The wife of a professional baseball player from Childersburg – who was a former teammate of Derek Jeter with the New York Yankees – has funded the renovation of a home for victims of domestic abuse in Shelby County.

Ashley Wheeler, who said she grew up in a home where her father physically abused her mother, has set up the A2Z Hope Foundation to help those who may be suffering through similar circumstances.

The foundation supports the prevention and awareness of domestic violence and has funded the renovation of a home called Ashley’s House at the King’s Home in Chelsea. It will house up to eight girls.

“It’s a house I wanted to invest in for young women who have been in abusive homes like I was,” Wheeler said. “My Mom’s a domestic abuse violence survivor. We had to bounce around to shelters to stay away from my abusive father.”

The home she’s sponsoring is a far nicer environment than any of the shelters she stayed at in Tennessee when she was a girl, she said. “We were cramped in a small space and we had to wake up and get ready for school in front of the other kids staying there,” Wheeler said. “We didn’t have a space of our own, but it was a safe place to escape the situation.”

The home now called Ashley’s house has private rooms and a scenic balcony overlooking a lake on the grounds of the King’s Home campus in Chelsea.

Wheeler said she hopes to meet and spend time with some of the girls who live in the house. It will be part of her own healing process, she said.

“Even as a grown woman, I feel trauma,” Wheeler said. “I deal with anxiety. Helping these girls is helping me heal. That’s part of why I’m doing this.”

As a child, she watched her father repeatedly beat her mother, once hitting her so hard that he knocked her teeth out, in front of Ashley and her brothers.

“That went on for years,” Wheeler said. “He finally left and never came back.”

Her mother took the children and moved near her family in Childersburg when Ashley was about 13 or 14.  Enrolled at Childersburg High School, Ashley became an athlete, playing basketball and softball. She met and began dating her future husband when she was a freshman, and he was a sophomore.

“We were high school sweethearts,” she said. “He was a good athlete, like I was.”

Her husband, Zelous Wheeler, plays professional baseball in Japan for the Yomiuri Giants, after having his Major League debut in 2014 with the New York Yankees as a teammate of Derek Jeter in Jeter’s last season. Wheeler hit a home run in his first Major League game on July 3, 2014, after being called up from the minor leagues. He was on the field celebrating as Jeter got the game-winning hit in the bottom of the ninth inning in his last game at Yankee Stadium on Sept. 25, 2014.

Ashley was at Yankee Stadium that night too, watching from the stands. “It was amazing, like a dream,” she said. “The crowd was wild. The players all rushed out on the field, greeting Jeter. Zelous kept jumping up, saying, ‘Wow.’”

Jeter is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Wheeler moved to Japan the next year and has had a successful career there since 2015.

In 2017, he had his best season for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, batting .271 with 31 home runs and 82 RBI. After that season, he signed a two-year contract extension worth about $3.5 million.

Having a baseball career in Japan is not easy for her husband, Ashley Wheeler said.

“He did have to learn to speak Japanese,” she said. “He does pretty good.”

It’s also hard on family life, since the Nippon Professional Baseball season in Japan lasts from March through the end of October. He returns to Alabama in November for the off-season.

“He hates the sacrifices he has to make for his family, not being there for our son,” she said. “But he says he’s going to play until he has to crawl off the field. He loves it.”

Their son, Zethan, 7, attends Chelsea Park Elementary School.

Ashley said her husband is supportive of her foundation. “He was very happy about it and proud of me,” she said. “He knows my childhood trauma.”

She remains close with her mother, and has a relationship with her father, who she said is now sorry for his years of abuse. “He apologizes and tries to make up for it,” she said.