Raising the bar with a scholarly touch
In the middle of a track meet, with the starter’s pistol going off, fans cheering and athletes scurrying, David Coneway of Los Angeles Marshall is lying face down on the grass taking a nap near the pole vault area.
“Good morning, sunshine,” a female vaulter tells Coneway as he peeks from under his hooded sweatshirt.
Since arriving from Bulgaria 10 years ago to live with his mother, the 18-year-old Coneway has embraced all the freedoms of his American experience — and that includes being different.
He reads plays by William Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill, offers quotes from Henry David Thoreau, relishes discussions on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” devours Russian literature and says about Moby Dick, “It’s long but a great book.”
He also does plenty of writing himself:
“The average day at home meant a lot of non-household chores: tending to livestock in sweltering heat, carrying chipped wood to and fro, and occasionally scrubbing scarlet stains off the porch after dinner was ‘caught.’ School was non-existent in this simple life which charged me with perpetuating it as my grandparents’ future replacement on the farm. Everything coalesced into a blurred existence where one day was indistinguishable from the next.”
Coneway has a 4.1 grade-point average and tried pole vaulting at Marshall after friends decided to join the track team.
“I was pretty scared, but I did it anyway. I said, ‘Yeah, I like flying,’ ” he said. “I stuck with it, and it turned out all right.”
He finished second in the City Section last season and, with a best of 13 feet, 11 1/4 inches, is one of the favorites to win the pole vault title next month. But there’s so much more to Coneway than pole vaulting.
“David Coneway is the kind of kid that you see about every career — once,” Coach John Arbogast said. “David came to me full of questions and full of zeal and has taught me more about coaching in my four years with him than I ever knew before he got here.... He’s the kind of kid that I would trust with my life.”
Coneway lives two blocks from Marshall. At the end of his sophomore year, his mother was injured in a car accident.
“I was completely shocked,” he said. “I was more self-centered, go to school, go to practice. Now I have to take care of my mom. It was really hard.”
“Today, only the fluorescent T-shirt remains of the scared Bulgarian boy that once wore it. I relish the opportunity to speak in public, if only to jest and uplift the energy of the room. I please teachers with my work, but I stun them with the lighthearted poise that comes with it. And the fluorescent T-shirt — it will always stay with me as a reminder of the change that America brought. Because in America, I found my identity.”
Coneway had to write a lot of essays while applying to colleges. Harvard, Princeton, UCLA and California were among the schools he sought out. He ended up deciding on Princeton. He wants to study literature, compete in the pole vault and learn more “about human nature.”
His final day of classes at Marshall was last Friday, so he’ll have two months off before graduation day in late June, leaving him time to read at least 10 books in between practicing for the pole vault.
He also will make time to be the only student honored by the City Section at its Sportsmanship Recognition Dinner on May 11 as part of its Character Counts partnership.
“As William Hastie stated, satisfaction is not rooted in the magnitude of the result, but the obstacles that paved the journey. By pushing my limits, I found a new outlook on life. Difficulty is an opportunity for enrichment and for realization. To achieve is to overcome.”
Coneway doesn’t know whether to become an author, lawyer or journalist. But he has learned one important lesson from this country.
“Here in America, I have all this freedom and can do whatever I want,” he said.
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