Gabriella Sperling
Sport: Track and field
School: Rutherford
Class: Senior. Age: 17
Accomplishment: She won the 200 and long jump titles and took third in the 400 and 400 hurdles to lead Rutherford to its first NJIC divisional title as the Bulldogs won the National division.
Paul SchwartzYou can take the girl out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the girl.
Let’s head to Cafe Riazor, a little Spanish restaurant tucked into a residential neighborhood in Chelsea in lower Manhattan with Gabriella Sperling and her mom Leslie Vazquez.
“I love to go into the city and take pictures of the old apartment buildings down there with my mom sometimes,” Sperling said. “Then we head to Cafe Riazor and have great tapas and finish it off with a piece of Red Velvet Cake.”
Four years after she moved to Rutherford from Baldwin, N.Y., part of Hempstead in Nassau County just off the Long Island Expressway and near a Long Island Railroad station, Sperling still calls herself “a city girl.”
But she’s found herself as an important part of a very good small town track team and has found a new home.
“It was hard being a high school freshman in a new place,” Sperling said. “It’s a really nice place but when I started school, I didn’t know anybody and it seemed like the other kids had known each other their whole lives.”
But Sperling always had track and field and eventually her talent and determination won people over.
“I started running when I was 7 or 8 years old for the V-Tesse track club (in Baldwin) and I have always loved the sport,” said Sperling, who joined the Rutherford winter track program under Curtis Arsi. “It was hard for me to make friends even then because a lot of the kids were new to the sport and I was a little more advanced.”
One of the better freshman boys, Ariel Tepox-Carino, became one of her first new friends in town and three years later, both are veteran leaders and remain close. It’s had an impact on her own interactions with younger teammates.
“I go out of my way to make the new kids comfortable and advocate for the young kids because I know how difficult it is to be a freshman in a new place,” she said.
“She’s one of the hardest working athletes I’ve ever had day in and day out,” Arsi said. “She’s so determined to be the best she can be that sometimes she is too critical on herself. I put a lot of pressure on her but she keeps doing what she’s doing.”
“She’s so versatile that every line-up I do centers around where I’m going to put her,” says Arsi, who has used her in six different events and several relays, including a school record 4-x-400 relay in the winter season. “She doesn’t take a rep off and her work ethic is contagious.”
“Track has helped me stay confident, even in the worst of times,” said Sperling, who will compete in the sprints and long jump at the University of Albany and study to become a forensic pathologist with a dream of someday working for the FBI or CIA. There also might be some youth coaching in her future.
“I love watching kids on my team who improve and watching them get faster makes me very happy,” said Sperling, who said she’d like to give back to the sport that’s given her so much.
And Arsi, her high school coach, is grateful for the move four years that brought Gabriella and her older brother Kai, who graduated last year and is now at Bergen Community College.
“Every time I see Gabriella’s mom, I say ‘thank you for moving to Rutherford.”
