Hofstra U Pitcher Kayleigh Lotti

Long Island freshman baseballer overcomes heart condition.

May 5, 2006

In a sports world filled with huge decisions, intense competition and performance-enhancing drugs, Kayleigh Lotti is a refreshing athlete who brings fans back to reality.

>Kayleigh Lotti unless you're from the Long Island area, where she plies her trade.

And why would you know of Lotti, anyway? After all, she's not dunking basketballs in the NBA playoffs, and she isn't the next great star, recently drafted into the NFL.

Lotti is a freshmen softball pitcher at Hofstra University? She plays a game that few sports fans ever see, at a school that dwells in relative anonymity in the Colonial Athletic Association, a small college conference by most standards.

At just 18 years old, though, Lotti is more than a starry-eyed coed mowing down opponents with Pedro Martinez-like regularity. Lotti is also a heart-surgery survivor - a stark reminder to sports fans that life is much more than balls and strikes.

In a world of sports that is rife with steroids, attacks on fans and sexual assault cases, Kayleigh Lotti is as refreshing as a spring flower sprouting to life in the thawing soil.

Lotti reminds sports fans to keep it real. For someone barely old enough to vote, this remarkable woman has figured out what many onlookers never seem to get.

"I've looked up to athletes," Lotti says, in a recent interview with Suite101. "But I wonder what they do outside of sports. Before the recovery I took it for granted, too."

Lotti jars us from the malaise we fall into, cheering for our favorite heroes, as if every shot they make and homerun they hit will in some way alter our daily lives.

A two-time Gatorade Rhode Island High School player of the Year, Lotti was fortunate to have felt pain in her shoulder heading into her senior season.

Looking for a pitching-related problem, doctors found a congenital heart disorder that threatened Lotti's life. Usually caught during childhood, the defect, when gone unchecked, kills most people by the time they reach their early twenties. Lotti was lucky.

"It made me respect the sport," she says, speaking with a decisive reflection that makes her sound more like a coach than a young college player.

After a successful recovery that included a week in the hospital and a month-long sabbatical from softball, Lotti was on the mound at Hofstra, as the team's ace, in just her freshmen season, firing a no-hitter in her first college start.

Of course, with 14 no-hitters in 21 games in her junior year alone, this was indeed keeping it real, for Kayleigh Lotti.

"When I first started pitching, it came very natural," she says with confidence but not arrogance. "I took it for granted. Now, I give it my all in every game, knowing it could be my last time to pitch.

Until now, you probably hadn't heard of Kayleigh Lotti. Yet she is the brightest kind of athlete there is. The one who reminds us of the fragility of life; the one who destroys some of the cynicism created by the many cheaters and haters wearing professional uniforms today.

The copyright of the article Hofstra U Pitcher Kayleigh Lotti in Basketball is owned by Mark Barnes. Permission to republish Hofstra U Pitcher Kayleigh Lotti in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

May 8, 2006 7:31 AM

bob magyar :

They should make xrays of the chest mandatory because haven't some basketball and football players die from this.

May 8, 2006 8:30 AM

Mark Barnes :

Indeed, players have died from undetected heart-related incidents. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it seems that all children should have a chest xray at some point to confirm that no defect like this exists.

I'm just happy that Kayleigh Lotti's was discovered in time.

Perhaps this sort of thing will get more athletes, who have not been checked out, to have a more thorough physical in the future.

Thanks for the comment.