Michigan guard Elliot Cadeau refuses to be defined by limitations

Michelle Cadeau sat outside the soundproof booth watching her 4-year-old son through the glass. An audiologist tested what a school nurse had flagged days earlier when she could not get a reading from Elliot’s right ear. Michelle hoped the specialist would reach a different finding.

Inside the booth, the doctor asked Elliot to repeat a variety of words. Then the doctor covered his left ear.

“I could hear her through the window,” Michelle recalls. “She says ‘football’ and he didn’t respond. She says ‘tennis ball’ and he didn’t flinch. Then he looks at me and says, ‘Is she going to say anything?’ ”

Michelle then burst into tears.

Years later, Elliot Cadeau has grown into the starting point guard for one of the nation’s best college basketball teams. While averaging 10.2 points and 5.6 assists per game, he has helped lead Michigan to a No. 1 seed in the men’s NCAA tournament Midwest Regional. The Wolverines open the tournament Thursday in Buffalo, New York, against No. 16 seed Howard.

Cadeau’s story isn’t just about playing through adversity. It is about how a player at basketball’s most demanding position learned early to adjust, anticipate and keep moving. Deaf in his right ear since birth, later diagnosed with an eye condition that required painful surgery, and managing asthma along the way, Cadeau has built his game and his confidence around what he refuses to let define him.

“[My disabilities] taught me that I can’t make any excuses about anything, and that hard work can overcome that,” Cadeau said. “It put a chip on my shoulder.”

Those building blocks began as Michelle tried to create normalcy around her son’s condition. His classmates made paper hearing aids and colored their own. Since then, she said, he has never looked at his condition as a handicap. On his own, he stopped wearing his hearing aid in sixth grade, tried it again briefly at 16, then quit altogether.

“Being deaf in one ear is normal for me,” said Cadeau, who played his first two college seasons at the University of North Carolina before joining Michigan this season.

There were lessons in that. What Cadeau lacked in hearing sharpened other parts of him.

“When he was little and started basketball, he’d give me his hearing aid to hold during activities,” Michelle said. “He would always run and stand last in line to watch what everybody else was doing before it was his turn. He found ways of living his life, and it has made him more attentive to detail. He’s always had to understand in a different way than you and I would have to, because we can hear everything.”

Years later, Cadeau faced another challenge. During his first year of college, he noticed a change in his vision. He said he could no longer see clearly out of his left eye. An exam confirmed keratoconus, an eye disease that distorts vision and required surgery.

“[Keratoconus] came out of nowhere, and it was weird because I’ve had 20/20 vision my whole life,” Cadeau said. “It was painful after the surgery, but I’m all right.”

Cadeau said he never saw those experiences as a reason to feel sorry for himself. Instead, they strengthened his belief that obstacles don’t have to define a person’s ceiling.

As a point guard, vision, poise and quick decisions matter on every possession, and that mindset has become part of Cadeau’s game. It is also why he hopes younger players see beyond the highlights. He and his mother want children facing setbacks to know that their limitations do not define them.

“I’m very proud of him, and I think his story needs to be told because there are so many kids walking around with something — a hearing aid, an insulin pump, glasses, whatever it may be — and they can feel limited by it,” Michelle said. “Elliot is living proof that you can still get where you want to go.

“If you put in the work and treat those things as superpowers instead of limitations, you can become whatever you want to become.”

Cadeau has spent his basketball life doing that, and Michigan assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen has seen those traits all season.

“There was a game where he missed a 3, and we met with him [during a timeout], and he asked to be taken out so he could regroup,” Miskdeen said. “We were like, ‘Wow,’ because players nowadays don’t ask to be taken out unless they’re tired. It showed how unselfish he is.”

In another game, Wolverines shooting guard Nimari Burnett was closing in on 30 points.

“And you already know,” Miskdeen said. “Elliot was trying to get him the ball so he could get 30. He’s hyped about his teammates trying to score.”

That same awareness showed up in Michigan’s Big Ten tournament semifinal victory over Wisconsin. Instead of forcing a shot late, Cadeau swung the ball to Big Ten Player of the Year Yaxel Lendeborg, who drilled a game-winning 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds left.

“Elliot said he saw there were seven seconds left, and he didn’t want to shoot it because that would have given Wisconsin time to come back and shoot,” Michelle said. “How are you even aware during a time like that? His attention to detail definitely has come from [his disabilities].”

Miskdeen said the version of Cadeau people see on the court is not the full picture. Around teammates and staff, he said, Cadeau is funny, loose and deeply respected, with a quiet personality and a leadership style outsiders might not always notice.

When Cadeau takes the floor in the NCAA tournament, he will do so as the poised point guard of a No. 1 seed, carrying with him a long line of adjustments — the hearing test, the eye surgery, the asthma and the work that turned each obstacle into fuel.

He hopes people see something more.

“I hope they see all of the work I’ve put into the game, and the more than 10,000 hours it took just to be able to play in these kinds of games,” Cadeau said. “And I hope kids can take inspiration from that and understand that anything is possible.”

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