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STUDENT PROFILES
Thanks to the coaches and teachers at Northern and Northwest High Schools for their student recommendations and input, which make it possible to recognize these talented, dedicated students for their accomplishments in academics, athletics and cultural arts. by MEREDITH BARKLEY
NORTHERN GUILFORD Luis Benitez, senior
Sport: golf
Northern Guilford golfer Luis Benitez sees the game as good preparation for life. The challenges, coming in many forms, are getting him ready for the years ahead, he figures.
“The biggest thing is fighting the urge to quit when you’re having a bad day,” Benitez, a senior, said. Working through down times and witnessing the results “makes you happy that everything worked out correctly.
“Mentally learning and challenging yourself and seeing improvement definitely works with every other element in life,” he observed.
Benitez said he shoots in the upper 30s for nine holes, a level of achievement he credits to “a lot of time and practice.” Yet another of those life lessons. He believes it will serve him well in business, which he’ll study at UNC Charlotte starting this fall.
He hopes to make the university’s golf team, too. But with seniors getting another year of eligibility because of COVID, he realizes there may not be room for him. If he doesn’t make the team next fall, he’ll likely play club golf and try again the following season.
Regardless of how that turns out, his course of study is set, he said. His mom, a real estate agent, and dad, a physician, have urged him to focus on business and finance, and he said he’s looking forward to it.
He’s already dabbling in the stock market with money he’s saved from birthdays and a summer job. That’s meant poring over financials.
“It’s a lot about research and finding companies that are undervalued and overvalued,” Benitez said. His financial adviser has helped.
“One of the biggest things in stock trading is to take all the emotion out and put it into analytics,” he said.
That’s another takeaway from golf.
He’d like to eventually make the PGA tour. But, insist his parents, education comes first.
“So I’ll follow that,” he said. And if pro golf works out afterwards, that will be wonderful.
NORTHERN GUILFORD Garrett Benfield, sophomore
Sport: wrestling
For Northern Guilford’s Garrett Benfield, wrestling is very much a family affair. His father, Matthew, wrestled as a youngster and is a Nighthawks assistant coach, and his older brother, Max, who graduated last year, wrestled with the team.
“I sort of grew into it,” said Benfield, a rising junior who has wrestled since kindergarten.
In fact, perhaps the highlight of his wrestling career so far was winning the NCHSAA 3A state title for Northern last year – dad and brother at his side.
“We got to be on the same team for one year,” he said of his brother. His father helped coach the championship squad.
As a freshman wrestling at 126 pounds, he lost a close match during that contest. His opponent, he said, “started to take over in the third period. I couldn’t keep up.”
So, he and his teammates have worked on endurance this year, he said, “going hard for two full hours” during practice.
Last year Benfield hit a growth spurt during the season, which made it difficult to maintain weight as the season went on. After the season, when keeping weight within certain limits wasn’t as important, he ate more and gained. This year, growth spurt over, hitting his weight – now 152 pounds – isn’t as hard, he said.
Still, it’s something all wrestlers work on. His diet: mostly fruits, vegetables and lots of chicken. He eats two meals a day during the season, he said: an egg for breakfast, fruit in the
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afternoon and “a good meal at dinner.”
His favorite classroom subject is history, which he said has taught him a lot about how the nation came together and developed, and the major events, like wars, that helped shape it.
He called wrestling in the COVID era “pretty tough” because it has meant a complete change in seasons.
Thankfully, though, masks haven’t been the issue they have been for other sports, he said. While they wear them on the benches when not wrestling, they don’t during competition.
NORTHERN GUILFORD
Carmen Wallace, rising junior Sport: tennis
Northern Guilford’s Carmen Wallace plays different sports throughout the school year. It relieves stress, she said, and helps her in the classroom. “It takes my mind off school for a couple hours every day,” Wallace, a rising junior, said. Besides, she added, without it “I don’t know what I’d do every day after school.”
She participates in tennis, lacrosse, cross country and track and field, where she does the high jump, long jump and triple jump. While she has no favorite, she figures she’s better at tennis.
She plays the No. 1 court for the Nighthawks. But COVID-adjusted scheduling had her doubling up this spring. She switched off between tennis, normally a fall sport, and track and field, usually leaving one practice and heading to the other.
It could be exhausting, she said, but “I still enjoy both sports.”
During long months of pandemic isolation, she ran a lot on her own and found it calming.
She played tennis when she was little, picking it back up in middle school. Her parents taught her the game – they’d both played in high school and are still at it.
While hard shots are helpful, you need to place them where your opponent will have trouble returning them, she said.
Her favorite classroom subject is math.
For fun, she often heads to Lake Gaston with her family, who has a house there, and she enjoys wakeboarding.
“It’s fun to be on the water and not really think about anything else,” Wallace said.
NORTHERN GUILFORD Josh Deslauriers, senior
Sport: baseball
Northern Guilford senior Josh Deslauriers, a baseball player since age 4, has learned over the years that the sport he loves is a game of failure. He’s okay with that. In fact, he embraces it. Through it he has learned important life lessons.
Make no mistake, the game’s lots of fun, too, he said. Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep playing it.
He started off in a Summerfield Recreation league. Some of his teammates then were teammates at Northern, and they developed close bonds through years of playing ball together.
He also likes feeling that he represents friends and neighbors.
“It’s just special playing for your community with a bunch of guys you know and have grown up with,” Deslauriers said.
...continued on p. 26
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In his sophomore year he collected a slew of awards: all-conference, all-area, all-state, conference player of the year, and academic all-conference. His parents have it all on display in a special area of their basement. COVID halted last season soon after it began, but he hopes to add to the trophy case this season.
Next year Deslauriers expects to play college ball at High Point University, where he’ll major in electrical engineering. His parents are both engineers.
He hopes life beyond college includes a heavy dose of baseball. His goal is to be good enough to play pro ball.
NORTHERN GUILFORD James Newsome, senior
Sport: baseball
Newsome, a senior who switches off between pitcher and first baseman for the Nighthawks. Fielders react in different ways depending on what happens when the ball comes off the bat. That opens the results of a contest to a host of possibilities, said Newsome, who calls himself “a big numbers guy.” “No one baseball game goes the exact same way as another,” he said. “It’s something I love about it. With a million different outcomes there are going to be some very high highs and some very low lows.” Success or failure in baseball depends on how you respond, he figures. Same with life. “How you deal with all that will help you in the long run,” he said. Newsome, an academic all-conference selection as a sophomore, has been involved in sports for as long as he can remember. Both parents were athletes at NC State. His dad played football, his mom basketball. And he played a number of sports growing up. Baseball was the one that stuck. “I’m just very thankful for being involved in this game for as long as I have been,” he said. And it won’t end with graduation, he said. Next year he’ll play college ball at Virginia Military Institute. He learned of VMI from an assistant coach he met during a tournament. After some research, he was sold. He described it as “the total package.” When Northern Guilford’s He plans to major in biology on a pre-med track James Newsome expounds in hopes of going to dental school. on what intrigues him about “Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been fascibaseball, he talks about “the nated by dentistry,” Newsome said. game inside the game.” He hopes to open his own dental practice one The duel between pitcher day and says the three years he has worked at the and batter is what everyone Sky Zone Trampoline Park in Greensboro has been sees, he said. But there’s so good preparation. 26 JUNE 3 - 16, 2021much that goes unnoticed, and that’s where the game gets interesting, said “I never knew what it was like behind the scenes” of a business, he said.
NORTHWEST GUILFORD Liam McWhorter, senior Sport: track When Northwest Guilford’s Liam McWhorter was in sixth grade, he looked forward to the next year so he could run outdoor track. Outdoor was the only competitive running option for middle schoolers, he said. That changed when he reached high school. He could then run throughout the school year – cross country during the fall, indoor track during winter and outdoor during spring. McWhorter, a senior, signed up for all three and has had only a week or two off between seasons ever since. “It’s a great form of exercise,” he said. He runs the 400 meter and mile as well as a leg of the 4x800 meter relay. His best mile time was in his sophomore year, when he covered the distance in 4:46. He’s several seconds slower this year, but has still won some races. He said he runs five days a week, allowing a little time off to let his body recover. During workouts, he said, he can run up to seven miles. “Running is a good avenue to clear my mind and have a break where I don’t have to worry about getting the next assignment done or study for that test,” he said. “After you’ve been running for a while, you get in a groove and everything that concerns you just eases away and you can just be focused on your thoughts.” He also likes being part of a team – a group of like-minded folks working toward a goal. The Northwest Observer • Totally local since 1996 “I’m a competitive person,” he said. “So that opportunity is very valuable to me.”
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Next year he heads to NC State to study biomedical engineering, which, he said, is “a very versatile field that gives me a lot of options after college.” Among them, he said: researching or becoming a physician.
He won’t be running for the university’s team, but he expects to continue running on his own. In fact, his roommate will be a fellow Northwest teammate who he expects to be his running partner.
“We both made an agreement that we’d keep running to stay in shape and get some exercise,” McWhorter said.
NORTHWEST GUILFORD Andreea Alecse, senior
Sport: tennis
Northwest Guilford’s Andreea Alecse cut her tennis teeth watching Grand Slam tournaments with her father. She can scarcely remember life before those majors. It didn’t hurt that Romanians like her favorite – Simona Halep, a former world No. 1 player – were well represented.
So at age 9, when she had the chance to attend tennis camp and give the sport a try, she was all in.
“I just immediately fell in love with it,” she said.
It wasn’t until freshman year at Northwest, though, that she took up the sport competitively. She joined the high school’s girls team and through junior year also competed on the track team. Her events: high jump, long jump and 100-meter dash. Because of COVID, this year the two seasons overlapped, so she chose to focus on tennis.
“I’ve just really been surrounded by tennis, and sports more broadly, my entire life,” Alecse said.
Her father has had a long interest in tennis and played when he was younger, she said.
Alecse likes the way tennis “challenges you mentally and physically. You have to be focused. A lot of tennis is anticipating what your opponent is going to do so you can be there to return the ball.”
She was born in the U.S., but her parents are from Romania and spoke Romanian at home, so when she started preschool she knew only a handful of English phrases. She had to learn quickly.
“I know how much of a burden learning English on the fly can be,” Alecse said. That’s why she now volunteers to teach English to Spanish-speaking people (she is fluent in English, Spanish and Romanian and is working on becoming fluent in French, Russian and Arabic).
This fall she heads to UNC-Chapel Hill to study political science and public policy. She hopes to follow that with law school and a career in government helping shape policy.
For a start in that direction, she’s been active in Northwest’s Speech and Debate Club, where she captains a team.
Debate, she said, “whetted my interest in public policy.”
NORTHWEST GUILFORD Catherine DeSiena,
rising sophomore Sport: golf
Northwest Guilford’s Catherine DeSiena took a swing at golf during summer camp seven years ago and wound up with
a passion.
So much so that this past year, as a freshman, she spent up to 10 hours a day, club in hand, honing skills.
She was part of the Vikings team that went undefeated during the regular season and advanced to the regionals this year. She hopes to play in college and then, perhaps, the LPGA.
But that’s a ways off.
“I’ve just been focusing on my game,” she said. For the moment, DeSiena is relishing golf’s challenges and the opportunity to play a lot.
“If you want to get better you’ve got to really put in the time,” she said. “You have to be in the right frame of mine. You can’t be mad at yourself. You have to stay on an even level.
She plays golf year-round – at Northwest during the high school season and local tournaments and elsewhere the rest of the year. She also works weekly with a local coach who suggests way of improving her techniques.
“I play every opportunity I can,” said DeSiena, who calculates she averages about 42 strokes for nine holes.
Her favorite subject at school has usually been math, but she said she has struggled a bit this year with her Math Honors 3 class.
“I think it’s mainly because I haven’t been in school,” DeSiena said of distance learning challenges during ...continued on p. 29
