Cross Country, Track and Field
Favorite athlete: I don’t really have a favorite athlete, but I really enjoy watching Eddie Johnson play for the US soccer team.
Favorite team: Boston Red Sox
Favorite memory competing in sports: When I used to play soccer for my club team, I scored a last-minute game-winning goal to win the tournament championship.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: I somehow managed to get a concussion during a winter track practice.
Music on iPod: Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, Queen, Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Passion Pit, just to name a few.
Future plans: I plan to major in engineering and then go to med school to become an orthopedic surgeon.
Words to live by: “Once you commit to something, never do it half-heartedly.”
One goal before turning 30: Finish medical school and be working in a hospital. Also, I’d like to run a marathon.
One thing people don’t know about me: I really like to cook and often make dinner on weeknights. I love baking as well, becoming the designated birthday cake maker for the family.
By Mary Jane Souder
Ben Aunins is an advertisement for the value of perseverance.
For two years, the Central Bucks West senior lived with constant pain in his left knee, a condition that was eventually diagnosed as Osgood-Schlatter disease as Aunins grew close to seven inches in less than two years.
Instead of throwing in the towel as many would have done, Aunins continued to train as much as his knee would allow, and this year he is making important contributions to West’s cross country squad.
“It was rough going for him his sophomore year until the beginning of his senior year,” said coach Greg Wetzel. “This is the first time he’s been able to run uninhibited and train the way he’d like to.
“It’s been really cool from a personal standpoint to see a kid that’s invested so much and didn’t give in. A lot of kids might have said, ‘Oh, maybe this isn’t meant to be. This hurts so much.’”
Quitting was never a consideration for Aunins, who had to make allowances for his knee.
“I couldn’t really run with the team much,” he said. “I was on the elliptical or biking most of the time, so I had to train through that.
“For a while, I didn’t know it was Osgood Schlatter. I thought it was tendinitis, so I tried doing physical therapy and icing and heating it on my own, but nothing really worked.
“In the beginning, I kind of pushed myself further because I didn’t realize how big a problem it would be, and when I first had it, I was still going full tilt, but it became too much to bear, so I had to cut down because it really impacted me a lot during workouts and races.”
Aunins inexplicably received a reprieve from the pain during winter track of his sophomore year, but the following spring the pain returned.
“It was really frustrating,” he said. “The biggest thing that was annoying was not being able to do the workouts because that’s how you get better, and if you drop out because you’re hurting, you don’t get that sense of fulfillment that you get with the workouts.”
Finally, by the end of his junior spring track season, Aunins was relatively pain free.
“It’s been great,” he said. “It’s great to finally be able to do workouts and run with the team like normal. You get to push yourself and see improvement, and it’s been a much better experience.”
No one is happier to see him back than his coach.
“It’s really neat to see a high level student who has also pushed himself and persevered in something that maybe was going to work and maybe wasn’t, but he just kind of believed the whole time,” Wetzel said. “Now he’s cashing in on hanging in there.”
Running has always come naturally to Aunins, whose first exposure to competitive sports was on the soccer field. By fourth grade, he was competing on the travel circuit.
“I was really good at running,” Aunins said.
So when he received an invitation to go out for cross country from the CYO program of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, he jumped at the opportunity. He’s been running ever since.
“I liked it because it’s both physically and mentally challenging,” he said.
In the spring of eighth grade, Aunins broke his foot playing soccer, an injury that sidelined him during his entire spring track season.
“I was coming into my freshman year cross country just getting my cast off, so I was barely even walking, let alone running,” he said. “That was a big obstacle.”
Wetzel remembers Aunins as someone who was short in stature – he measured in just over five feet - but possessing plenty of heart and perseverance.
That perseverance has paid off.
After running near the front of the jayvee team last year, Aunins has settled in as the seventh runner for a highly competitive West squad this season. One day at practice, the team was asked to do pull-ups. Aunins did 18 – 10 more than anyone else.
“It was because he had been working hard the whole time on his own with nobody watching,” Wetzel said. “He’s put in a lot of miles running this summer and has a lot to be proud of from an athletic perspective but even more so from an academic perspective. He’s among our very best students at CB West in our whole school.”
Aunins describes himself as a ‘math-sciences kind of guy,’ and his schedule is loaded with AP classes.
“That hasn’t been out of trying to get a good GPA as much as I’m just interested in it,” Aunins said. “I’ve taken all except one of the AP sciences in my school just because I’m that interested in them.
“My competitiveness in running kind of carries over into school because I always try to do my best.”
His resume is an impressive one. Aunins boasts a GPA of 4.3034 and is in the top 10 percent of his class. He has earned numerous awards and honors, including first place in the Health/Medicine Category at Delaware Valley Science Fair as well as first place at the PJAS Local Science Fair and earning second place at the state level. He received the Outstanding Accomplishment in Science Olympiad award last year and was high scorer for his team in the Science Olympiad as both a junior and senior.
With aspirationa to one day pursue a career in medicine, Aunins is the co-president of the Future Doctors’ Club of America.
“Medicine emerged my sophomore and junior years,” he said. “I really like helping people.”
Aunins got a taste for helping others volunteering with AMICA Lose the Training Wheels Bike Camp where he taught children with autism how to ride bikes.
“That was just so fulfilling and great to see them ride,” he said. “I really like being able to help people with their problems and being able to fix it. It’s just a great thing to do.”
This summer, he was a student researcher at the Temple University Bioengineering Lab, and he is a member of West’s Science Research Club as well as Key Club and the Spanish Honor Society.
Aunins plans to major in engineering and is leaning toward biomedical or mechanical engineering. He has a lengthy and prestigious list of potential colleges that includes Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia, Emery, Vanderbilt and Washington University (St. Louis).
“Academics really comes first for me,” he said. “That’s how I’m going to pick my school.”
Whether he competes in cross country at the collegiate level depends on where he winds up, but running at some level will undoubtedly be part of his future.
“It’s a total privilege,” Wetzel said of coaching Aunins. “People say, ‘You put in a lot of time coaching,’ and I will say, ‘It’s the best kids in the school.’
“Literally, the cross country and track teams – not just at CB West – pretty much always are the best kids in the school, and it’s a privilege to coach kids like that.
“Ben is very likable. Some kids who are that talented in the classroom and are that tough might be abrasive, but he is very well liked by the kids on the team. We have a very young team, so a lot of the kids don’t even know half of his story.”
A story of perseverance that had a happy ending.
