2023 Times Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year: Seneca’s Anna Bruno

The Seneca High School girls track and field team has been awfully good for a long time now. The Fighting Irish have won 11 consecutive sectional championships, but it wasn’t until this past spring that the program was able to bring home its first team trophy from state, placing second in Class 1A.

And while she’s all about the team, it would be fair to say senior Anna Bruno had an awful lot to do with the school’s loaded trophy case’s newest addition.

The 2023 Times Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year capped off her high school career at the IHSA State Finals on the campus of Eastern Illinois University with one final dominating performance, recording four top-three state finishes – two of those state championships.

For Bruno, however, she is more interested in the way her individual success led to Seneca’s team success.

“Track is usually seen as a very individual sport,” she said. “It’s your race, beside relays, and you kind of do it on your own. To be able to have a whole team trophy that several people contributed to, it kind of shows that team spirit and that team effort that usually isn’t seen so much in an individual sport like track.

“It is really a team sport. It’s just the points are harder to see add up at a meet because you’re watching one person from a team at a time or concentrating on your race.

“I’m so blessed to have had the team I did. You can be talented or just be a hard worker or just have great coaches, but every one of those aspects has to come together to have [a state meet] like that for your whole team.

“It was really great.”

“She could have been a state qualifier in all of the individual sprints, but she bought into the vision to have incredible relay teams, which was crucial to our runner-up finish at state, [and] her hard work and determination paid off this year making her the state champ in long jump.”

—  Terry Maxwell, on The Times Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year Anna Bruno

Bruno’s team-first mentality showed itself all over the state finals leaderboard.

She won the individual Class 1A long jump title by 0.03 meters over runner-up Laurel Munson of Eureka, with Bruno traversing 5.50 meters for the championship. Her other three state medals all came in relay events.

The 4x100 saw Caitlyn O’Boyle, Teagan Johnson, Bruno and Lila Coleman place third with a run of 49.67 seconds. Seneca’s 4x200 team of O’Boyle, Anna’s younger sister Clara Bruno, Anna Bruno and Coleman finished as state runners-up in 1 minute, 44.21 seconds. And Seneca’s 4x400 team of Clara Bruno, Coleman, Evelyn O’Connor and Anna Bruno – coached by Anna and Clara’s older sister Eva – repeated as state champions with a run of 4:02.53.

“We had won last year also,” Anna Bruno said, “so to be able to come around again [and repeat as state champions] was great. And also, I had a sister on that relay, and my other sister coached it. That added a personal aspect to it. It was a family thing we got to do together that I thought was pretty incredible.”

Devoting top athletes to relays was a preseason choice made by Fighting Irish track and field coach Terry Maxwell and his staff. It paid off, in no small part because of the willingness of Anna Bruno and Seneca’s other top runners to set aside a chance at personal glory in individual events to build something bigger.

“Anna had a really dominant year for us in the sprints and long jump,” Maxwell said. “She could have been a state qualifier in all of the individual sprints, but she bought into the vision to have incredible relay teams, which was crucial to our runner-up finish at state, [and] her hard work and determination paid off this year making her the state champ in long jump.

“We’re really going to miss Anna’s leadership, how she leads by example for her teammates.”

The choice to devote more of her efforts to relay events rather than individual ones was a no-brainer for Anna Bruno, who’s bound for the University of Mary in North Dakota to compete in track and field at the Division II level while tackling a music major, a pairing of time-consuming interests she says most of the D-1 schools she considered would not permit.

“I was OK with [concentrating on relays], because it’s less pressure on one person, and like I said before, it gets more people involved,” she said. “It’s a lot of trust, and you have to balance out the risks, but it worked out really well for our team this year.

“I think it was a good choice on [our coaches’] part, and everyone went with it. Nobody was frustrated and going,’ I wish I was in an open event.’ That’s how we got success. We all stuck to the plan and were all-in.

“It’s good to feel success on your own, but that’s really just yourself and your coaches feeling it. When you have everyone on your team get a medal and get to hold the [team] trophy, that’s really, really cool for everyone.”