In spite of Trevon's condition, Eric said he had no hesitancy entering Connie's life with her four children (Trevon is the third, and the only one disabled).
"I thought it would push him away, but it didn't," Connie said. "It pulled him closer."
Trevon Jenifer, in a match against Jonathan Phills of Oxon Hill, draws a crowd whenever he wrestles. "The whole stage stops to watch this kid," says Jim Johnson, a referee who has worked other matches but is not pictured here.
(Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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Connie, however, was not ready for a whole different kind of motherhood when Trevon was born.
She said sonograms showed no signs of any birth defects. But immediately after Trevon was born on Sept. 7, 1988, at Civista Medical Center in La Plata, he was rushed to Children's Hospital in the District before his mother could see him.
Once she saw her son, Connie was petrified.
"It took me a month before I could hold him," said Connie, who is an assistant manager at a CVS drugstore in Lexington Park. "I was scared I was going to drop him. But once I found the strength to [hold him], I knew he would have the strength in him to overcome anything."
Trevon Jenifer smiles when he recalls people "telling me, 'You're not going to graduate from college.' " In addition to studying criminal justice and psychology, Jenifer wants to play a college sport. Eight schools, including Illinois, Oklahoma State, and Arizona, compete in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association's Intercollegiate Division. Some offer other wheelchair sports, including track, tennis and rugby, as well as scholarships.
According to Maureen Gilbert, the director of campus programs at Illinois, the school offers waivers for some wheelchair athletes, providing residential tuition fees for out-of-state residents.
Jenifer has participated at Illinois's summer camp for wheelchair basketball and has begun looking into some colleges' sports programs. "I want to get a college scholarship, like wheelchair basketball or track," he said.
With Success Comes Opposition
Your fingers disappear in a handshake with Trevon Jenifer. Years of applying his hands as his means of transportation has turned them muscle-bound and enormous. His wrist to the tip of his middle finger measures nine inches.
Those hands are the pivot for all his conditioning exercises -- push-ups (in which he raises his entire body off the ground at twice the rate of his teammates), squats (where he treats the floor like a trampoline, and gets almost 12 inches airborne), weightlifting (he can bench press 120 pounds, though he said now that he is training year-round, he would like to be at 200 by the summer), and running (he does laps both on the outdoor track and in the wrestling room with his teammates -- using only his arms).
"Someone was complaining about running laps at practice," sophomore teammate Robert Davidson said, "because we were the ones trying to keep up with him."
Jenifer presents a unique challenge to opponents, as Patuxent sophomore Nick Damron learned. Because Jenifer has no legs to grab on to, it forces opponents to alter their approach.
"My first match against him, I was so scared," said Damron, who lost to Jenifer last month but defeated him last weekend. "He knows people are kind of freaked out by him at first. But he's phenomenal. I like wrestling him. He's definitely one of the hardest workouts I get. He makes me a better wrestler because he forces you not to use your legs, just your arms."
