South Florida athlete set for London Paralympics

BOYNTON BEACH?

? Noah Yablong can beat a lot of tennis players sitting down. As a Paralympian, that comes with the territory.

The 24-year-old athlete from Ocean Ridge, across the Intracoastal, is among the best wheelchair tennis players in the world. He's one of nine American players traveling to London this summer to compete in the Paralympic Games. Five nights per week, weather permitting, Yablong meets his longtime coach at the Boynton Beach Tennis Center.

"I have it, and I found a way to deal with it," Yablong says.

"It" is Legg Calve Perthes disease, a bone disorder that literally killed his femur, starving it of blood until the cartilage wasted away. The pain and the effects aren't unlike arthritis. At 10 he had the right hip of a 70-year-old man.

As a boy he played basketball, baseball and soccer, and dabbled in tennis and golf.

"He was very fleet-footed; I mean the kid was fast," said his father, Jeffrey Yablong, an emergency physician. The diagnosis explained why his son was becoming more lethargic and mentioning leg pain.

"I was really crestfallen, more for Noah," he said.

At 11, surgeons in Chicago changed the shape of his femur to stop Yablong's leg from slipping out of his hip when he walked. His father describes the result: "Instead of having a ball in the socket, he has an arrowhead, with the arrow pointing up." Bone grinds on bone.

Yablong can walk, but he's gripped with pain if he goes too far. On a recent evening, he pushed his wheelchair from a white sport utility vehicle to a tennis court 100 yards away. That's about as far he goes.

It was that pain that made him sedentary through his preteen years, growing up in Indiana, Yablong said.

"Sports, for me, had fallen by the wayside," he said.

Then a friend with muscular dystrophy started playing basketball on Saturdays at a nearby center for the disabled. Yablong, then 12, came along and discovered that he could play tennis, too. Soon he attended an International Tennis Federation junior camp, where he met his coach, Kari Yerg, a municipal recreation director from Boynton Beach.

One thing led to another. He played well enough in tournaments for the disabled to become the No. 1 ranked junior tennis player in the United States and the fifth in the world.

The University of Arizona has a wheelchair tennis team, so he went there and studied engineering. School chipped away at his practice time, he said, but he kept playing and winning ? in Boca Raton, in Europe, in Australia, in South Korea. Those tournaments gave him enough clout to draw a wildcard spot in the Paralympic Games, sponsored by the U.S. Tennis Association.

When he flies to London on Aug. 23, he joins an elite class of disabled tennis players, 112 from around the world. After a recent practice he still couldn't decide whether he was nervous yet.

"That's the question everybody asks me," he said, after some thought. "We'll know when I get there."

bwolford@tribune.com or 561-243-6602 or Twitter @benwolford

Source: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/fl-paralympics-tennis-player-20120718,0,7634481.story?track=rss

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