During the recruitment process, Lance White could tell there was something different about Liatu King, something that separated her from so many of the hundreds of other high school prospects whose living rooms he had sat in through the years.
She was thoughtful, uncommonly so for a teenager. There was a purpose and a meaning behind every word she said. Even from brief conversations, the Pitt women’s basketball coach could tell there was a maturity that doesn’t typically come until these athletes reach the colleges to which coaches are trying to entice them.
“I think so much of that process-oriented person goes back to the way she grew up,” White said.
Indeed, a unique upbringing helped shape a unique individual.
Now a sophomore on the Panthers’ women’s basketball team, King grew up in Washington, D.C. in a household with a mother, Patricia Opurum, who is deaf. Her father, David King, who lives in Virginia, is also deaf. At just nine months old, King learned American Sign Language (ASL), a skill that allowed the oldest of two children to be an all-important intermediary between her mom and the world around her.
In her second year of college basketball, King has already emerged as one of Pitt’s best players. Her talent, drive and diligence on the court have brought her here, but she knows her life away from the game played just as instrumental a role in turning her into the player and person she is.
“I wouldn’t change anything,” King said. “If those things didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be here. Having those experiences at a young age happened for a reason. It turned me into the person I am today. I’m forever grateful for it.”
Liatu King and her mother, Patricia Opurum.(Courtesy of Liatu King)
Her mother’s lack of hearing was an omnipresent aspect of King’s life, before she could even walk or talk.
If the two were at a restaurant, she would order for them. At a doctor’s appointment, she would serve as the interpreter if one wasn’t available to facilitate critical medical conversations. At events at school, King would help translate. It was, as King put it, a collection of tasks that those in the hearing world might take for granted.
“I wouldn’t say it was a challenge,” King said. “It was just different.”
Still, difficulties would occasionally present themselves. Though she knew ASL, King was still a child who didn’t have the robust vocabulary of an adult. Sometimes, she wouldn’t exactly know how to accurately express what someone was trying to tell Opurum, a problem that would arise every so often at the doctor, where complicated medical terminology needed to be passed along.
In many ways, King’s childhood was unsettled, forcing her to shift and move between different worlds — of the child that she was and the adults with whom she would regularly have to speak, of the person who could hear and the one who couldn’t. At times, it could get overwhelming.
Trying as they may have been, those experiences were transformative, giving her the kind of traits teachers, coaches and so many others have seen through the years.
King had no choice but to mature quickly in a way her friends and classmates didn’t. By constantly having to immerse herself in a struggle she could never fully understand, she learned empathy. Ensuring her mother understood something before continuing a conversation taught her patience. She came to understand the importance of body language and facial expressions, especially when communicating with someone who can’t pick up on tone of voice. With a sister, Precious, four years younger than her, King took on a different level of responsibility, particularly when her mother was working and couldn’t be around.
“Liatu was always independent,” Precious said. “She always did things on her own. She never really depended on anybody. If she wanted it, she was going to find a way to get it.”
For all King did for her mother, Opurum did just as much for her daughters.
A single mother, Opurum would wake up at 4 a.m. and take two buses to her job as a custodian. Even with that demanding and draining schedule, she was a fixture at games for a daughter who showed an interest in sports beyond just basketball. Though the age difference between Liatu and Precious always made it so that they were at different schools, she always made sure her daughters got there on time every day. She did all this while navigating the kind of obstacles that to billions of others are banal aspects of daily life and she would do it all, as Liatu so fondly recalls, with an unwavering smile on her face.
“The outside world isn’t fair,” Liatu said. “It’s not her fault that she isn’t able to connect with the outside world. I just want to be that piece when I’m around her.”
The sacrifices made by her mother helped position King for a better life. Still, there were extra steps King had to take to reach her goals.
Growing up in Southeast Washington — a section of the nation’s capital that’s “not where the tourists go,” as King said — King’s intelligence and work ethic earned her a spot at Bishop McNamara, a private high school in nearby Forestville, Md. To get there her first two years, King had to endure a convoluted commute. In the morning, she’d take a bus to a train station and once there, she’d take another bus before transferring one final time to a different bus. It was a journey of only about eight miles, but it would routinely take an hour.
Once at school, she thrived. She performed well academically, earning summa cum laude honors each of her four years, and she was an athletic standout, which doesn’t even take into account her career as a stellar linebacker in football, a sport she quit when she got to high school. By the end of her time on the school’s basketball team, she had scored 1,024 points and grabbed 1,018 rebounds while earning first-team all-Washington Catholic Athletic Conference distinction as a senior and helping lead her team to its first WCAC title since 2008.
Her accomplishments drew the interest of college coaches across the country. King’s mother was a constant presence during the recruiting process, with schools like Pitt providing interpreters for in-home meetings and visits to campus as a way to remove the burden from King.
Liatu King and her mother, Patricia Opurum.(Courtesy of Liatu King)
“You could tell she was someone who there wasn’t going to be a lot of hand-holding,” White said. “If you tell Liatu to do something, it’s going to get done and it’s going to get done well. That comes from the way she had to grow up, being that first born and having to handle so much of the family’s communication with the outside world. You learn to take care of things at an early age. We could see that so much with the way she deals with her teammates to the way she deals with all of her affairs.”
After coming off the bench most of last season as a freshman, the six-foot King is the Panthers’ third-leading scorer and leading rebounder through seven games, a time in which Pitt has already matched its win total from last season. In games against Texas A&M and Northwestern last week in the U.S. Virgin Islands, King pulled down 19 rebounds in each contest, even adding 23 points in the win against Northwestern.
Rather quickly, she has become the impact player who can affect the game in so many different areas — just what White envisioned when he was recruiting her. Those gaudy numbers have come with growth. A soft-spoken individual who grew up in a world dominated by silence and stillness, King has had to learn to be more assertive and vocal on the court, prodded in some part by her loquacious coach.
When it hosts Rutgers on Wednesday night, Pitt will be holding a deaf awareness night. As part of the festivities, among other things, the school will be handing out ASL Pitt t-shirts to fans, and the starting lineup videos and national anthem will be signed. King’s mother and younger sister will both be making the trip from Washington to attend.
For King, it will be another indication of a world that has shown itself to be more inclusive, empathetic and accommodating to people like her mother over recent years. And even as they now live hundreds of miles apart, it will once again tie her closely to the most important figure in her life.
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