SuburbanOneSports.com recognizes a male and female featured athlete each week. The awards, sponsored by Univest, are given to seniors of good character who are students in good standing that have made significant contributions to their teams. Selections are based on nominations received from coaches, athletic directors and administrators.
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Female Athlete for week of May 11, 2021
New Hope-Solebury softball coach Chris Marchok, a Harvard graduate with life experiences that included a five-year career in the minor leagues and time playing winter ball in Venezuela during a coup, is as well spoken as they come. And yet he had to search for the right way to portray senior shortstop Erin Firth. “It’s really hard to give you a true sense of this kid just in words,” he said. “There is this solid core of maturity to her, and there is this solid core of decency and kindness and respect. And, yet, there is this kid who is going to compete 100 percent -- and I mean 100 percent.” So, in other words, she is the epitome of a student-athlete and overall citizen. “That’s really how anybody would feel about Erin after spending a little bit of time with her,” said Marchok. “Literally, this is the kid who you want your son to date. This is the kid who you want to have babysit your little kids. She is the one you want looking in on your grandmother. She’s an unbelievable kid.”
Add in the fact that Firth has turned an 11th-hour decision into an appointment to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and we have the proverbial cherry on top. “We are fortunate to have her saying she wants to serve,” said Marchok. “In my heart, I knew she was going to go to the Air Force Academy and serve her country. It really fits. That’s who she is.” The vast majority of those with sights set on the Army, Naval or Coast Guard academies have been gearing themselves up for it since they were toddlers. Not Firth. She explained: “I definitely would be one of those people who woke up one day and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ For me, that happened in October of 2020. It was way, way too late for when I should have been getting started.” She visited with neighbors, Sue and Vincent DeGiovanni, both Air Force Academy alums, to get more information and was able secure a nomination from U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.
The rest was on her, as she shifted gears toward her new destination and drove in the fast lane to get there. That she was able to do it was a feat akin to her ability to say the alphabet backwards in less than four seconds. “I basically rushed the whole process for getting into the academy into just three short months,” she said. “I really had no idea that was what I wanted to do until halfway through the college application process.” Firth, who sports a weighted GPA of 4.43, had a long-time goal of studying engineering. It was when she refined it a bit that she zeroed in on the Air Force Academy. “I realized it around that time that I wanted to do aerospace engineering,” she said. “I started researching schools that had the top programs for it. I applied to M.I.T. and Georgia Tech. I kept seeing the Air Force Academy. I thought, based on what I knew, which wasn’t much, it seemed like it would be a good fit. That’s when I contacted my neighbor. We talked, and it all went on from there.”
Firth – who is involved in National Honor Society, Key Club, Peer Leadership - is playing two sports this spring – softball and track, clearly proving she has no touches of Senioritis. Firth’s most athletic success at New Hope-Solebury came as a member of the field hockey team that enjoyed postseason success and repeated trips to the state playoffs. “She’s an exceptional athlete, but she’s an exceptional person,” NHS field hockey coach Gwen Smith said. “She is such a humble, caring person. When she would see somebody on our team having a hard time, she would always be the one to go over to them and talk to them. She was always a come along side kind of person but always held the high standards. It wasn’t like she lowered her standards. I think, honestly, the thing that is even bigger than anything is she is so highly respected by her peers. You should hear the things my girls write about her: ‘She’s the nicest, most genuine person I’ve ever met.’ That’s coming from her peers. … Kids like that are sometimes just not relatable, but she is so humble. She’s so ridiculously good at everything, but you would never know it. She’s so humble, and I think people are blown away by that.”
To read Firth’s complete profile, please click on the following link: https://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/female/erin-firth-0094788
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Male Athlete for week of May 11, 2021
Manny Puente was going down a familiar road. A standout long stick midfielder, the Souderton senior believed that lacrosse was his ticket into the college of his choice. “My sophomore year is when I decided I wanted to carry lacrosse into school, but the whole goal of playing lacrosse for schools was, ‘Well, I’m going to play to get into a better school than I would be able to get into academically,’” Puente said. A funny thing happened. Puente found out he didn’t need lacrosse to get into the schools at the top of his list. “I got into every place I wanted to get into, and I didn’t need to play lacrosse,” he said. “It came down to me choosing do I want to go the academic route or the lacrosse route, and I ended up choosing to go the academic route and play club ball instead.” This fall, Puente will be heading to Penn State University where he will be majoring in biology in the pre-med track. “It came down to would I rather go to Penn State where I get a different academic look at a bigger school with a lot more people that I actually know, and that became my preferred schooling method,” he said.
Listening to his coach tell it, lacrosse could certainly have been Puente’s ticket to the next level. “He’s kind of the unsung hero, if you will, because he shuts down just about any person we put him on, so when we go against teams with really good middies, Manny goes on the best one,” Souderton coach Mark Cornes said. “He’s in on every faceoff, he gets a ton of ground balls, and he’s a shutdown long stick middie. We know when we put him on somebody he’s going to take them out of the game. Manny probably has the talent to play Division 1, but he’s going to Penn State and play club. He wants the education.” Puente has a clear focus and strives to be the best that he can be whether it’s on the lacrosse field or in the classroom. It’s a focus that was redefined last spring when on April 16, one month into the COVID-19 pandemic, he lost his father. Cardiac arrest claimed the life 49-year-old Jason Puente, Manny’s biggest fan and supporter. In literally a heartbeat, Manny – who has a younger and older sister - became the man of the household. “It was the hardest time in my life - I’ll never face anything as hard as that hopefully,” said Puente. “It was completely out of nowhere. No one saw it coming. It was like just getting absolutely punched in the face. It was right after COVID really hit, the lacrosse season was cancelled and then that happened. It was just down, down, down. It was a mess. COVID meant nothing to me. I went through a really bad state of ‘I just don’t want to do anything.’ I was ready to quit lacrosse, I was about ready to quit everything because I didn’t care.”
That might have been Puente’s first thought, but it certainly wasn’t his last. Instead of quitting, he chose the opposite path. “My dad never missed a game – he was my sole motivator in sports,” Puente said. “I always kind of saw it as my dad was really into motivating me into sports and my mom was motivating me into academics. He was a really big athlete. He was the biggest inspiration to me. It was a hard downfall and loss of motivation. But I ended up transitioning that into another reason to keep playing, another reason to keep pushing toward my dreams. I transitioned to committing everything I had into lacrosse athletics and school.” This spring, Puente was a captain and key piece of a senior-led defense for a Souderton squad that earned a district berth. “They’re an interesting group of guys – they know how to have fun, and they also know how to get down to business,” Cornes said. “Everybody loves Manny. He’s just one of those guys. He’s a great leader on the field and off the field, and he loves to have fun.”
Puente – who takes honors and AP classes – also excels in the classroom. He is a member of the Engineering Club and also the school’s Athletic Leadership Council. According to Souderton athletic director Dennis Stanton, Puente has been an integral part of the school’s athletic community. “His selfless approach to leadership has truly had a positive impact on our team and school,” Stanton said.
To read Puente’s complete profile, please click on the following link: https://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/male/manny-puente-0094853
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