Deaf baseball player Chase Smartt
helps Charles Henderson win state titles as he emerges as top prospect
At first, the diagnosis appeared devastating.
Doctors delivered the news that nerve damage at birth caused Chase Smartt, the 2½-year-old son of Mark and Deborah Smartt, to be deaf.
The news spawned innumerable questions and few answers: Would their son ever hear? What, if any, options are available? What are the odds he could enjoy a normal life?
“We had no idea, no concept,” said Mark Smartt, now an assistant baseball coach at Troy University. “No one in my family or my wife’s family had ever had a hearing impairment.”
That was 1998. Fast forward to today, as Chase Smartt takes his usual spot behind the plate at Charles Henderson High School’s baseball practice. The powerfully built catcher enters the 2015 season as one of the state’s top prospects and a leader for a team chasing a third consecutive state title.
Smartt jokes easily with his friends and interacts with his coaches with no problems. When a reporter shows up at practice or a game, Chase easily serves as a team spokesman during interviews.
“He’s accomplished more than I ever dreamed possible,” Mark Smartt said.
For Chase, it’s been a long road.
After his diagnosis – doctors say he’s “profoundly deaf,” meaning he can’t hear anything – the Smartt family opted to have a cochlear implant -- a small, electronic device designed to help provide a sense of sound to the deaf -- installed behind Chase’s ear. Cochlear implants include an external microphone, which is now the only obvious sign that Chase has a hearing impairment.
Through it all, he’s undergone several surgeries, mostly to replace cochlear implants that no longer work.
Chase also needed intense speech therapy to learn how to talk clearly, but his father said they always tried to treat him like a normal kid.
For the Smartt family, that meant sports.
Mark Smartt helped Troy win a Division II baseball national title in the late 1980s and later embarked on a coaching career that included six seasons as the head coach at West Alabama and serving as a Troy assistant since 2002. He will be elevated to Troy’s head coach in 2016, following the retirement of Bobby Pierce.
Chase’s older sister, Taylor, emerged as a softball star and played the last four years at Troy. She’s now a volunteer coach for the Trojans.
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