Cross Country, Track & Field
Favorite athlete: Chase Utley
Favorite team: Philadelphia Phillies
Favorite memory competing in sports: Our varsity cross-country team going undefeated in the league in my 10thgrade year.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Tripping and falling while running with a pack of teammates in front of the entire winter track team as a freshman
Music on iPod: Classic Rock
Future plans: Major in electrical engineering in college, most likely Penn State, with a minor in music.
Words to live by: “Bad days happen. All you can do is forget about it and try again the next time.” That is something I have always repeated to myself, and it has definitely helped me to keep focus.”
One goal before turning 30: Successfully run a marathon
One thing people don’t know about me: I’m more reserved that I appear to be
By GORDON GLANTZ
An athlete and a musician.
An early riser and a late bloomer.
Upper Merion’s Thomas Ginnona – the Univest Featured Male Athlete of the Week – seems to defy all stereotypical labels.
A drummer since grade school - drawing inspiration from classic rocker Carl Palmer (Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Asia) while playing in his own cover band, The Salamanders, outside of school and the advanced and jazz bands inside of it – it would be safe to say that Ginnona willingly marches to his own beat.
“He’s a different kind of a kid,” said Upper Merion cross country coach Lynda Newhart, who calls Ginnona “an example in perseverance” who can be an example for other athletes.
“He could’ve quit a long time ago, but he stayed focused. In the past year, I think he just made the decision to put his heart and soul into it. You want to see every kid doing that.
“For me, seeing him succeed shows that every kid can work hard and do well. He’s the not the kid who is a superstar. He’s the kid who has worked for four years to get where he is now.”
And where Ginnona is now is not, as Newhart indicated, at the front of the pack. But he is close enough that he could be considered a key “team player” – one nicknamed “Coach” by a captain for his team-first mentality – in what most outsiders see as a team sport.
“One of the captains said it, and it just started becoming a thing,” said Ginnona. “I guess it was a half a joke. I just like to make sure everyone stretches out and everything, but it was kind of a joke at first. If it was intended as a joke, it is less of one now.”
It is far from a joke from the view of Newhart, in the sixth year of her second stint as a coach.
“He’s always been quiet, kind of shy,” said the Vikings’ coach. “When they nicknamed him ‘Coach,’ it helped him open up. It was all positive. When they gave seniors gifts, they gave him a whistle. He very much wants to see the team succeed.”
Ginnona, who lists the team’s dream season when he was a sophomore not running with the varsity as his best memory, was always more concerned with how the Vikings did as a team.
But this year, being more confident in his ability to contribute, the individual pressure is off.
“This year, I’m a lot less centralized on how I do,” he explained. “I’m more thinking about how the team does as a whole.”
A Diamond in the Rough
Ginnona will be the first to admit that his first love, when it came to sports, was not running.
A Phillies fan through thick and thin, he was a baseball guy. He played through middle school and as a freshman at Upper Merion before the axe fell.
Fortunately, the AP student with a 3.7 grade-point average already had another sport to fall back on.
He remembers the day when he was approached by Dave Burns, the cross country coach at Upper Merion Middle School, about running.
“In seventh grade, the cross-country coach asked everyone if they were playing a spring sport,” recalled Ginnona. “I told him baseball, and he said to do cross country to prepare. I decided to do it. I enjoyed, so I just kept doing it.
“I really have to thank (Burns). I never would have given it a shot if he hadn’t asked me.”
With baseball out of the equation, Ginnona also joined the Upper Merion spring track team as a distance runner and plans to run indoor track this winter.
Beating the Dawn
To succeed in his separate but equal worlds – as a runner, student and musician – Ginnona finds himself often accomplishing more before the sun rises than many do in a day.
“My mornings are pretty crazy,” he admits
When the cross country team does its morning water workouts, he needs to be in the pool by 6 a.m. He then needs to be at practice for whichever school band is in season by 7.
When he takes a seat in his first class of the day – AP physics – he has already been immersed in his two passions.
After school, more practices or a mid-week meet are followed by a night of studying in pursuit of his longtime goal of attending Penn State to pursue a career in electrical engineering with a likely minor in music.
Depending on the amount of homework on his plate, Ginnona can literally find himself burning the midnight oil.
His parents, Ronald and Traci, are “Penn State people” and Ginnona credits his desire to be part of the Nittany Lion Nation as the impetus for hitting the books.
“I knew since I was two or three that I wanted to go there,” he said. “In middle school, I was getting more Bs than As. I decided to do well enough to have the grades to go to Penn State. Once I got started, it just became a personal goal to do well.”
“Sometimes, in high school, it gets tough. Classes get hard. In the spring, track and jazz band both start. Sometimes I’m late to track (practice). It gets tough to balance the two and to stay committed.
“Between sports and music and academics, somehow I make it work. I’ll get home around 5:30-6, and I’ll have AP homework to do. I’m used to how it works and the time constraints. I always find a way to make it work out.
“Sometimes, even between seasons, when there are two or three weeks, having that extra time is kind of hard. I ended up making my own time constraints anyway.”
Come the spring, he often has to miss a key rehearsal in lieu of a meet.
It’s a difficult juggling act, but the easy-going Ginnona takes it stride.
He also realizes that a lot of people made it possible and feels a responsibility to not let anyone down.
That list includes the coaches and band directors who allow him leeway when his schedule gets impossibly taut.
“And I can’t not include my parents,” he added. “They understand this was important to me, and that I had to keep a commitment.”
Breathing Easy
Ginnona, in addition to his shin splints that occurred during his freshman year and continue bothering him, has dealt with sinus infections.
But the perseverance his coach spoke off shone through.
“Around mid-September this season, I got a really bad sinus infection and resultant cough, and I was out of school and, as a result, cross country for almost an entire week,” he said. “We had a meet against Plymouth Whitemarsh and Cheltenham at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School that Wednesday, and even though I was sick, I decided I had to go to the meet to support my team, regardless of whether or not I was well enough to run in it.”
That’s when the competitive juices took hold.
“I came to school that day and in the afternoon left with my cross country team for the meet,” he continued. “I ended up running and ended up running a time of 20:04, which wasn't that bad, all things considered.”
Ginnona missed school and practice again the next day, and despite the fact that his doctor suggested he take a break from running, he attended his team's next practice that Saturday morning and led one of the groups through their workout, timing each of the intervals they ran.
Because the scenario was nothing new, Ginnona knew how to manage it.
“I get recurrent sinus infections often and have had several in the past year,” he said. “Since the one that I got in September, I have since recovered and have worked hard to make sure that the sinus infection wasn't a permanent setback to my high school running career.”
Right on Time
Given that the late bloomer rises as early at 4 a.m., it is ironic that both he and Newhart recall the day he managed to miss the bus to an invitational meet at Salesianum in Wilmington, Del.
It happened in his freshman year when the team was cut a break by not having to meet their normal Saturday morning bus at 5:30 or 6 a.m.
Instead, with a 9:30 bus, Ginnona was six minutes late.
“He missed the bus, but he still had his dad drive him,” recalled Newhart. “It was just to run in a freshman race. You could see the dedication was there early on.”
“This year, he makes sure he is on time.”
Turning in his best times of a career beset with shin splints early on, that statement takes on enhanced meaning.
“This is something I worked toward,” he said. “In cross-country, you can push yourself when you push others on your team. That’s the team aspect to it that some people don’t understand. You can motivate yourself by trying to stick with someone else. Both people can push each other.
“This year, I put in more time and effort and it’s paying off.”
