Tonya Piergies had a lifelong love for running.
North Shore Country Day, and coach Patrick McHugh in particular, turned the senior into a track star — and track geek.
It started when she was little. Piergies used to eagerly await her school’s field day races. She would also randomly ask her father, Tony, to time her.
“I’ve always liked to run, and I can’t really describe why sometimes because it seems so second nature,” Tonya Piergies said. “It sounds like it would be really kind of cliché when thinking about how much I like it now, but that’s what I remember.”
Looking forward to field day is a long way from constantly monitoring track and field blogs and websites as Tonya Piergies does now.
She said that McHugh sparked her obsession, gradually introducing her to one site after another. They would discuss things they saw online for hours.
“Patrick and she, they’re both track geeks,” assistant coach Harold Gauthier said. “They love track. They’ll sit around and talk about, ‘Oh, did you see this race? Did you hear about this?’ She just has a love for the sport.”
Tonya Piergies even drafted her own fantasy track and field team, earning points based on how her athletes did in the world championships. Every person that medaled garnered points.
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“I would check it as much as I checked my fantasy March Madness bracket,” Tonya Piergies said. “It was the ultimate track geek moment.”
Tonya Piergies’ father, who also competed in track and field in high school, also bought a camcorder and taped all of her races.
“My dad has turned into a really big track geek too,” Tonya Piergies said. “Every time I finish a meet, I’ll go over to his house, and he’ll put it on the big screen.”
Tonya Piergies’ love for the sport helped make her the lone North Shore Country Day girls track and field athlete to qualify for state. At the Class 1A Lisle Sectional on Friday, May 15, she finished second in the long jump at 16 feet, 6 inches to earn an automatic state berth. She also took third in the 100-meter hurdles, and advanced to state because her time of 16.30 seconds was better than the qualifying standard (16.64).
The Class 1A preliminaries are scheduled for Thursday, May 21, at Eastern Illinois’ O’Brien Stadium in Charleston.
More remarkable is that Tonya Piergies entered high school averaging 12 feet in the long jump. Her 4-foot increase is between two to four times the average, Gauthier said. She also dropped from 31 seconds to 27 seconds in the 200.
“That’s the type of improvement you don’t typically see from a high school athlete over the course of four years,” McHugh said. “It all comes down to the fact that she embraces the idea of daily work habits that lead to constantly striving to improve.”
“She’s been a bit of an inspiration for a lot of the other athletes,” Gauthier said. “We tell the story over and over and over again, ‘Tonya’s freshman year, she didn’t run this time or she only did this distance, but look at her now.’ That’s just been an easy poster child for us coaches and for the school to say if you put the time and effort in, great things will come out of it.”
Not even a nasty fall when she was first learning the hurdles freshman year could stop her.
“She still has a little bit of a scar on her shoulder from that fall,” McHugh said. “She brushed it off about as quick as I’ve ever seen a kid brush a bad fall like that off.”
Gauthier said it was “night and day” from her freshman year to her sophomore year. Other coaches asked Gauthier what happened to Tonya Piergies. He simply responded, “She loves track.”
“It wasn’t us really,” Gauthier said. “She listened to her coaching staff, but she put all the work in.”
For Tonya Piergies, it was the more track, the merrier. One or two events wouldn’t suffice. She turned into a multi-event athlete after her freshman season, with the hope of becoming a heptathlete.
At the Olympics, heptathlon and decathlon winners are often referred to as the world’s greatest athletes. The challenge is as mental as it is physical, as a heptathlete has to quickly put each event behind her in order to focus on the next.
“It takes a special kind of focus to be able to reset yourself every hour or so as the events go on,” Gauthier said. “She’s just got really great focus.”
Her love of track led her to choose Carleton College (Minnesota), where she plans to pursue her dream of becoming a heptathlete alongside two-time Division III Women’s National Field Athlete of the Year Amelia Campbell.
“I don’t like things that come really easy,” Tonya Piergies said. “I like to be really challenged.”
Rosenblum is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.