On May 3, 62-year-old Bucks County school coach John Gleeson was throwing batting practice in the left-field batting cage.
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Standing about 45 feet from the batter, shielded by an L-shaped screen commonly used by teams, Gleeson was pitching to Jake Skolnick – “our hardest hitter,” co-coach Vince Campellone said.

John Gleeson the Survivor
Campellone then heard the clang of a line drive hitting a bar of the screen.
Turning toward the cage, Campellone saw Gleeson facedown on the ground, his body twitching.
Campellone ran over and yelled for players to get the trainer.
Campellone rolled Gleeson onto his back, opened his mouth, and made sure he wouldn’t swallow his tongue.
Tyler Campellone, Vince’s son and a sophomore outfielder on the team who recently took a CPR course, started resuscitation.
Trainer Juana Bivins ran over from the gym behind center field, and used the defibrillator on Gleeson. A student trainer called Gleeson’s wife, Connie, who works at the school’s Children’s Center, and she arrived just in time to see a shock from the defibrillator jump-start his heart.
“It was very fortuitous the way that things fell,” John Gleeson said. “I could have been [at home] mowing the grass all by myself and had my blocked arteries kicked in, and I would have been in pretty bad shape because there would have been no one around. As it was, getting hit in the head with a line drive was almost a blessing in disguise, because it kicked off this whole series of things.”
Gleeson was rushed to the nearby St. Mary Medical Center. Five of his arteries were blocked.
Gleeson wants to return to coaching this fall for his son’s last football season, saying he has dreamed about it for a long time. If his heart exams go well, he could be ready for the mid-August start of practices. But if doctors say he needs a defibrillator implanted, he likely will miss the opening of the preseason.
As for Skolnick, the player who hit the fateful line drive, Gleeson said the senior went through the instinctual “Oh, my God, what have I done?” phase.
“But as I’ve told him and everybody has told him since,” Gleeson added, “it was a blessing in disguise, that in some ways you set off a series of events that probably will prolong my life for quite a while.”





















