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SALT LAKE CITY — Oscar Martinez hasn't seen the Utah Jazz play, but he can appreciate their talent now that's he been able to gauge just how high a net is – with his guide cane.
"Yeah, they're high," Martinez said. "I don't know how the players do that!"
The Utah Jazz organization recently invited Oscar and his classmates from the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind to tour Vivint Smart Home Arena; not just to tour but also to touch, so they could get a hands-on sense of all that's entailed in a venue like the Jazz's home court.
With shoes off, the students toured the arena hardwoods. They got down on their knees to move their hands across the floor, feeling where each floor piece joined another floor piece. The floor is put together like a jigsaw puzzle, so it can be quickly dismantled and put away for special events.
"They have to fit these pieces together," Robbin Clark told the students. Clark is the expanded core curriculum coordinator for the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind. "And, all over the place — you'll feel these cracks."
"I didn't know the floor was like a puzzle," said Shaley Tracy through a sign language interpreter. "I'd never seen that before."
At one point, the students shouted from the arena floor to help gauge, by echo, the size of just how much space 19,911 seats take. They shouted, they looked, they touched and they couldn't pass up on little basketball in a pro arena.
"The locker room; Holy Hannah, it was amazing!" Clark said. "It was great for our students to come up to each one of the lockers and to see like, the real deal, to feel the real shoes. You can't get that from a picture or a descriptive video. That's pretty rad."
"Then I saw the athletes' shoes, and they were very big," said Tracy. "And I couldn't imagine they were that big! I've never seen that before."
But the tour wasn't just about touching nets, floors or super-sized shoes. Its goal was to give students opportunities to explore possibilities for when they graduate.
"We're discovering what are some career opportunities; what we could do, what kind of skills we need to come work at a place like this," Clark said.
Whether it's in concessions, maintenance, ticket sales, accounting — any field — the hope is the tour will help open the minds of students and the community at large.
"It doesn't do us any good if we're only doing this in our walls," said Clark, "but when we can bring our students to the community, when we can give them that experience and that empowerment — that's quality of life."
