Brewington article in N&A
Posted: January 29th, 2007, 9:28 am
Thanks, Chris. The article brought a tear to my eye, as Chris wrote about Brewington's deafness and his transition to Dunton-style LU basketball. Here's to hoping that Saturday's game was just a preview of great things to come for Brew & LU basketball.
Latest performance by Liberty transfer Brewington hints of potential
By Chris Lang
Lynchburg News & Advance
January 28, 2007
In Randy Dunton's mind, the transition would be seamless and simple. Dwight Brewington, the athletic Providence transfer who came to Liberty after a two and a half years at the Big East school, would fit right in, give the Flames a scoring presence and help lift LU to the top of the Big South standings.
It was a no brainer, it seemed. Brewington brought a level of athleticism that's rarely seen in the Big South Conference. His first step is so quick that officials often confuse it for a travel. Few wings in the league can guard him one-on-one.
"Here comes a kid who was an established kid at Providence and he's coming to Liberty; on the surface, that looks like an easy transition," Dunton said. "But there's much more complexity to it. And you'd think I'd been around long enough to anticipate those complexities, but when the lights came on, there were more issues about him getting adjusted to where he's capable of being than any of us anticipated."
When Brewington became eligible Dec. 16, he didn't immediately take over games. His ballhandling was so shaky at point guard that he was removed from the starting lineup and used on the wing instead.
It hasn't been the fairy tale start that some had hoped for, but his 30-point showing in Liberty's 122-117 win over VMI Saturday night gave fans a glimpse into Brewington's immense potential, even if his first month as a Flame has been a test of patience, both for athlete and coach.
"You're always optimistic that talent is going to carry the day," Dunton said. "But there's a lot more to this stuff than just talent. I'm talking about him being settled. What I want more than anything else for Dwight is for him to have peace, for him to have confidence that the people here at Liberty love him and care about him, and that we want what's best for him."
Fitting in
Brewington, who is 60 percent deaf and wears hearing aids, doesn't trust easily. His father was absent for much of his life, and he grew up with mother Pamela Harrison in the north Boston suburb of Lynn, Mass. Brewington endured constant teasing from classmates because of his disability and didn't make a lot of friends at school. Instead, he spent hours away alone in a gym, shooting a basketball and learning the nuances of the game at a level that surprised his future high school and AAU coaches.
"It was his solace," said Harrison, who watched Brewington's 12-of-14 shooting performance at the Vines Center Saturday night.
He averaged 20.7 points and 7.0 rebounds per game as a senior at Worcester Academy and earned a scholarship to Providence to play for coach Tim Welsh. Brewington realized immediately that PC wasn't a good fit for him. He grew close to his AAU coaches while playing summer basketball, but never found that same level of comfort with Welsh's staff.
After one year, Brewington wanted to leave. Harrison and other family members urged him to stick it out. You can't just quit after one season, she reasoned. Adjust and learn. Get better. Get stronger as a person.
It never happened. By the time his junior season started, Brewington was injured and missed practices and games. He was suspended for a violation of team rules and eventually left school.
"It was bad from the beginning, and it never made itself any better, which is too bad," Harrison said.
Harrison said Brewington has a "different sense" at Liberty. He knew he didn't have to go to a high-major school to chase his dream of playing in the NBA. If a basketball player is good enough, the NBA scouts will find him. Otherwise, Santa Clara's Steve Nash might have never won two NBA MVP trophies. A Washington Wizards scout attended Liberty's game against Lipscomb Dec. 21 to watch Brewington.
More important for Brewington than logging playing time at a power-conference school was finding a place where he'd fit, a place where coaches understood how his hearing loss affects his game, how his foray and fatherhood into marriage affected his academics and personal life. He needed a home as much as a place to play basketball.
"He's happy here," said Liberty forward Alex McLean, who quickly befriended Brewington when they both transferred to LU last winter.
Sense of responsibility
Brewington said his hearing problems haven't played much of a role in a "frustrating" first month as a Flame, a sentiment McLean echoed. Dunton said he's installed hand signals to help call plays from the bench.
"We've got so many," Dunton said. "We've run out of the hand signals."
Being deaf is part of Brewington's identity, and he doesn't try to hide it. He's one of three known hearing impaired players in Division I (the others are at Lipscomb and UC Santa Barbara), and he said he feels an extra sense of responsibility in showing deaf children that their impairment doesn't have to hold them back from their dreams.
Among Brewington's many tattoos, which stretch along his arms and all the way up to his neck, one stands out. On the inside of his left forearm, the words "my dream is big enough so the facts don't count" are scrawled in ink, followed by "I love Mom."
It's a telling sentence. The facts say that he should struggle in basketball, a game dependent on on-court communication. What he lacks in hearing, he makes up for in an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. He plays on feel as much as sound, so his hearing has not held him back.
That's a message he tried to share with a young boy at Jacksonville's airport when the Flames traveled back home after a loss to Florida earlier this month.
Teammates told Brewington the boy, 10-year-old Tucker Wiseman, was communicating in sign language with his mother while waiting for a flight to Boston to return to his boarding school. Brewington sought out Wiseman, who was 100 percent deaf in both ears, and shared his experiences of growing up as a hearing impaired child. They took photos together and exchanged information. Wanting to keep in touch, Brewington wrote Wiseman a letter and sent it out this weekend.
"I was always fought through it," Brewington said, speaking of those who told him his hearing deficiency would hinder his dream of playing basketball. "Every day, I walked through fire. And I still do."
More work to do
The father of two small children - daughter Dantia is three and son Malakai is 3 months - Brewington and wife Gabrielle have found a happy home in Lynchburg. After Saturday's game, he stood with Malakai in his arms, doting affection on his young son as family members surrounded him.
He's not completely trusting of those around him yet - the Providence experience left him cognizant how much of college basketball is business, not personal - but he's growing more comfortable as his bond with wife and teammates grows stronger.
Brewington still has plenty to work on as a basketball player. His defensive intensity needs to improve, Dunton said. He played so much zone at Providence that playing the sticky man-to-man Liberty employs has been an adjustment. Brewington still needs to handle the ball better (he has 49 turnovers in 13 games). He also needs to find another level of offensive aggressiveness, he admitted. As much as he and standout Larry Blair said before the season that they wouldn't butt heads, there was subconscious effort on Brewington's part not to take too many shots.
He became unselfish to a fault. "This is Larry's team, I accept that," he said. Blair has repeatedly denied that notion, saying there's plenty of room for both to score, and that who scored didn't matter as long as the end result was a Liberty victory.
The growing chemistry between the two -each scored 30 against VMI -is evidence that the toughest part of Brewington's transition to Liberty is behind him.
"I'm still searching for ways to help him be all he can be inside of what we're doing," Dunton said. "Dwight Brewington's a good person. He's got a good heart. He comes off the bench with an eagerness to help the team win. You couldn't ask for any more."
