Tennis Coach Fought Illness to the End, Volley by Volley

PHILADELPHIA — Her heart was warm, her competitive spirit burned red-hot, but all her adult life Cissie Leary’s hands felt ice-cold.

Scleroderma had robbed them of proper circulation, forcing her to wear gloves and a heavy winter coat to matches, even on the warmest days of early fall and late spring. Her players ribbed her for keeping the heat so high in the team van. She never complained.

For two decades, she coached women’s tennis at the University of Pennsylvania, until she finally had assembled a stellar team.

But by that time, the disease that made her hands so cold was killing her. Cissie Leary’s kidney failed and cancer flooded her body. She underwent dialysis three days a week and chemotherapy every 1 1/2 months.

Still, she coached.

“It’s just really an amazing gift that she had,” said Jan Bernstein, one of Leary’s former players. “To show people how to be fighters.”

Wardogs, she called the players who learned. And for the players who battled back from adversity, who refused to quit, she reserved her ultimate compliment: real wardogs. In the final months, Cissie Leary showed her players the meaning of the words.

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Catherine Collins was just 23 and in pigtails when she was hired at Penn. She had had a successful career at Rollins College, a tiny school in Winter Park, Fla., with a top women’s tennis program.

“There was just immediate respect for her,” Bernstein said. “She was very intelligent on the court. She could watch your match for 10 minutes and tell you what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses were.

“When she first came to Penn, she was introduced to us as Miss Collins,” she added, chuckling. “That lasted about a day.”

From then on, she was just Cissie, much beloved by everyone: Her players. Their mothers and fathers. Penn administrators. Even opposing coaches and the players she recruited but couldn’t get.

“I never heard a bad word come out of her mouth,” said Bernstein. “Every opponent was going to be tough. Every coach was good, whether they were or not.”

Her inaugural team--the “First Troop”--consisted mostly of students who had come to the Ivy League as much to study as to play tennis. They were sisters, and they met every year at what they called “The Bash.”

Leary recruited well; she raised funds, served on national and regional tournament committees, helped level the playing field for women’s tennis programs at Penn and in the Ivy League.

“She’s taken the women’s program to a higher level. That took time,” said Al Malloy, for decades the men’s tennis coach at Penn. “When she latched onto something, you could see it in her eyes. But she got what she wanted for her team in a very quiet way.”

She wasn’t shy.

Leary and her longtime friend, Louise Gengler, coach of Princeton University’s women, once went to an old-timers baseball game. They were standing behind the outfield fence watching ex-Baltimore manager Earl Weaver toss balls to Cesar Cedeno, the former Astros slugger.

Then Leary pulled what Gengler calls “a Cissie thing.”

“Hey Cesar!” Leary shouted. “Can we shag some balls?”

They hopped the fence, caught some balls with the “Gold Coast Suns” and even took a few swings at Weaver’s fastball.

“She’s always up for an adventure,” said Gengler, “and yet is also very simple and pure too. Always game for doing something.”

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She did not reveal the gravity of her illness--scleroderma, a disease that eats away at major organs.

Her kidneys had been lost 11 years ago, after her daughter, Katie, was born. Doctors had warned Leary that this would happen if she had a child, but she persisted; her father donated a kidney, and she spent the semester in bed.

By that spring, she was back on the courts.

But the transplant did not eradicate the scleroderma. And it was only last spring, as the tennis season neared its end, that her players and friends learned how sick she was.

By then, her kidneys were functioning at 25%. She had lost one-third of her body weight. She suffered fevers that spiked around 104 degrees, and she broke into cold sweats. Doctors recommended that she skip the May matches for a full checkup.

She kept coaching, unable to pull away from a team that eventually finished 16-7 and sixth in the East.

“She was a bewilderment and an amazement to her doctors that she was still playing tennis, coaching, recruiting--and was a lot sicker than she let on to be,” said her husband, Mike Leary.

Doctors eventually determined that she had lymphoma--linked to the anti-rejection drugs she took after the transplant--and prescribed chemotherapy. But it was all for naught; this September, a month into the season she’d spent her career building, doctors gave her six to nine months.

She coached anyway, occasionally from a hospital bed.

“She said, ‘I have a certain amount of time and I have to do the most with it; I’m not going to go home and lay down in bed until it comes.’ She really gave the rest of us strength through that,” Mike Leary said.

She missed some practices, stopped hitting with the team and couldn’t travel to the last tournament in November. But she made it to Georgetown. And Princeton. And the first home match against Army.

In that last month, she planned her annual tennis clinic, although dialysis would mean a trip to the Florida Keys, not Jamaica. She set up treatment in California, where the tennis team will play this spring. Two weeks before she died, she participated in the Ivy League coaches’ conference call--from her hospital bed.

When the doctors gave up and Leary decided to go home from the hospital, she fought the little battles for her independence, Gengler said. She took her own medicine and tried to walk up the stairs. She fought to sit up when guests arrived.

“Are you sure you want to sit?” Gengler asked.

“No,” Leary said, gritting her teeth. “But I’m going to.”

She was 42 when she died, two days after Thanksgiving. Her husband, daughter, former players and coaches were at her side.

And now, Mike Leary recalls the last, delirious words of a real wardog:

“Tell those men to get off my courts!” she shouted.