The tournament was held at the Wells Avenue YMCA in Newton.

Preston Settles was just 15 years old when he passed away.

Two Teams who competed in the 3v3 final for a $ 1,000 prize and title.

On August 8, the gym at the Wells Ave YMCA in Newton, Massachusetts, filled up the way it always does for the Preston Settles Basketball Tournament. With sneakers squeaking, whistles blowing, and dozens of high school and college players from around the state fighting for position in a 3v3 basketball tournament, this year, something in the air was different.

This was the fourth and final year of the tournament, built to honor the legacy of a fifteen-year-old boy who never got the chance to grow up.

Preston Blair Settles died in February 2022, 22 days after collapsing on a basketball court in North Andover, Massachusetts. The cause was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, a genetic heart condition that thickens the walls of the heart muscle and often hides in plain sight until it’s too late. It’s more common than most people realize, affecting roughly 1 in 500 adults in the United States.

What his family did next is the reason this story is still being told four years later.

Preston’s older sister, Taylor Settles, along with family friends Maya Terzi and Jose Padilla, didn’t set out to build a three-year tradition. They set out to do something that felt true to Preston.

“Growing up, Preston was always bouncing around from activity to activity. Shoes untied, articles of clothing flying always,” Taylor said.

He tried everything as a kid, soccer, hockey, baseball, lacrosse, before basketball won out by middle school.

“He wasn’t very good, to be completely honest, but he was passionate about it and loved the atmosphere that basketball provided, and for him that was what mattered,” Taylor said. “A 3v3 tournament in honor of someone else is an event I could see Preston participating in without even thinking about it.”

The first tournament was hosted just six months after Preston’s death, close enough to the loss that Taylor describes the whole community as still raw, still reeling, and still desperate for a place to put that grief.

“The first year of the tournament was magical, to say the least,” she said. “I want to say we had 30-45 people in the stands just there to watch. Everyone wanted to be there to support Preston. The energy in the air was indescribable.”

That first year, the game itself was almost beside the point.

“Basketball was the last thing on everyone’s minds. We were all there for Preston,” Taylor said. But grief, she’s learned, doesn’t work the way people expect it to.

“One thing grief taught me is that a loss isn’t something you just get over and disappears. It is something that will always be a part of you and that you grow around.”

The tournament grew in a similar way, with Preston at the center of something that slowly became a place to build something competitive, something real, something that could outlast the initial wave of shared sorrow.

This final year, organizers offered a $1,000 cash prize specifically to raise the stakes, pulling in higher-level players and sharpening the competition into something worthy of Preston’s name.

The Wells Ave location wasn’t an afterthought. Before Preston left for boarding school at Brooks in the fall of 2021, the YMCA was essentially his second home.

“Up until Preston left for boarding school at Brooks that fall of 2021, you could always find Preston at the YMCA on Church St.,” Taylor said. “He would spend countless hours in there, whether it was on the court or just hanging out.”

She remembers picking him up there throughout middle school, and that if Preston wanted to get to the Y and didn’t have a ride, he found a way anyway. “For Preston, if there was a will, there was a way.”

Holding the tournament at a YMCA in Newton, in the community where Preston grew up, carried its own kind of meaning for Taylor. Newton, and Massachusetts more broadly, has a sprawling, overlapping sports community, and spaces like the YMCA bring all of it together under one roof.

“Preston loved to use his connections from different parts of his life to bring his friends together,” Taylor said. “He truly was a special soul who was able to connect with many different types of individuals, and he wanted them all to feel what he felt.” Watching that same kind of cross-community gathering happen at the Y this year, she said, “feels like something he would have wanted and loved.”

Three years in, the tournament outgrew its original circle. Players have traveled from one to three hours away, some of whom never knew Preston at all.

“It makes me feel so proud to be Preston’s sister to see the sheer volume of people who have come out these past few years to support him and remember him,” Taylor said. “It means the world that there are people in my life who didn’t even meet or know Preston who came out to play this year.

That was really special to me.”

Ending the tournament after this year wasn’t a decision made lightly, and was not for lack of caring or interest.

“Life goes on. That is one phrase that I really hated hearing when I first began to process that Preston was really gone,” Taylor said.

Over time, she’s come around to a version of that truth on her own terms. People who really knew Preston will always think of him, on February 27th, or on some ordinary day when something small reminds them of him. Meanwhile, life keeps moving: people take jobs, move away, get injured, grow into different versions of themselves.

This final tournament was timed to mark what would have been Preston’s 20th birthday, a deliberate, meaningful close rather than a fade-out.

Whether it’s truly the last one remains an open question. “Will it actually be the final year? As of now, yes, but in the future we will continue to keep Preston’s legacy alive and do what we can to give back,” Taylor said.

If there’s a thesis to all of this, four tournaments, a memorial fund nearing $2 million, a heart-research initiative bearing his initials, it’s contained in three words printed on the tournament’s own merchandise: No Bad Days.

“I would want someone to understand how charismatic, hopeful, and happy Preston was. He truly did not know how to have a bad day,” Taylor said.

He had a gift, she said, for making ordinary moments memorable, for finding something good even in frustrating or boring days, for making the people around him feel included and fully seen. “He embraced each day, each friendship, and each opportunity as it came, fully present in the moment.”

That’s the lesson Taylor says she carries forward now, to appreciate where she is, invest in the people around her, and keep moving one step at a time. It’s also the mission that has quietly driven the tournament from day one, raising awareness about the need for AEDs and the dangers of sudden cardiac death, while celebrating Preston’s life in the fullest, most joyful way his family and friends could imagine.

Three years, hundreds of players, thousands of dollars raised, and one final tournament on a Saturday in August. All in service of a boy who lived only fifteen years but somehow, by every account, never had a bad day in any of them.