Coastal Edition/Academic Athlete/September 2013
Rebecca Suh
Coach Daniel Batten/track and cross country
Coach Mike Bennett/track and basketball
St. Andrews School
Savannah, GA
By: Ruby Nicole Hilliard
Running Beyond the Top of the Class
Rebecca Suh, at first, seems like a normal 15 year-old high school sophomore who is excited to have just finished her driver’s education class and is looking forward to driving.
Living in Savannah, Georgia, she likes hanging out with her friends at the beach or around the pool and taking vacations with her family, but Suh is anything but average. She excels in cross country running, track, basketball, as well as on the academic playing field. Her favorite subject is math followed by history, thanks to a really great history teacher she had last year. Suh likes that math is rigid and has rules. She says the rules make it easy to understand versus other classes like English and science, which seem more abstract to her. Other subjects might not come quite as easily for her but she works hard to do well in school.“Overall, I get good grades when/because I really try, not just because I am naturally smart,” says Suh.She strives each semester to earn Headmaster’s List, which is awarded to students who achieve an average grade of 95 percent and do not make one grade below 87 percent. Suh holds herself to a very high standard. “I strive to achieve the best grades I can. I hope to be valedictorian or salutatorian of my graduating class,” she says.
Suh also plays the violin and the piano. While she may love the piano more, she believes that she is better at the violin if only because she practices every day. She has been playing the piano since the age of six, the violin since about third grade, and she will continue taking violin for the duration of high school. Her parents encourage Suh’s endeavors in academics and sports. Her mother, Helene, is a stay-at-home mom and is very involved in Suh’s life. Her mother is also an executive member on the board of trustees. She believes that education is extremely important and sees that Suh stays on task. Suh’s father, Dan, a neurosurgeon, is very interested in her sports activities. “They have two daughters, and my mom was fine with that, but my dad really, wanted a son. He always jokes that I am his son because I play a lot of team sports…He really loves my sports,” Suh says of her father.Suh’s father couldn’t be disappointed with her. She maintains a 4.0 grade point average all while playing sports year round. This past year, Suh achieved a Coaches Award for cheerleading, Most Valuable Player in cross country, the Scholar Athlete Award in basketball and for the past two years, she has been Most Valuable Player in track. “I feel extremely proud of my awards and really hope I can uphold them,” Suh says.Her coaches, Mike Bennett (basketball and track) and Daniel Batten (track and cross country), are really proud of her too. “She’s one of the quickest players I’ve ever seen,” says Bennett, adding that watching her play was like a blur. “She has very quick hands and feet.” This is why he reached out to her to run track for him. Both Bennett and Batten were very surprised at her ability when they, on a whim, put her in the 4×400 relay event, which she had never run before, where she scored a state qualifying time. 
She impressed them and surprised herself. They immediately knew they had a runner on their hands. “I knew right then that we were only scratching the surface of what was available with her,” says Bennett.They had her running for the varsity team in seventh grade, “Which is unheard of,” says Bennett. “Most kids don’t have the ability to compete at the varsity level at that age. The most impressive thing about her is that within the first 25 feet of track she can reach top speed. She starts out blindingly quick.” Batten says Suh consistently impresses him her enthusiasm to do better. “She’s always asking the right questions, like, ‘Why do we do it like that?’” He speaks highly of her sportsmanship and her encouragement of others on the team. “She is bubbly, fun to be around, has a big, vibrant personality and always includes everyone on the team in conversation,” he says. 
Suh also likes her coaches. “[Batten is] a runner himself, too, so he knows. A lot of times you’ll get coaches that played before but aren’t currently a runner. So, that is what I like about him. He can actually run with us if we need him to. He’s very intense, and I like that. Some of our practices will be really hard, but he also knows when we need a break. Then we’ll do the one-mile warm up loop, some exercises, and then play soccer for the rest of the practice. He knows when it is time for us to have an easy day,” she says of Batten. Suh attended the All American Cross Country Camp this summer where she broadened her knowledge and learned strategies to set her apart from the pack in running. The best thing about it for her coaches is that they have her for three more glorious years. Suh says she is too young to know what she wants to do with the rest of her life just yet. She is, perhaps, interested in studying law, but one thing she knows is that she will take running with her wherever she goes.
