The healing power of athletics has been seen on the grandest of stages, most notably in how sports helped the country heal after 9/11.
The same thing is occurring on a local level with one person: Leah Pressley.
The Hamilton West junior’s world was rocked when her house burned down in the second of two electrical fires on consecutive days. She lost most of her belongings, including her prized tennis racket.
The blazes occurred shortly before school was back in session, and the family immediately had to fly to Florida to watch her dad receive an award. Upon her return, Pressley didn’t think she had enough spirit to rejoin the tennis team she had played for as a freshman and sophomore.
Who could blame her?
“I thought ‘That’s 16 years of my life is gone,’” Pressley recalled. “My dad was in the house since the 1990s. That’s even longer for him. We lost all our stuff. We had to go buy a few things for Florida and while we were in Florida an inspector went into our house and said everything was gone. It was terrible.”
“Everything” included her tennis outfits and prized Wilson Clash racket, given to her by Andy Stoll, one of her two coaches, along with JoSeph Revell, at Trenton’s National Junior Tennis & Learning club.
“Coming out of that I was really in a dark place; I was like ‘All right, my life can’t get any worse,’” Pressley recalled. “We came back from Florida and it was tennis season. I didn’t even want to do tennis. I was really close to saying ‘I don’t want to go.’
“It was hard. I was so ready for the tennis season. I tried all my new tennis dresses on; I was so excited. After all that I thought ‘Maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen.’”
But then …
“I thought ‘Nope, I’m gonna go.’”
Upon her return, Pressley received a new racket from the Hamilton West coaches and another new racket from Stoll a day later.
“When I went the first day and they bought me a racket I said, ‘They must really want me here!’” Pressley said with a smile.
Now that she’s back, the effervescent second singles player realizes it was the best thing for her.
“I think my saving grace through that whole tragedy was tennis,” Pressley said. “Through it all I have tennis to rely on. I can take my anger and my tennis out on all that because tennis is a thing I’ve learned to love. It’s been helping me through this whole dark thing.”
Hornets head coach Gaby Walsh and assistant Jim “Mole” Ditmars, the previous head coach, are impressed by how Pressley has rebounded.
“For a teenager to handle what she has gone through is just amazing,” Ditmars said. “This is obviously a great distraction to play tennis and all things considered she’s doing very well.”
Walsh marvels at how she pours her energy into the sport.
“She wasn’t here the first week because of everything, and she’s missed some practice here and there,” the coach said. “But when she’s here she’s focused. She’s a great teammate; the girls love her. During a match she’ll be hyping up the girl on the court next to her. It’s been a nice outlet for her, something she enjoys doing.”
She has enjoyed it since age 5, when Pressley began playing in NJTL. She followed her older brother into the game and when he gave it up, she kept going. Pressley attends lessons with her teammate Lucia Dabbene, the Hornets’ first singles player, and serves as a coach for the younger students.
“I love the game so much,” she said. “I love the feeling of pre-game, coming out here, thinking win or lose I’m gonna be proud of myself if I put my all out there and learn about my opponent. Talking to someone else who loves the game, and then going out there and actually playing against them is always fun.
“During a match I can see what I’m doing wrong or right and in practice I can work on that. The point is you can always improve. There’s always someone better and I have to learn from that for me to get better.”
As a freshman, Pressley notched four wins at second singles and one at first doubles. Last year she had three wins before her season was halted in mid-October when she slipped and fell at Shady Brook courts and suffered a right knee injury.
“That sucked,” Pressley exclaimed. “I was so excited for CVCs (Colonial Valley Conference Tournament) and then I couldn’t do it.”
After enduring physical therapy, walking was still difficult, so Pressley did reps with West trainer Jen Bauer to get straightened out. After six months, she was finally cleared to play.
“And then I just played non-stop,” Pressley said. “Over the summer I constantly went to practice, did not stop. I kept doing drills, I had my grandpop come out to help me serve, my brother was there.
“I spent the majority of the summer working on my serve. Last year I couldn’t get my serve in. It was constantly going out. I worked with my coach and because I’m a hard hitter, he was showing me how to bring my racket down and bring it back up and add shape to the ball to keep it in.”
The results were readily apparent.
“Her serve has gotten better,” Ditmars said. “She’s much more confident in her first serve. And she’s been a bit more consistent with it.”
Although the serve has improved, Pressley considers the backhand her best shot. It led to a 2-2 start at the outset of the season, and Ditmars feels she is improved enough to shatter her season high in victories.
All this has come while learning to play with a new HEAD racket.
“It’s an amazing racket,” she said. “It’s also a heavy racket And it’s a lot heavier than the last one so you really gotta put shape on that ball. If you don’t – straight into the net.”
Walsh is seeing a more confident player who is delivering solid groundstrokes while cutting back on her double faults.
“I think she has a lot more confidence in herself,” the former Steinert No. 1 player said. “She’s asking for advice during games, which I think helps her. She boosts herself up. I used to talk to myself when I was playing, she talks to herself to hype herself up.”
Pressley’s playing ability is part of her value, right along with her leadership qualities.
“(Dabbene) and Leah have been great examples of role models for the rest of the team,” Ditmars said. “Leah is a natural born leader. She talks to the kids; she pushes them a little bit. She’s very encouraging. She’s never negative and the kids love her.”
It was, of course, tough to remain positive after the disaster that befell her family.
The first fire came while she was in the shower and struck between the second and third floors, with the bathroom on the second. Leah began “smelling this really weird smell,” not knowing the fire had started directly above her.
“My dad said ‘Leah, you need to get out there,’” she said. “I threw on my slippers and got out and I can just remember looking at the house and seeing the smoke come out of my house. All my neighbors came out like ‘What’s going on?’ and five fire trucks come up. The police came. It was a whole lot.
“The fire only affected the back part of the house so we were able to go in and grab some of our things while we were being displaced.”
A day later, she and her mom were heading to their hotel when they got a call from her dad telling them another fire had struck.
They raced home only to see firefighters spraying hoses on a structure as the second blaze completed the horror the first fire had started. The bedrooms and living room had survived the initial blaze, but they were engulfed by this one.
And a 16-year-old kid had to watch her world burn down.
“I could see our windows broken, I saw the ceiling fans falling off the ceiling,” she said. “I was like ‘Oh my goodness.’ My dad told me that the second fire started in my room. So there was no chance I could get more of my stuff.”
And suddenly the simplest chores, such as how she would get to and from school and practice, became a mystery. It finally worked out, and the family was waiting for an apartment to be ready in mid-October. But Pressley still sees grim reminders of what once was, as it’s expected to take at least a year to rebuild the home.
“They haven’t even started working on my house,” she said. “It’s a struggle to just go back to the house to check on our mail and other things. When we go there and see all the windows and doors boarded up, that hurts.”
Fortunately for Pressley, she has an antidote that, though it may not heal the wound, can certainly take her mind off it.
“My goal is to continue playing outside of our practices, keep pushing myself,” she said. “I need my revenge from last year, I need to finish out this season strong, to do well in the CVCs. Keep staying consistent with how I practice, keep going and not letting what’s happening on my house affect me that much.
“If you really think too deeply into it, you will get succumbed by it and I don’t want that to happen. So tennis is the one thing I heavily rely on. I want to play more. That’s my goal.”
And once again, sports comes to the rescue.
