In the waiting room of The Vincera Institute, Dasia Pressley didn’t understand what her stomach pain meant. It was a July 2018 morning, and Pressley — then a rising junior at Syracuse — waited with her parents, Darren and Denay, for Dr. William Meyers’ diagnosis. A groin injury had bothered her for three years, but she continued running anyway.

Nine o’clock turned into 10, 10 into 11. Soon, it was 4 p.m., and Meyers, a renowned Philadelphia-based surgeon specializing in core injuries, entered and diagnosed Pressley with a sports hernia. It required surgery, something Pressley had never undergone.

“I didn’t think much of it,” Pressley said, “but as he kept talking and he talked about the surgery and like, how sore you’re going to be, how much therapy is going to be, I started to get a little bit more nervous.”

The next morning, Pressley returned at 6 a.m. and had the surgery. Then, she started therapy at the same specialty medical center the following morning. Day-by-day, week-by-week, she slowly re-learned simple movements like standing and walking. She returned and broke the Syracuse record twice in two weeks with her 4×100 relay team. And as Pressley enters her senior season at Syracuse looking to set a new personal record in the 60- and 200-meter events — while also anchoring the 4×100 relay — the nagging injuries are afterthoughts.

“She did an awesome job of getting right back up to a high level,” associate head coach Dave Hegland said. “So now, coming into this year, she’s been healthy, she’s trained well.”

At a Syracuse meet in Florida during the 2018 season, Pressley ran the 4×100 with her groin injury, something she’d done for nearly two years. Usually, it wouldn’t hurt after the race. But this time, something was different: She couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, and the pain in her stomach was the worst it had ever been.

“I was hunching over, and that has never happened before,” Pressley said. “I could barely practice that week before regionals it just started getting too much.”

That prompted the initial visit to Meyers and briefly halted a running career that began in seventh grade after she outgrew her summer camp. Darren and Denay wanted Pressley to find an activity that distanced herself from her two older sisters. Pressley and her friends chose track just for fun, but it soon blossomed into first-place finishes. Pressley never lost a race in middle school and set the Pennsylvania state outdoor 200-meter record as a junior at Pennsbury High School that still stands.

Since she arrived at Syracuse, however, Pressley’s only had a handful of first-place finishes. And part of that was because the injury continued to follow her after that Florida meet. The first time Pressley and her 4×100 team ran together, it was the 2019 Atlantic Coast Conference outdoor championship and Eunice Boateng, Alexis Crosby and Cheyenne Trigg were all hurt. But Hegland approached the girls and said they’d still be running, Pressley said.

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Pressley, Kadejhia Sellers, Justice Richardson and Eunice Boateng were the original group that ran the 4×100 meter race in previous seasons but hadn’t raced together yet that season. The new relay finished sixth, with a school record of 45.17 seconds. A potential place in the NCAA regional tournament wasn’t guaranteed, and the girls thought even their school record wasn’t enough to advance, said Pressley.

“I crossed the line and didn’t even know we broke the record, and the other girls ran up to me and were like, ‘We broke the record!’” Pressley said. “And I was like, I’m still trying to catch my breath.”

At the end of the day, Pressley’s relay was informed that it had done enough to make it to regionals, earning the final spot of 24 qualified teams. The team ran with the chance.

Two weeks after the ACCs, it bested the previous record by almost a full second, with a time of 44.36 seconds. Even with a new school record for the second time in two weeks, the Orange missed out on nationals by four-tenths of a second.

That was the first year at Syracuse for Pressley not hindered by injuries. Her first two hinted at her potential, but it wasn’t until those postseason tournaments that she finally reached that point. And now, she’s running free of physical restraints.

“She has fallen up just short on a couple occasions, just like hundredths of a second, thousandths of a second, real near misses,” Hegland said. “And I know she doesn’t want to have that experience again.”

Published on February 17, 2020 at 12:54 am

Contact Gaurav: gshetty@syr.edu