Mature beyond his years; Even with impairment, BV’s Olthoff morphs into one of South Dakota’s leading basketball players

Josh Olthoff is an All-State basketball player from Brandon Valley, helping lead the Lynx to the Class AA championship game in March. The 6-foot-8 senior averaged 12.6 points, 6.5 rebounds and 3.5 assists per game during the 2023-24 season.

No doubt those numbers got the attention from area college teams, and Olthoff said he made some visits, and listened to offers.

In the end, however, Olthoff is headed to Grand Canyon University in Prescott, Ariz., where he’ll focus strictly on the books, and not the basketball. His hope is to become a history teacher, specifically Colonial American history.

Having such a specific goal and career path already planned out shows a maturity level beyond his 18 years. But actually, that’s nothing compared to the maturity he’s shown since birth.

By talking to him, you’d likely never know it, but Olthoff was born deaf. At age 1, he underwent a surgery where an electrode was inserted into his inner ear. That surgery enabled him to wear cochlear implants, which are located on the outside of his head. The implants bypass damaged cells in the inner ear and sends electric signals to the brain, where they are interpreted as sound.

As a young child, he wore the implants in a different form where they were strapped to his body to lessen the chance of them coming off.

They’re much less cumbersome now as an adult. Two implants are located on each side of his head, where they look almost like headbands. They’re seldom seen, however, underneath his flowing, longer hair style.

On the basketball court, unless he took a massive charge and was subjected to a big hit by the offensive player, you’d never see the implants. On two occasions, however, the charge was big enough that the implants sailed off of his head and onto the court.

It happened in the championship game against Mitchell on March 16. From the time the implants leave his head until they are reattached, Olthoff can’t hear a sound.

And that’s everyday life. He removes the implants to sleep, shower, and any time he’s in a pool or hot tub. During those times, Olthoff doesn’t hear a sound – no ringing, no humming, no buzzing. Nothing.

“I guess I’ve never known life without it,” he said when asked if it’s a hindrance. “It’s not a new thing for me. It’s really not an issue.”

Playing basketball at its highest level in high school also brought other challenges. There was the fear of having one of his two implants take flight, but there were also potential communication issues.

At practice, when coaches were delivering instructions, Olthoff said he relied on his teammates at times to relay the message if it didn’t come in clearly.

“I had wondered about that if in loud environments when the freshman are practicing, the sophomores are practicing and there’s a million things going on, if then it’s a little harder to pick out my voice among all the stuff,” Brandon Valley head coach Craig Nelson said. “But he always seemed to figure out a way.”

During games, when the Brandon Valley point guard barked out a play, it was accompanied with hand signals directed specifically to Olthoff to make sure he knew the play.

He’s the youngest of four brothers, and he’s the only one with a hearing impairment. His parents both have one recessive gene and one dominant gene. Olthoff said he had a one-in-four chance of getting both recessive genes.

In this particular case, it seems Mother Nature’s math worked out.

Even though he was dealt the one-in-four chance card, Olthoff was rarely seen complaining about it. In fact, it rarely even came up.

“My teachers know about it. Most people around me know about it,” he said. “But it’s just not something I bring up.”

For Nelson, he said if someone hadn’t brought the impairment up to him initially, he probably wouldn’t have known either.

“I tell so many people that there’s no way you’d ever know,” he said. “Josh is a high IQ guy. He always just figured it out.”