Michael Norton Jr. is a high-volume athlete when it comes to memorable moments.
In a recent basketball game against rival Belfast, the 6-foot-2 senior forward from Oceanside High School in Rockland stole the ball on back-to-back possessions, capping off both with rim-rattling dunks.
Norton already was dunking two-handed as a 5-foot, 9-inch eighth-grader.
But for a teenager who has dealt with significant hearing loss nearly his entire life, such definitive actions in basketball, football and baseball have spoken much louder than his typically reserved demeanor.
“If you do have hearing loss, that’s something that you can’t change,” said Norton, an all-conference football and basketball player as well as an honor student and National Honor Society member. “My advice would be to focus on the things you can change in order to be the best person you can be.”
Norton is averaging more than 17 points and eight rebounds per game this winter for an Oceanside basketball team that is 13-5 going into its Feb. 17 Class B quarterfinal game against Winslow at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor.
“The easiest way to sum it up is that he has a motor that not many other people have,” said Oceanside boys basketball coach Matt Breen.
Early travails
Concerns about Norton’s hearing arose when he was late to start talking and tests at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary at 18 months measured his hearing at 60 percent of normal in his left ear and 40 percent in his right ear.
While exactly how long he had been experiencing hearing loss is uncertain, it’s likely traced to a severe bout of chickenpox he endured at when he was 8 months old, according to his grandfather, Dennis Norton.
Once diagnosed, Norton was fitted with his first hearing aids and began undergoing speech therapy.
“By the time Michael was in kindergarten, he was speaking fluently,” said his grandfather.
Norton soon began playing youth sports and while he didn’t savor having to wear hearing aids, he came to see it as a necessary sacrifice.
“When I was a kid I never met another kid with hearing loss or hearing aids, and that just made me question even more why I had to have hearing aids,” said Norton. “But as I grew up I realized that in some areas I had the potential to be better than some others and I didn’t want to trade that in just because I had to wear hearing aids.”
Those around Norton noticed that he began using other tools to compensate for any hearing-related challenges.
“In football and in all sports he’s really relied on his vision,” said his grandfather. “The hearing loss has contributed to his ability to play at a high level in sports because works so hard to not let it be a handicap for him.”
Wes Drinkwater, Norton’s football coach in both middle school and high school, noticed Norton’s visual acuity at a young age.
“I was coaching him in the seventh grade and we were doing live drills and he suddenly stopped me and said, ‘Hold on coach, hold on coach,’” said Drinkwater. “He was playing cornerback on the right side of the defense and another kid was playing tight end on the opposite side of the offensive formation at least 30 yards away. Michael noticed that he didn’t have his mouthguard in so he stopped and told me because he could see that little piece of mouthguard hanging off the kid’s helmet.
“I said, ‘How could you see that?’” and he said, ‘I don’t know, I just saw it.’”
Adapting for success
Norton has added to his arsenal for comprehension as he’s grown older, whether it’s lip-reading or using his knowledge of the sports he plays to anticipate the next movement.
“The way the doctors explained it to us, you’ve got to look at him as being in a bubble of about 9 feet,” said his grandfather. “If he’s standing in the middle of that bubble, with anyone standing outside that bubble that’s more than 9 feet away, even with the hearing aids it becomes more and more difficult for him to hear.”
Norton’s biggest challenge has come in football where perspiration inside the helmet sometimes affects his hearing aids’ ability to pick up sound or contact occasionally jars the device loose.
“As Michael’s gotten older his hearing aids have become smaller, and the only thing with that is they’re harder to find on the football field when they fall out,” said Drinkwater, who is trying to convince the University of Maine-bound Norton to extend his football career for one more game at this summer’s Maine Shrine Lobster Bowl.
“It’s funny, every time that happened he could almost always take you back to within 5 feet of where they fell out. To my knowledge we never lost one.”
A defensive end/linebacker and tailback, Norton earned first-team all-conference honors on both offense and defense last fall after amassing 2,111 total yards — 1,603 rushing — with 30 touchdowns along with 94 tackles and 12 quarterback sacks while leading Oceanside to its second straight Class C North semifinal.
“This football season I was offsides only once,” he said. “I like to see everyone else’s first step before I make mine. Not being able to hear as much as everyone else allows me to tune out the other noises in the game and that allows me to focus more.”
Baseball also provides few hearing-related obstacles, Norton said, except on a windy day when the sound of a stiff breeze occasionally overwhelms the sound of the bat hitting the ball.
“The piece of the hearing aid that sits on top of my ear receives the sounds, and sometimes when I’m playing the outfield the wind can interfere with the sound of the bat a lot more for me than it does for anybody else,” said Norton, a right fielder who batted .425 with 13 stolen bases last spring for coach Don Shields’ Mariners.
Norton and his basketball teammates occasionally accommodate crowd noise by relying on hand signals — particularly in recent years as Oceanside won the 2016 Class A North championship and returned to the regional final again last winter before moving to Class B this year.
“There was one time when he stole the ball at half-court and the official blew the whistle and called a foul but the crowd erupted because they knew he was going to dunk it and he didn’t hear the whistle,” said Breen.
“They were going to ‘T’ him up for dunking the basketball after the whistle, so I had to explain to them the hearing problem. We do that now before every game.”
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