FAMILY MAN
Athletic talent runs deep in the Trusty clan
Among the many traits of the Trusty family, as a potent counterbalance to its legendary competitive streak, is a certain humility. So when you ask Onnie Trusty about the soccer abilities of her youngest sibling, she’s reticent to take any credit.
If you present Auston Trusty a similar question, about the influence that his youth national team sister and Penncrest All-Delco had on his career, he mobilizes his modesty to tell a story that Onnie demurs.
The center back who has played every minute this season for the Philadelphia Union volunteers that his success stems directly from his older sister — from watching her dominate countless games in central defense, from positing Onnie as his initial role model, even the ephemera of his Instagram and Twitter handles, which feature the No. 3, Onnie’s jersey number.
“That’s why I got into defending,” Auston said last week. “Obviously over time, I’ve played every other position just like everybody getting that sense of every position. But I would say I’m a center back because of her, to keep it 100 percent real. I’ve never said that out loud, but the reason I’m a center back is because of her.”
Ten years separate Onnie and Auston in age, but the relationship between the two soccer players among LeeAnn and Walt Trusty’s six children is one thread in the web connecting one of Delaware County’s most prolific athletic families. Three of the Trustys have been recognized as All-Delcos in their sports. (Auston would have surely been the fourth had he not eschewed his final three years at Penncrest to attend YSC Academy, the Union’s soccer-specific high school). Five of the six have translated their athletic abilities into college educations.
Auston is the outlier, passing up a scholarship to the University of North Carolina for a first-team contract with the Union in
2016, though the 20-yearold is working toward a degree online. He has been a revelation for the Union this season, but with an athletic pedigree that dates back decades, he is just the latest chapter in a family where sports run in the genes.
“That was the pathway. That was just the lifestyle,” Auston said. “It’s hard for me to understand because my family’s all about sports. My family’s pretty athletic from top to bottom. So it’s kind of just, you play sports. It doesn’t mean you don’t do well at academics, but you had the genes, so why don’t you take advantage of the genes?”
••• Three days before the oldest Trusty, Josh, started classes at Shippensburg University in Aug. 1998, Auston was born, the baby of a family of immense athletic aptitude.
Josh was a basketball standout at The Christian Academy. Next came Melissa, a cross country star at TCA. Part of a graduating class of 23, TCA lacked a girls cross country squad, which was no problem for Melissa, who ran in boys competitions before medalling at Delcos in the first scholastic race she ever ran against girls. She parlayed an All-Delco nod into four years as a distance specialist at the University of Maryland.
Onnie was the first to attend Penncrest, earning AllDelco accolades as a sophomore and junior before foregoing her senior season due to conflicts with the under-16 and under-17 national teams. She landed at Florida State, twice reaching the Final Four before a hip injury curtailed her career.
Elijah was a track star at Penncrest, an All-Delco jumper who followed Josh’s footsteps to Shippensburg, where he earned three AllPSAC nods and qualified for the NCAA Division II Championships. Ethan was a key cog in Penncrest’s 2014 PIAA championship lacrosse team, scoring twice in the final as part of a 26-goal season. He helped Cabrini qualify for the Division III Tournament all four years before graduating last spring.
Then there’s Auston, whose childhood was spent at the feet of his siblings at more fields than he can count.
“We just took them everywhere, to practices and tournaments,” LeeAnn said. “It’s like they never took naps in a bed; it was always in a car or in a stroller.”
“If I wasn’t at home, I was at someone’s soccer game or someone’s track meet or someone’s basketball game,” Auston said. “So that’s how I learned to play every sport and use my whole body.”
Auston’s most frequent playmate was Ethan, who is two years older. They were ball boys at Onnie’s games, or the kids messing around in the sand pit on the infield at Elijah’s track meets.
Close enough in age to directly compete, they frequented the same groups of neighborhood friends. There were organized sports like soccer and basketball, which both pursued before deviating in the springs, Ethan to lacrosse and Auston to the baseball diamond. And there were the less organized pastimes, springing from their imagination. Days could be spent playing pickup basketball, backyard football or street hockey. Or absent a proper tennis court, standing in the middle of their street and volleying tennis shots at each other.
“We grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by sports,” Ethan said. “All the neighborhood kids gathered together and played sports, because that’s what we do. We grew up playing sports, watching our family play sports.”
While this branch of the Trusty lineage was the most decorated, it was by no means alone. LeeAnn (nee Reihmer) was one of four sisters who played field hockey, lacrosse and swam. Walt is one of eight children. Three cousins — Jerimiah, Isaiah and Ayanna — were standout basketball players at TCA, Jerimiah playing at Whea-
ton College. Kevin Trusty, a 2012 All-Delco wide receiver at Penncrest, is a cousin, as is Ken Trusty, an All-Delco defensive back at Penncrest in the 1980s. So when a football or basketball game would break out at a family function, things could get serious.
Like any sibling relationship, there were fights, tears, times when LeeAnn would play peacemaker. But there was also genuine support. When Ethan picked up lacrosse and the family purchased a bounce back screen, Auston would help him turn passing practice into games. Even as Ethan’s interest in soccer waned, he and Auston would still spend evenings in the yard kicking the ball around.
The benefit of so much competition at home became obvious once the Trustys focused their beam of competitive energies on outsiders. For Ethan, who’d tried in vain to match the speed of Elijah, six years his senior, what difference did it make if a lacrosse opponent was two years older? Same for Auston, who found playing up in age a natural extension of competing against Ethan in everything.
“I think it was a healthy competition,” Onnie said. “We’re all very competitive in the stuff we do, but I don’t think it was a negative thing at all. It’s never been something where it’s a jealousy thing because one does better than the other. We’ve all been really supportive of each other.”
“I would say that made us better athletes, being able to play with the older kids and get our skills up to their level,” Ethan said. “Having the ability to play against an older group of kids like that kind of limits that fear of going against a tougher opponent earlier in your life.”
••• LeeAnn and Walt’s plan was the same with each child. The kids would try as many sports as they’d want, for their health and social benefits, and in time, they’d have the power to pick their paths.
“I saw sports as being pretty important to them,” Walt said. “I was an athlete myself, so I saw what it could do for them. I always said that if they had the genetic thing work out like our family does, we could have some athletes here. So we saw them mature in different ways.”
“I think it just kind of naturally came as each kid came along,” Onnie said. “For me, I saw my older brother and older sister played sports, and it was just ingrained in my head, OK I want to try sports now. Our parents would let us try whatever sport we wanted to.”
Living in Media provided opportunities aplenty. They started on the standard fare of basketball and soccer at the Media Youth Center and branched out into their niches. Onnie fell in love with soccer. Melissa was bored by it. Josh played soccer through middle school until basketball captured his attention; ditto Ethan with lacrosse. Melissa and Elijah gravitated toward athletics and stuck when they recognized their natural gifts. Ethan started with Rose Tree Optimist club in sixth grade with a group of friends that evolved into the nucleus of the state title squad.
“They dabbled in just about everything,” LeeAnn said. “… Then I think they found what they wanted to focus on.”
Auston excelled in basketball, contemporaries with players who’d fuel Penncrest’s consecutive District 1 titles in 2017 and 2018 (and in the process, usurp the school wins record set by Walt’s 1968-69 squad). Josh coached Auston and Ethan at MYC, urged by Walt in an effort to bridge the decade between them.
Auston played baseball in elementary school and football in middle school. But soccer seized him, with a sizeable assist to Onnie. From a young age, Auston could absorb a game’s intricacies with astounding quickness. Onnie noticed the difference in how Ethan and Auston observed from the sidelines. Ethan would watch a little, then hit the snack bar. Auston would be transfixed.
“I remember him from a little kid, always just being mesmerized and asking questions,” Onnie said. “I probably was in high school at this time and I was travelling all over the world with the national team, and I remember him coming to me and asking, ‘how did you do all this?’ I was telling him that I was working hard and blah, blah, blah, and he wanted to know how I got a scholarship to get into college, and I was telling him it’s not just the soccer aspect, you have to have good grades, it all comes in a package. And he was just one of those kids that was just a student and really soaked in the information that you were telling him.”
Auston remembers those days in less exalted terms. While not shining as a ball boy — “we had the job, but we weren’t doing the job,” he recalled — he was tuned into action on the field. But it wasn’t until later that the soccer path Onnie followed really clicked as being one to emulate.
“She talked about going to IMG (Academy) and she told me that there was a U-17 residency, and I was asking her all these questions about it,” Auston said. “I remember asking her all these questions and thinking, ‘dang, that sounds so cool and I want to do that.’ I remember being young and thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do that, but I want to do that.’ And I ended up doing that.”
Auston drew on the usual pantheon of role models. That No. 3 was inspired by Allen Iverson’s blue-collar ethos for Onnie and Auston, and Auston’s youthful goals were sky-is-the-limit high. But the nearest goal was to get better than the best player he knew. And that was Onnie.
“He told me, ‘my goal is to be better than you in soccer,’” she said. “And I was like, OK. And then he did it.”
Onnie is his biggest fan. Though the hip injury robbed her of a chance to pursue professional soccer, she relishes watching Auston live that dream. After each game, Auston can expect a text from Onnie, stoking his confidence or keeping him grounded.
“When I have a good game, she’ll be the one to tell me I played well,” Auston said. “Friends and family can tell you (that) you played well, but they don’t really know the game. But she can tell me and send a text and say, ‘you played really well.’ She has the kind of soccer sense.”
“I’m so proud of him,” Onnie said. “I don’t really know what else more to say. I love seeing him fulfill his dream and do what he’s good at and have so much success at it. Especially this year, getting to actually play and play every minute of every game, I know that’s his dream.”
••• There’s a question filtering through all the accolades that is begging to be asked. It yields an answer that’s enlightening, though not in the way intended.
In their primes, who was the best athlete among the Trusty family?
Walt and LeeAnn, brandishing their savvy in keeping the peace between competitive offspring, wisely defer. They point out that even in their 30s, Melissa and Josh are avid competitors in marathons, triathlons and Ironman competitions. Elijah is a strength and conditioning coach. Ethan has perhaps the broadest skill set.
LeeAnn finally relents, with a grimace and a hefty caveat, that Auston and Onnie, “were more natural athletes,” a quintessential not-better-but-just-different response.
Onnie goes the honest route before bending to the present.
“I want to say myself,” she said, “but I think Auston can take the cake on this one.”
Ethan’s replay is more diplomatic.
“I mean, Onnie was really, really, really good in soccer and basketball,” he said. “Elijah was really good at track and good at basketball as well. But honestly when it comes to just us all playing as a family, we all are good in our own ways. So it’s hard to say. … It depends what we’re playing.”
Auston provides the most salient reply, the one that informs the underlying mindset on which the bloodline’s athletic prowess is founded. He doesn’t say himself. But in the never-give-an-inch Trusty way, he doesn’t say not himself.
“I feel like everyone has their answer,” Auston said. “Everyone in their prime would be like, ‘no way, it’s me.’ Onnie in her prime would be, ‘no way, that’s me.’ Elijah would never give it up, Ethan would probably not give it up.”