Leukemia sidelined quarterback Tommy Ryan as school rallies support

Tommy Ryan, the 19-year-old quarterback from Clarkstown South High School, reached his graduation milestone after more than 130 days hospitalized for leukemia. His path back to that moment ran through a football season he could not play and a community that kept finding ways to bring him into the school’s orbit.

Ryan was a senior at the West Nyack, New York, school when leukemia sidelined him, but he still took part in Clarkstown South’s season-opening game against Lakeland High School in Shrub Oak on Sept. 5, 2025. Unable to be on the field, he joined the coin toss remotely by phone, a small but visible sign that his role in the program had not disappeared even as treatment kept him away from the lineup.

The support extended beyond game day. On Thursday, April 17, Clarkstown South High School hosted a fundraiser called “Buzzes 4 Bumpy” to support leukemia research and help Ryan in his fight. The event turned the school into a center of practical aid for a student-athlete whose diagnosis had already pushed him into a hospital room for months at a time.

Ryan’s story is also one of coordination across the places that shaped his recovery and his schooling. The school community kept his name present through football and fundraising, while his hospitalization underscored how long-term cancer treatment can pull a teenager away from class, practice and ordinary senior-year routines. In Ryan’s case, the road to graduation depended not only on medical care, but on a network of school staff, teammates, and families willing to keep him connected to both education and community life.

That combination of treatment and support gave his graduation a weight that reached beyond one student. For Clarkstown South, Ryan’s experience became a test of how a school can stay with one of its own when illness interrupts everything, and how a milestone like graduation can still be reached after a season defined as much by hospital walls as by the football field.