely hear what you are saying to them, let-alone what they are saying to you.
I asked him Saturday what challenges his hearing loss poses for him coaching varsity basketball.
His answer was powerful.
“I am so grateful God has opened doors for me to coach and work with young people. I am thankful that people are willing to make an extra effort to look at me when they are talking to me so I can read their lips.”
Truth is, people like Lenny Krebs make it easy for you to cheer for them and to want to help them. He is a motivator who demands excellence. If you’ve seen him coach, you’ve seen him call a timeout and get red-faced while pointing out something that was not executed the way he expected.
He’s a man who is thankful for what he has, and doesn’t stand around pouting about what he doesn’t have. He has what he has, which includes his God, his family and a competitive fire to follow what he calls “the process” to see how far it can take himself and his teams.
For Lenny Krebs, that’s more than enough.
I don’t know whether the Warsaw girls basketball team will win a lot of games or championships with Krebs in charge. I have learned over the years not to try to predict what high school kids are going to do (if you have them or have had them, you know what I mean).
But I DO know this: Lenny Krebs is genuine, he is relentless, and his attitude is contagious.
And whether or not he can hear you, the Warsaw community is going to hear from him … loudly and clearly.
