Basketball, Softball
Favorite team: Phillies
Favorite memory competing in sports: Going to states my freshman year
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: We were playing a game to end practice and two of my teammates had a dance battle to decide who was gonna go first!
Music on playlist: A mix of pop and country
Future plans: Attend Kutztown University to play softball
Words to live by: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”
One goal before turning 30: Travel to Puerto Rico
One thing people don’t know about me: I played the violin through elementary school
By Mary Jane Souder
What a difference a year makes.
Last year this time, Joslyn Perez was relegated to the role of cheerleader on the sidelines of her Plymouth Whitemarsh softball team. This year, Perez is back in the middle of the action as the starting shortstop for a Colonial squad that – after a 2-3 start – won five straight.
The PW senior admits she is back with a different perspective after being sidelined through both last year’s basketball and softball seasons with a torn ACL.
“Just the whole support aspect,” the PW senior said. “In basketball, I had a teammate that injured herself and missed her entire senior season, so I think showing support for people and showing you are there for them.
“In softball, it’s very easy to get down on yourself when you make an error. You stress out about those kinds of things. It definitely showed me the importance of having a team culture and having people surround you that are going to show up for you.”
There’s also the not-so-little-matter of having a deeper appreciation for your sport.
“One hundred percent,” Perez said. “The first time back, it was scary. I’m not going to lie. Coming back to softball, I knew I could hit. Skills like that were still there.
“Going into the season, my biggest thing through my whole physical therapy process was focusing on the planting and the pivoting. Turning on softball baserunning was a big concern of mine. Once again, just having the confidence in myself and what I’ve been through to be able to come back and do it.”
Perez still wears a brace on her right knee that she hopes to shed by the time summer softball rolls around.
“I feel good, a hundred percent,” she said. “Which is kind of crazy to say, but we’re pretty far into the season when you think about it. Looking back and looking at it now, it’s like I barely think about my knee, which is good.”
Softball is very much a part of Perez’s present and future, and as a four-year varsity player, Perez can see the growth not only in herself but the team.
“As more freshmen come in, I can see the growth in the team culture and the relationships I build with all of them,” she said. “I am so grateful that through my four years I was able to create that and have that lasting memory, especially through my senior year.”
PW softball coach Mike Perez – who also happens to be her father – has had a front row seat to his daughter’s journey both on and off the diamond.
“It’s a lot to take a full year off and come back to a game like softball, which has such technical skills that you need as far as the timing and everything,” the Colonials’ coach said. “But she’s working really hard to get back to where she was, for sure.”
A captain, Perez has fallen naturally into the role of leader.
“Number one, it’s just her presence,” the PW coach said. “She just does everything she can for the team. She’s not a me-first type of player, and I think she’s the type of kid that leads by example. Kids just naturally gravitate towards that and follow her, which is huge.
“On the field, she played second base the first two years, and she’s moved to shortstop, which is her more natural position. Defensively, she’s just super steady for us out there. She makes all the plays she can, and a lot of the ones that are those plus plays. She brings a nice presence to the offense as well. She’s not the biggest kid, but she’s got some pop in the bat and get timely hits, and she’s a very unselfish player.
Back to the beginning
The second of four daughters of Mike and Nancy Perez, Joslyn has been competing in sports for as long as she can remember.
“Oh my gosh, I grew up playing at a local field with just a ton of my friends,” she said. “I grew up always playing, starting with t-ball and then ever since.
“My dad’s always been my coach, and that’s continued obviously through high school. You make friends along the way, but I got to grow up playing with all of them, which is one of the biggest memories that I have.”
Joslyn grew up following in the footsteps of her older sister Marissa.
“She’s obviously been a role model when I was younger,” she said. “We grew up playing the same position.”
A varsity starter since she stepped on the softball diamond as a freshman, Joslyn also played basketball, and Marissa joined the basketball team as a senior for the opportunity to play with her sister.
“Joslyn’s freshman year she was a role player/sub for our team that won the Liberty Division and SOL Tournament,” PW basketball coach Dan Dougherty said. “Her sophomore season she convinced her older sister Marissa to come back and play. The two of them had such a special time together that year.
“Joslyn was a starter/captain that year as well as her junior and senior seasons. Five games into her junior year she goes down with a torn ACL, misses the rest of the year and the first half of this year. Battles all the way back to starting our final playoff game at Neshaminy and played 20-plus minutes.”
There was never a doubt Joslyn was going to play collegiate softball, and she committed to Kutztown University in November of her junior year.
“Going back to my sister, she obviously plays collegiately, and I kind of learned through her process to start that very early,” she said. “I started going to recruitment camps early in my freshman year of high school, so I did it for about three years.
“I got on campus for a camp at Kutztown, and it was beautiful. I love the coaches, love the environment, so ultimately when it came down it to, picking was a pretty easy decision.”
Perez’s final list also included Muhlenberg and Moravian.
An unexpected setback
A month after committing to Kutztown – five games into her junior season, Perez went down with a knee injury.
“I obviously talk a lot with my parents about it and talked with my mom, and she was like, ‘You know, you get injured, but a lot of times you are tough enough to just get back up and keep going. I knew it was bad when you stayed down,’” Perez said. “I just thought I had hyperextended my knee. It just hurt for a second and then I would get back up and be fine.
“I went into a back hallway with my trainer, and I was doing some agility. That’s when I realized it was very unstable, but I was never really familiar with knee injuries. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Looking back, obviously, it was a very big thing, but in the moment, I had no idea.”
So convinced was Perez that it was not ‘a big thing’ that she went on a week’s trip to Hawaii with her grandparents.
“It felt great,” she said. “I was walking around in rocky terrains, and everything was fine. I was hiking, I was swimming in the ocean.
“It wasn’t very easy to grasp what was going on. I was in contact with my trainer, and I’m like, ‘It feels really good, it’s not really hurting anymore,’ so when I came back, she had me doing some drills in our gym, and I went to go take a layup, and when I landed, it buckled again.”
This time – around two months after she initially went down - Perez got an MRI, and the prognosis was definitive - she had suffered a torn ACL.
“As a 16-year-old kid would be, she was very confused,” Mike Perez said. “She didn’t know how to handle it.
“She was very nervous about how her Kutztown coaches would take the news, and it was a lot for her to take in at that moment, but they were phenomenal. She let them know, and they were like, ‘We deal with this all the time. Just work to get better. You’re not going to forget how to throw a ball and swing a bat. Just get healthy.’ Once she had that reassurance, I think that helped a lot.”
Perez had surgery and was out of action until the final weeks of her senior basketball season. She missed her entire junior softball season and travel ball season last summer.
“Funny enough, my travel team actually lost a few players – some players quit and then I got injured,” Perez said. “My older sister actually ended up playing for my travel team, so I continued to show up to all the practices and games throughout the summer season.”
She returned to the court midway through her final basketball season.
“I think I was back for 14 games, but it felt like it was six games,” she said. “My main goal was I wanted to play for Senior Night, so thankfully I got to make that happen, but I also got to get a little further and get into districts, which was nice.”
In addition to the physical rehab, there was also the mental piece.
“I was in the starting lineup for softball and basketball, and that being taken away was very difficult,” Perez said. “But I like to think of myself as a person and teammate that is very supportive of other people. So, I was happily there to watch everybody else succeed, but mentally that’s not something that’s very easy, and you don’t want to show that because I wanted to show my support for everybody else that was out there.
“Mentally having people that reciprocated the support back and showed that they were there for me.”
According to her father, Joslyn was a warrior throughout the whole process.
“She was really pushing herself and working with the trainer and going three times a week to therapy to try and get back and doing everything on her own to get back,” he said. “As a coach, I know how hard she works at everything she does. No matter schoolwork or basketball or softball or whatever task is at hand, she’s going to go 110 percent. As a coach, you’re kind of limited with what you’d be able to see in that situation. It was interesting to see that from the parent’s side of things – just get to see her progression and her determination.
“She had her goal. She really, really wanted to get back for her Senior Night in basketball. She didn’t want to just be camped out under the basket for the first tip-off and get the ‘pity layup.’ She said, ‘I want to play,’ and she got cleared to play two or three weeks prior. It was really cool as a parent being able to see the reaction she got from her teammates and from the fans.”
A bright future
In addition to sports, Perez is part of PW’s International Baccalaureate program, which includes a lot of service activities, including helping with the Philadelphia Marathon every year.
As for her future, although she’s not 100 percent certain, Perez – whose grandmother was an art teacher – is deciding between a career in speech pathology and art therapy.
“Whenever my sisters and I would go over to our grandparents’ house, she always had a craft or something for us to paint,” Perez said. “So, I’ve always been doing it since I was little, and I love kids, so I thought that was a great way to put the two together.”
While there’s no mistaking that Perez’s talents in both sports will be missed, it’s much more
“(I) love the person even more (than the player),” Dougherty said. “She has been a fixture at our summer camp every year. Campers love her.
“She has had such a positive attitude despite the injury. She is so reliable, responsible – everything you want from a leader. She’s so polite – you’d never know what a fierce competitor she is. I can’t say enough good things about Joslyn - I’m going to miss her so much."
