HAMILTON TOWNSHIP, Ohio — A few days after Christmas, Henry Horton is making hot chocolate. His mom tries to get milk out for him, but he stops her.
“Get out of here, mom,” said Henry, a sophomore at Little Miami High School.
Henry was born with proximal femoral focal deficiency. As he describes the condition, which led to eight surgeries and a prosthetic leg, he stops and laughs because he said it wrong.
“I don’t have a femur. I don’t have a fibula,” Henry said. “And I’m also missing an ankle bone.”
In his bedroom, Henry plays Minecraft. Then, he takes his prosthetic off and demonstrates how to put it back on. It’s his 13th different one.
But Henry wants people to know his leg doesn’t define him.
“Not everybody understands what it’s like for a disabled person,” he said. “They look at me and look at my leg and think I’m different — I’m really not.”
More than the hot chocolate his family enjoys around the holidays, Henry loves basketball. And before he started playing wheelchair basketball, he used to get compliments after every game — even if he didn’t play well.
Sometimes, he said it seemed like kids let him score.
Now, he plays for the Cincinnati Dragons, a wheelchair basketball team started by a Paralympian who grew up in Covington. Now, Henry has to earn those compliments.
"They like to foul me," he said with a smile.
In a gym in the East End, Henry unloads his wheelchair and leaves his prosthetic leg near the bleachers. Another prosthetic is decorated in Chicago White Sox baseball logos.
“It has been huge for Henry to not be the one who’s different,” said Stacy Horton, his mom. “And I think that it has really allowed him to grow as an athlete and as a person.”
But if he graduated today, Henry couldn’t play competitively at any of our region’s colleges. Not because he doesn't have the ability, but because there aren't any programs. There are only a dozen or so in the entire country.
It's part of the reason behind the University of Cincinnati's new adaptive sports program, which starts this spring.
“I love wheelchair basketball because it is really chess,” said Jacob Counts, Dragons coach and coordinator of UC's new program. “And I feel like that’s a lot of what we deal with every day in life."
At a practice tournament, Counts tells Henry to pass and move. He said he'll have a better shot when he gets the ball back.
“I became disabled when I was 13," Counts said. “And there weren’t a lot of options for kids with disabilities to play adaptive sports.”
He stopped playing sports until he was 19, when he found wheelchair basketball. It changed his life. Because he eventually became a Paralympian for the United States wheelchair basketball team. After that, he played professionally overseas.
But when he moved back home, he was disappointed.
“Still no kids team,” he said. “And the adult team I was on folded.”
So he started his own. And now, he’s been hired to develop UC's new program — something he says you can’t find anywhere else in the state. Something he hopes will help more students like Henry follow their dreams.
