Emma Palmieri Inspires Greatness On and Off the Track

393

Emma Palmieri stands at the starting line. She isn’t superstitious, so there isn’t a pre-meet meal or a song she has to have blaring in her AirPods (thankfully, she says, because she doesn’t know how people can keep up with such routines), but she likes to visualize her goals. She used to play basketball, and had fun doing it, but she never set any expectations for herself.

It’s different on the track. Palmieri, a senior at Hopewell High School, tries to have fun, sure, but she’s chasing GOAT status.

Palmieri is the definition of lead by example. She’s not one to raise her voice and get her teammates’ attention, but there’s a reason that Hopewell coach Jeff Brunton is taking 20 students to Youngstown State University in the evenings.

In the past, students might have ducked out of hard workouts or skipped out entirely. Palmieri isn’t alone in setting the standard, but she’s certainly at the forefront.

“I think it’s because they’ve seen how she operates and how much success she’s having, and they just have learned, ‘Oh, this is what it takes. So, this is what we got to do,’” Brunton says. If Palmieri does it, then it works. 

“She just walks up to the line,” Brunton says. “And when she steps up to the line, everyone else just falls behind her.” 

— 

Brunton has been coaching Palmieri since she was in eighth grade, when she came out for some junior high track workouts. She started as a cross country runner, so when she joined the track team as a freshman, the coaches tried to nudge her toward the 800-meter. But she wanted to sprint. “She kept running faster and faster, so we were like okay, well, you can’t say no,” Brunton says. She’s stuck ever since. 

Palmieri was fast as a freshman. She came out and ran 13.8 in the 100-meter, and she just kept dropping time. By the end of her freshman year, she was the second-fastest girl on the team.

“She was just unique in that way that she has all the gas of a cross-country runner,” Brunton says. “Like, she qualified for states twice in cross country, her junior and senior year. So, she’s got all that gas, but then she also has like the speed of a 100-meter sprinter, and she has the strength of a 400. So, all the tools are there.”

Brunton feels like Palmieri is capable of breaking the 100-, 200- and 400-meter school records — and both relay records (Palmieri is already part of the record-setting 4×100 relay team).

Palmieri watched former teammate Lauryn Speicher break the 200-meter record in 2023 and now she’s just 0.04 seconds off the record herself. She’s 0.69 seconds off the 100-meter record and 0.3 seconds off the 400-meter record. And if she needs any reminders (she doesn’t, that’s for sure), all the records are emblazoned on the team T-shirts.

A lot of work has been put into pursuing not just one but five school records, and a whole lot more work is yet to be done, but Palmieri isn’t worried about it. “If it’s meant to happen, it will,” Palmieri says, “and I think with all the practice I’ve been doing, I think that it will.” She believes everything happens for a reason, and in this case, it very well could be because of the effort she’s put in over the years. The competitive spirit starts at home, but as she’s gotten closer and closer to breaking records, that competitive streak has gotten even stronger. 

“I think she’s gotten even hungrier as she’s gone and gotten closer to school records and closer to achieving some pretty cool stuff,” Brunton says. “She’s never been satisfied with where she is right now.”

But Palmieri doesn’t want to just be remembered for what she did on the track. She’s kept with it, outside of chasing records, because she loves to run — and loves to run with her friends. But she sees now what she can do for those chasing after her. “Just being someone for everyone else to look up to, like the new freshman, the new sophomores and all that,” Palmieri says. “I want them to beat my records and go for those goals as well.” Brunton sees it firsthand every single practice.

“A young girl in seventh grade can look at Emma Palmieri and be like, ‘Oh, I can I can be her. If I do what she did, I can get to that point,’” Brunton says. “Because it’s not like she was dropped out of the sky and was just good at everything. She worked her tail off and just progressively got better and better and better. So, if you follow her career, you would just see a path to that goal as opposed to someone who just landed on top of the mountain.” 

 — 

Palmieri was pissed.

She had finished as the runner-up in the 400-meter at the 2023 WPIAL track & field championships, so obviously, she wanted to win it in 2024. So, Palmieri and Brunton worked all year on cracking 58 seconds in the event. That was the goal — a race against herself and not the girls on the track. She ended up running a 57.93. Brunton was stoked that Palmieri executed to perfection. Palmieri was pissed she finished in fourth. 

Brunton could see the disappointment, but he wanted to make sure that Palmieri looked at the big picture.

“Hey, you’re allowed to be mad,” he told her after the race. “You’re allowed to be mad that you got beat by these other girls, but I want you to appreciate what you did.”

Brunton watched Palmieri consider what he said for a moment. And she nodded, taking what he said to heart. The competition on the track isn’t like football or basketball; there is no playing defense. All you can do is go out and run — do your best. Brunton watched Palmieri do her best day after day for months. It’s a moment in time, finding the good in a moment of disappointment, that will stick with Brunton (and Palmieri) forever. 

“It was a long day,” Palmieri says. “We were there until like 10 o’clock because of the weather and everything, but him saying that, he always makes my attitude turn around, and he’s the one that gives me the most confidence because he’s always like saying everything to make me like inspired and not get down to myself if I have a bad race. He knows I’ll do better at the next one.”

There’s a very close bond between Palmieri and Brunton. He doesn’t have any kids of his own, but he views his students as the children he borrows throughout the season. The success — the improvement from one meet to the next, one practice to the next — is what gets him out of bed in the mornings. It’s that admiration and affection for Palmieri — and all of his students — that helps him make the trips to Youngstown.

Brunton has been coaching Hopewell for over a decade, and there have been very few athletes to come through the program like Palmieri. And now there’s just one more go around.

Obviously, the records are important (and on the horizon), but the biggest goal is to break 56 seconds in the 400. That’s the main event, and it just so happens that the only girl in the WPIAL Class-2A to break 56 seconds is the WPIAL champion, so there’s a lot of work to be done. There are three girls to catch at the WPIAL level. “They’re going to keep getting faster, so we can’t play defense,” Brunton says. “So, we’ve got to get faster.”

“I just think about hopefully getting better than fourth this year, and he just keeps telling me every meet that you’re going to reach this goal,” Palmieri says. “Like the few past weeks in indoor, I haven’t been reaching my 400 in under a minute, and he’s like, ‘You’ll get at the next one.’ I could feel it, and I did, and him always saying that makes me like pushes me knowing that I can get it.”

Palmieri may not be a hard-edged runner, preferring to have fun at the end of the day, but she’s a fierce competitor. And that competitive edge has only gotten stronger and stronger. When other students back off a hard workout, tapping out even, Palmieri steps up. When other students improve gradually with slower, lower-impact workouts, Palmieri takes on more. That’s what has allowed her to enter the GOAT conversation.

That work ethic, that attention to detail, was evident just last week at Youngstown State.

“She knows she knows that, and she just, she’s like, ‘Okay, this is what we got to do,’” Brunton says. “And so we were going to be two sets of this. She crushed the first two sets and she goes, still. I said, ‘You want to do a third set?’ She said, okay. She’s never gone three sets, but she crushed that one.

“So she’s just like anything I think [will help], like, ‘Hey, we need to work on this for you.’ It may be like a hard workout or whatever. She’s just like, ‘Okay, like, let’s do it.’ Basically, whatever’s necessary.”