Softball used to be a primary factor in Ashley Sutta’s life. The Palmetto High School senior considered playing softball “a lifestyle, not a just a game.”
But life threw a huge complication into her plans to continue to compete in the game.
“I have a genetic defect in my bones,” she says. “My L-4 and L-5 and the lumbar were hitting each other.”
The pain would come when she arched her spine to pitch.
“It hurt really bad. I couldn’t walk for a while,” she says. “I had to take ice baths, I used heating pads and I took Advil.”
Her doctor told her to stop playing or face the risk of becoming paralyzed. She went to physical therapy which helped so much, she went back to the game. Until she was injured again.
“At this point, I had one of two choices, I could either stop playing softball altogether or heal as best I could, change my entire pitching motion, and pray to not break it again,” she wrote in her college essay.
She tried that route. She changed her pitching motion and managed to keep her accuracy.
But her injury changed how she viewed playing the game. This year, she has chosen to work to save money for college to study neurology instead of playing either volleyball or softball.
What her injury brought her is a curiosity about the science of what happened to her. She started searching for answers and that lead her to an interest in neurology.
“The spine and the brain are connected,” she says.
That interest has grown into a resolve to become a neurosurgeon.
Sutta wants to go to the northeast for college. Her list includes New York University, Columbia, Cornell and the University of Miami. She plans to major in neurology or biology.
In the meantime, Sutta continues to participate in an on-going project that gives Christmas gifts to seniors who live in nursing homes or assisted living facilities.
“They write down they want and we get it at the store and wrap if for them to open on Christmas, because they don’t always have family,” she says. “It’s kind of cool.”
The Christmas gift project is sponsored by the South Miami Rotary Club. Sutta’s dad is a member. They work with the local franchise of Home Instead Senior Care to identify the seniors and get the gift requests.
“Everybody in that home as long as they fill out the paper,” Sutta says, adding that they always wrap extra gifts in case the request gets lost. The extra gifts would be items such as fluffy socks, coloring books, and fluffy blankets.
She’s been involved in the program since seventh or eighth grade.
“Now I run the groups of wrapping and put them into the boxes,” she says.
Then, the first Friday of December, a group of about 30 volunteers meet at Coral Gables Senior High to wrap the presents.
“We give community hours to people and we provide dinner,” she says.
At Palmetto, she’s a member of two community service clubs, Key Club and Interact. She’s a member of the Italian Honor Society, the English Honor Society, the French Honor Society, Spanish Honor Society, Future Business Leaders of America (FFEA), the National Honor Society and the Psychology Honor Society. Through all of the clubs and honor and honor societies, she participates in numerous collection drives, including drives for hurricane relief.
She plans on doing her own collection drive later in the year.
“I plan on getting donations for the Be a Santa to a Senior,” she says.
