School: Neshaminy
Golf, Wrestling
Favorite athlete: Shane Victorino
Favorite team: Phillies
Best memory competing in sports: Winning a State Championship in football for the Penndel Wildcats
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: When my golf teammate fell off the bus when we got to our golf match!
Music on iPod: Everything
Future plans: Going to college to become a Military Officer
Words to live by: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
One goal before turning 30: Get a motorcycle
One thing people don’t know about me: I can ride a unicycle.
Colby Lederer isn’t big on being in the spotlight.
So it’s hardly surprising that the Neshaminy senior didn’t want his golf coach, Ken Gurysh, to go to the newspapers after his quick action brought a hasty resolution to a potentially deadly situation this summer.
It all began when Lederer was leaving his doctor’s office and saw a mother in distress. Her infant child, he discovered, had accidentally been locked in the car in the oppressive heat.
“I was getting my physical for golf, and when I walked out, I saw this mom crying, and the doctor was trying to break the window with a screwdriver,” Lederer said. “So I ran to my car and pulled out my sand wedge and gave it to the lady.
“The doctor smashed the window and saved the baby.”
The impact didn’t just break the car window. Lederer’s sand wedge also broke in half.
“That was fine,” Lederer said. “I didn’t care about the golf club.”
The story had a happy ending. The baby was fine, and a broken sand wedge was a small price to pay.
“I didn’t really know what to do, but my instinct was to grab a club,” Lederer said. “They were pretty happy, and it was cool to impact someone’s life like that.”
That’s about as much as the Neshaminy senior will allow himself when prodded to talk about his heroic gesture, and according to Gurysh, that spontaneous act of kindness is vintage Lederer.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that as soon as he saw someone in trouble that he was going to do what he could to help,” the Redskins’ coach said. “He’s definitely that kind of kid.
“He would jump in to help anybody in a second that needed help, no doubt about that. There’s no way he would ever walk by. I don’t think he realizes how cool it is that he did what he did. He just did it because it was the right thing to do.
“He’s not a glory hound, and he doesn’t like the spotlight, which is kind of an interesting thing in this day and age because there are not too many kids of his ability and talent that don’t want to be in the spotlight. He’s happy just doing his thing and succeeding and letting everything else take care of itself.”
Lederer has experienced plenty of success. He excels in two sports - he was ranked sixth among SOL golfers at the end of the regular season, and in wrestling, he is a two-time regional qualifier.
In the classroom, Lederer is enrolled in honors classes.
“He’s extremely well rounded, and he has a great personality,” Gurysh said. “He is very driven and has high expectations of himself.”
It is that drive that undoubtedly allowed Lederer to excel at a sport that takes a lifetime to master.
“I started playing golf two months before tryouts the summer of ninth grade,” he said. “I snuck on as the last kid on jayvee.”
He didn’t stay on the jayvee for long.
“He played jayvee the first two or three matches,” Gurysh recalled. “He was tiny, and he wasn’t hitting the ball far, but he was scoring the same as all the juniors I had that were playing in my seventh or eighth varsity spot.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘These guys are juniors, this guy is a freshman. I have him for four years. I’m putting him in. If those guys aren’t going to be scoring well enough to post scores for me anyway, I’m going to give my freshman experience.’”
Lederer, according to Gurysh, didn’t post more than one score that first year, but he gained valuable experience.
“It was the best thing I ever did,” the Redskins’ coach said. “It helped his confidence tremendously, and it helped me in the long run because he gained a lot of valuable experience playing varsity.”
Lederer admits that he surprised even himself with his rapid ascent.
“I just picked it up,” he said. “My dad would golf once in a while, and he got me interested, and then I just loved it.
“I liked the fact that it’s an individual sport, and the summer after ninth grade I got a membership to Yardley and starting playing every day.”
Lederer went on to become one of the league’s elite golfers, and he has earned a spot in the district tournament.
“His strength in the beginning was definitely his short game,” Gurysh said. “We laugh about how far he used to hit the ball with how far he hits it now – he hits the ball long off the tee.
“The best part of his game is his mental game. He has great focus and is able to play in the now and not dwell on a bad shot he hit on the last hole.”
Gurysh goes on to recount a match several weeks ago when Lederer bogeyed the first two holes, parred the third and eagled the fourth hole.
“He doesn’t let one bad thing hurt him,” the Redskins’ coach said. “He’s able to be pretty resilient.
“Nothing can make you more mentally tough than wrestling. Those wrestlers are a different breed, and I think that carried over into his mental focus on the golf course.”
Lederer agrees.
“Wrestling made me mentally strong,” he said. “You learn how to forget about stuff and move on. I feel like wrestling helped out a lot in golf for the mental aspect.”
Lederer grew up in a wrestling family – his brother Dex is wrestling at the University of Maryland on a full wrestling scholarship, and Colby has been wrestling since he was four years old. He also played baseball and football but gave both of those sports up in 10th grade.
“I enjoyed wrestling,” he said. “Looking up to my brother, and watching him and his friends wrestle got me into it.”
That being said, he admits he almost gave it up when he was a sophomore.
“I was – not bored, but I lost interest, and then I kind of missed it a little,” Lederer said. “The practices started, and a week into practices, I joined the team.
“Wrestling is all mental - it’s just wanting to win.”
A two-year captain, he wrestled at 119 last year but will probably move up to 135 this year.
A two-year captain of the golf team as well, he admits he has modeled himself after 2010 grad Drew Keeling.
“It was pretty weird looking up to Drew and watching him play and slowly transforming into a player like him,” Lederer said.
Like Keeling, Lederer is a natural leader.
“He’s more of a leader by example, not as much of a vocal leader, but he can be a vocal leader when he needs to,” Gurysh said of his senior captain. “He doesn’t need to though because he lets his actions speak for themselves.
“I’m not going to know what to do with myself next year. I lost another great one last year with Andrew Keeling. He was the same type of kid. The only thing Andrew didn’t have was he wasn’t quite as gifted an athlete as Colby. Colby with wrestling is kind of a stud. It’s very rare you would have a wrestler and golf combination.”
Lederer is uncertain about his future plans. He is leaning toward a business major and has not ruled out the possibility of wrestling or playing golf at the collegiate level.
“I’m still deciding,” he said.
In the meantime, Lederer has some unfinished business to take care of on the golf course and the wrestling mat at Neshaminy.
