It was all but inevitable when Kelani Lawrence won the title this past May.

× Expand Dan Smith Salem YMCA Membership Director Kelani Lawrence became a national racquetball champion on the same weekend her mother, Malia Bailey, was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

For Kelani Lawrence, it was a matter of heritage. Her mother, Malia Kamahoahoa Bailey, had done it—several times—and was about to be honored even further. It would be a tough hill to climb as the fifth seed in the USA Racquetball Championships at Highlands Ranch, Colorado, in late May. She would have to play No. 4, No. 3 and No. 1, a multiple defending champion, in order to join her mom in the rarified air of National Champion.

And she did just that, scrapping and battling veteran players, going into a tie-breaker with the top seed and taking a title she thought she should have won the previous year.

Dan Smith

“I couldn’t go last year because I was getting married,” she says, a smile creasing her face.

She married Sam Lawrence, who is pursuing his degree in physical therapy at Radford University.

It’s been quite a year for the young woman, whose mother is Hawaiian and whose dad was a football, track and wrestling athlete at VMI. He suggested Malia take up racquetball when she was 20. It was a duck to water and a family tradition was born.

Technically, the singles title was not Kelani’s first national championship. In 2018, she shared the doubles title. She is a member of the current U.S. National Team for the Pan American Games.

Kelani’s resume doesn’t stop with racquetball, though it is obviously highlighted by her success there. She was a varsity field hockey player at Shenandoah University, where she graduated Suma Cum Laude in business administration with a 3.99 GPA. She has an MBA from Regent University in her hometown of Norfolk. She has played basketball and softball and is an assistant field hockey coach at Roanoke College. She serves as membership director at the Salem YMCA.

Kelani is a fiercely busy young woman of 25 who works out about an hour and a half a day and practices racquetball—often with male players, who “are stronger and quicker than women,” she says—several times a week. The men help her by providing intense competition, she says.

Though she is a professional in racquetball, she hardly makes a living at it. She has a couple of sponsorships (Head being prominent among them), and the money from those “pays some of my entrance fees for tournaments,” she says, but it is hardly lucrative.

It’s about love for the sport. And family tradition.

About the Writer:

Dan Smith is an award-winning Roanoke-based writer/author/photographer and a member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame (Class of 2010). His blog, fromtheeditr.com, is widely read and he has authored seven books, including the novel CLOG! He is founding editor of a Roanoke-based business magazine and a former Virginia Small Business Journalist of the Year (2005).