Whether he’s acting as a student or an athlete, Stevenson senior Sammy Oh always has a strategy.
For several hours each week, Oh runs track for the Patriots. He’s a distance runner who also competes on the 4×800- and 4×400-meter relay teams. At the Patriots Relays on April 16, Oh ran in the 1,600 finals. He was competing against Barrington’s Kurtis Monohan.
Oh had a plan.
“I look at the other competitors [and said], ‘OK, [Monohan] tends to take it out faster. I’ll give the first lap and I want to wait until the second 400.’ It gets your mind off the pain of the moment,” Oh said. “You always have to be thinking about strategy.”
Patriots track coach John E. Schauble added: “It really helps to have an enlightened, savvy, resourceful, flexible runner who can change and not run the same race every time. [Oh] does a lot of the right stuff.”
Oh beat Monohan by more than four seconds, his winning time of 4 minutes, 22.70 seconds a personal record. Oh’s tactically enlightened actions before races did not develop overnight. He applies the same process to every aspect of his active life.
A 4.0 student who scored a 35 on his ACT, Oh made the IHSA’s All-State Academic Team this year. He is also Student Council President and participates in the Science Club, Student Senate and Spanish Honor Society. He embraces each social ecosystem while acknowledging an essential component to performing at a high level — distinguishing between what’s relevant and what’s trivial.
“I don’t spend a lot of time studying outside of class. I don’t have time for it,” Oh said. “If I know what’s going to be on the test, I look at those specific things 15 minutes before. I’ll say, ‘I need to know this, this and this. Do I know that?’ If I do, I know I’ll get 100 percent.”
In the summer of 2014, Oh worked as an intern in a cancer lab at North Shore University HealthSystem in Evanston. His first day, he took a look around a room filled with doctors and college graduate students.
“I took AP Biology,” Oh said with a laugh. “I didn’t really belong. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
But Oh developed and executed a strategy.
He read journal articles every night. If he didn’t understand a concept, he wrote it down. Over time, the vocabulary made sense. His work in the lab researching the effects of cancer on mice took on greater meaning.
“Cancer is so difficult to understand. We are so far from understanding it completely but if you don’t think we ever will figure it out, we never will,” said Oh, who plans to attend Harvard in the fall. “I felt like I added something.”
In 2014, Oh competed at the state meet in the 800, 1,600 and 4×800 relay. Schauble said this spring, he believes Oh will qualify in the 1,600 and 3,200.
Whatever the event, one thing is for certain — Oh will think about his strategy, and execute his plan.
“Athletics and academics are very similar. They go hand in hand. Athletics you see it more a physical thing. For me it’s mostly mental,” Oh said. “I’m really good at knowing what I have to know.”
Kerr is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Twitter: @prepspioneer
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