Crystal Church is a gym rat. "I've been going to high school basketball games my entire life," she says. "I grew up around a gym."

No kidding. She spent one night during the Thanksgiving holiday at a high school basketball game in Columbus with her father, a retired coach. They just went to a random game, and sat and watched and talked basketball. The old coach and perhaps the budding coach, currently plying her trade as a freshman point guard at Wesleyan College.

"We didn't really know anybody at the game," she says. "We just sat there and talked about basketball. 'What would you do?'"

It was a fairly typical father-daughter, coach-player outing, a couple basketball junkies just watching hoops during the break before she returned to college and her own new team. Except for one slight difference. Crystal Church is deaf. And as a freshman point guard who seldom started in high school, but now does for the Division III Pioneers.

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