Field Hockey, Lacrosse
Favorite athlete: Apolo Ohno and Brett Favre
Favorite team: Philadelphia Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Beating CB South in OT this year in field hockey. It was off a corner play, and I got a pass from Kim Hitchcock and fired a shot, and freshman Bryn Boylan, who was our inserter, tipped it in, and we all threw our sticks in the air and cried. Also, for club lacrosse, I was in a tournament in Naples, Florida, and we beat the second best team in the nation, Capital Lacrosse, from Baltimore, and I had six goals against the best goalie in my recruiting class. It was also the last game of the tournament season and it was awesome to go out like that with my best friends.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports. This past year in lacrosse we were in a really intense game against Hatboro, and Bryn Boylan scored to tie the game, and I tackled her, and she peed a little bit. It was really funny. Also, last year in field hockey, Heather Zezzo scored the winning goal, and we went to hug her, and I swung my stick around and hit Ginny Moore in the head. She had a huge bruise for like two weeks right on her forehead. And this past year in field hockey, we were playing North Penn and we were winning 2-0 and Kim Hitchcock had a really nice shot from the top of the circle, and it was going in anyway, but Erick Fiorelli tapped it in so he got the hat trick, and he felt so bad that the next day he brought Kim a present and said he was sorry. Lastly, anything Cadera Smith has ever done!
Music on iPod: 30 Seconds to Mars, Coldplay, and Wild Cub
Future plans: I’m undecided on a major, but I plan to travel a lot after college and maybe get a business job. I also want to coach!
Words to live by: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” –Winston Churchill
One goal before turning 30: To go to New Zealand and Australia and to be married.
One thing people don’t know about me: I’m a huge movie buff and history nerd! I love to read and write stories as well.
By Mary Jane Souder
Roll back the calendar to April 1996.
Joni Romesburg, then the coach of the Central Bucks West lacrosse team, gave birth to a little girl named Elena Maria on April 8, 7:13 a.m., after 32 hours of intense labor. Three days later, on April 11, she was back on the sidelines coaching her lacrosse team in a big game against visiting Souderton.
The opening line of the newspaper article about that game read: “Elena Maria Romesburg is destined to be a gamer – or at least she will be if she bears any resemblance at all to her mother.”
Eighteen years later, Elena Maria Romesburg – now a high school senior - is about to graduate from Central Bucks West. She is defined by her fiercely competitive nature, and as predicted, Romesburg is a gamer.
“A lot of people are competitive, but when you talk about a gamer, someone who wants to beat someone out in everything they do – that’s where we could totally relate,” West field hockey coach Courtney Hughes said. “The kids respected the way she plays the game.
“She’s not always going to be the most skilled player on the team, but she’s awesome in how she brings everybody together by showing what it means to go all out for your team. She was always giving her best, no matter what her best was that day, and she was always giving her all for the team.
“You don’t find that. That’s not something you can teach a kid. That’s something they have inside them. You can be successful when you have a kid like that on a team.”
“Her competitiveness goes everywhere with her,” West lacrosse coach Tara Schmucker said. “With her intensity and her work ethic, which is sometimes overlooked because she makes it look so easy, she’s made herself into a gamer, but she wasn’t born one. She worked hard to get to that level.
“It’s the same in the classroom. She’s in the top four percent of her class. She’s an amazing student, and she’s just an amazing athlete.
Romesburg’s fiercely competitive nature extends to every area of her life.
“I compete in just about anything,” she said. “I race my brothers to see how fast they can read a book, stuff like that. I’m just really intense.”
On the athletic field, that intensity is one of Romesburg’s best attributes. She led her lacrosse team with 96 draw controls, 128 ground balls and 34 caused turnovers. Those stats are the result of sheer hustle and desire, and Romesburg has plenty of both.
For good measure, she also was the team’s leading goal scorer with 67 and added 15 assists.
“As I said at the banquet, I think her offense is great, but I think her ability to get the ball is her best asset,” Schmucker said. “I think a lot of people faceguard her because she certainly can score and she knows how to go to goal, but she has the ball for such a large portion of the game, and it’s so difficult to guard her because she can get the ball anywhere, and she has such a quick change of pace in her stride, and with her speed, it’s difficult to beat her to the ball. I think that’s definitely what makes her the best player.”
Romesburg was rewarded for her excellence with a first team 2014 Philly Region U.S. Lacrosse Association All-American selection. For three straight years, she was a first team all-league selection – the lone SOL senior able to make that claim. She earned third team honors as a freshman.
“Even her freshman year coming in, I knew she was going to be a game changer,” Schmucker said. “Just her tenacity and passion on the field is very evident in how she plays.
“She has all the intangibles, she has the things that you can’t teach.”
Romesburg was destined to become an athlete. Her mother played field hockey and lacrosse at West, and after playing club lacrosse at La Salle University, she returned to coach at her alma mater before giving it up to raise her family.
Her father, Steve Romesburg, was a three-sport athlete at West, competing in football, wrestling and baseball. He is the varsity wrestling coach at West. Younger brothers Vincent and Michael are also invested in sports.
“There was really never any pressure to play sports,” Elena said. “My mom and dad are very competitive, but they didn’t pressure me to do anything. If I wasn’t into sports, I don’t think they would have had a problem with it. They would have said – ‘Do your own thing.’”
Coached by her mother as a youngster in DAA field hockey and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Bull Dogs lacrosse, Romesburg, who also played soccer and basketball, was a four-year varsity starter in both hockey and lacrosse. She gave up basketball when she began suffering severe shin splints going from one surface to another. She admits she wasn’t as competitive in basketball but loved it just the same. This past winter, she was the team manager and gave serious consideration to playing again.
“I was friends with everyone, and they tried to convince me to play this year,” she said. “I said, ‘I can’t get hurt,’ but I would have loved to. If I could go back, I think I would probably play basketball.”
Early in her high school career, Romesburg was forced to choose between lacrosse and hockey as her sport of focus. It’s a decision that might well have been made when she began playing club lacrosse the summer before her freshman year with Ultimate Lacrosse. She tried to juggle club field hockey into the mix, but lacrosse won out.
“When I went into West and played field hockey, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love field hockey,’” Romesburg said. “Then I’d go to West lacrosse, and I’d be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love lacrosse.’
“My mom told me – ‘You have to choose. I can’t spend all this money playing both when you’re only going to be playing one in college.’ I decided I think I have a better opportunity to go where I want to with lacrosse. That was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make, I’m not going to lie.”
Ask Romesburg her favorite high school memory, and she recalls her junior field hockey season that saw the Bucks advance to the quarterfinals of the state tournament.
“You saw a group of kids that year that no one really expected anything from learning they could be this fantastic team,” said Hughes, then an assistant under her sister Casey. “Casey just brought out so much confidence in that group, and they had so much fun playing together every day. It was just all of them coming together.”
“That was probably one of the most fun seasons I’ve ever had,” Romesburg said. “We shocked the world a little bit. It was a great team, a close-knit team. We had some very good upperclassmen with Heather Zezzo and Ginny Moore, who I’m still very close with. The whole atmosphere was just great.
“I had a different coach in field hockey every single year I was here. Nobody predicted us to be a contender, and when we did that, it was just kind of awesome.”
Romesburg has fond memories of this past hockey season that saw several standout freshmen step onto the field and excel. This spring she helped lead the Bucks to the second round of the district tournament, and she turned her talent on the lacrosse field into a scholarship to James Madison University.
She is undecided on a major.
“It changes probably every day,” Romesburg said. “I was going to try to double major in economics and history, but I have not idea what I want to do.
“I have an interest in advertising, communications, marketing and business. I also like astronomy, history and finance. It’s literally all over the place, so I have to decide.”
A fixture on the distinguished honor roll, Romesburg is a member of the National Honor Society and is in the top 20 of her graduating class. She has taken eight AP classes and admits she is not a science or math person.
“I took AP Calculus during lacrosse, and it was kind of a struggle, but I managed to get through that,” she said. “I took all the AP History classes, and those felt easier.
“During field hockey, I had three AP classes at once, and that was a lot of work all at once.”
Working hard is something that comes naturally to Romesburg.
“Opposing coaches didn’t like playing against her because she was always going all out,” Hughes said. “There was no in between for Elena.”
