Observe a few huddles in Wrestling Group 1 at the Pennsylvania Intensive Camp and a similarity soon emerges : a slender young man with the name “ FRIES ” stenciled on the back of his shirt always stands on the periphery . Never at the front or in the middle . Every time on the outer edge . Grayson Fries , a sophomore wrestler at Nebraska ’ s Grand Island Northwest High School , certainly is not the loud , attention-seeking type , but he ’ s not shy , either . Soon after meeting him , you can tell that he ’ s a thoughtful , caring person without a mean bone in his body . “ He has a big heart and is always worried about other people … what happened to them , are they going to be okay ,” his dad Kevin says . His relative introversion is not why he stands at the back of the group . He stands there because after each break in the wrestling , as the campers sprint to the center of their group ’ s mat for instruction , he has an extra 20 feet to move before he can get there — 10 to run to the edge teacher or daycare provider when they were reading a book to the kids . After visits to various doctors — audiologists , otolaryngologists — his parents were told that their son was completely deaf in his right ear and was likely to soon lose hearing in his left ear as well . An external hearing aid failed to improve or stall the hearing loss , so his mother and father made the decision to have him undergo cochlear implant surgery at the age of 5 . Grayson and his family still do not have an official diagnosis as to what caused his hearing loss , but a premature birth is suspected as being a contributing factor .
Cochlear implants are small , extremely complex electronic devices that assist in providing sound to people afflicted with complete or near-complete sensorineural hearing loss , a type of hearing loss caused by damage to minute hair cells in the part of the inner ear called the cochlea . Normally , these cells act as an aural transit system , detecting sound vibrations
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of the mats , and another 10 to get back to where he started before he can make his way to the huddle . It ’ s a curious sight , a wrestler running away from the group like that . It ’ s a divergent path , but Fries is used to taking the road less traveled .
At the age of four , Grayson ’ s father Kevin introduced his son to the sport of wrestling . He took to the sport immediately . That same year , Grayson was playing outside as his mother planted flowers in their family garden when he turned to her and said “ Mom , look at me when you ’ re talking .” That request , along with other signs that his hearing was limited , was the moment that made them realize that he had already begun to read lips — it explained his desire to be close to the
Grayson Fries doing squats while carrying Andrew Cerniglia during Red Flag practice on the penultimate day of the Pennsylvania Intensive Camp . Cerniglia is currently a freshman at perennial wrestling powerhouse Nazareth High in Nazareth , PA . and passing them along to the brain via the auditory nerve . But in Grayson , and others with similar hearing loss , this process is broken , meaning that the inner ear and the brain cannot naturally communicate . Cochlear implants allow sound to bypass the hair cells and travel directly to the auditory nerve , artificially repairing that lost connection . To the casual observer , people with cochlear implants appear only to have some sort of external hearing aid wrapped around their ears ( it ’ s actually a tiny microphone , a speech processor , and a transmitter ), but what goes unseen is a second part of the device that is surgically implanted underneath the skin — a receiver and a mechanism known as an electrode array , which collects the electric signals from the receiver and sends them to differ-