Scholar-athlete of the year honored.
Skyline’s Wikstrom is named CIF scholar-athlete of the year
OAKLAND >> Eleanor Wikstrom’s list of accomplishments during her four years at Oakland’s Skyline High School would fill multiple pages on a resume. This week, she added one more. The Harvard-bound senior who is proud to represent “our historically-overlooked city” has been named California Interscholastic Federation scholar-athlete of the year, becoming the first from the Oakland Unified School District to receive the honor.
The track and cross-country athlete has a 4.0 gradepoint average and plans to major in cognitive science and international relations in college. She lists the United Nations as her career interest, with an emphasis on diplomacy, education policy, public health and medical research.
“I am excited by this award because I know that it represents something bigger than myself,” Wikstrom said in an Oakland Unified news release. “I think that this honor reflects a lot of what I have tried to do throughout my career — to represent our historically-overlooked city at championship meets around the state, to set cross country and track records that give current and future Oakland athletes a new understanding of what is possible, and to model excellence in academics in a public school system that has faced challenges with resources and that outsiders often look down upon.
“Everything I am is a result of the community that surrounds me. Everything I do is in hopes of exalting the community that has shaped my life.”
Beyond having straight A’s, Wikstrom has excelled in other areas of academia. Among her accomplishments:
• Four-time champion in the Oakland district’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Fest.
• National Merit semifinalist.
• National AP Scholar.
• Oakland Students for Public Education co-founder and president.
• Oakland Youth Vice Poet Laureate in 2019.
Wikstrom, a class valedictorian, said she has been think
ing a lot about how the coronavirus pandemic is shaping high school seniors this spring.
“This is a before and after moment in our personal lives but also with the state of the world as a whole,” Wikstrom said in an interview with Bay Area News Group. “It’s an incredible duality that we are living in right now. I think that the world has kind of always been ending in our lifetimes. We’ve always been threatened with global warming and fracturing democracy and all of these things.
“To have this be the way that our (high school) lives as we know it is culminating, I think is really telltale, the resiliency and the ability that the Class of 2020 has to tell the world that it’s not going to end, that we are still here, fixing it and persevering and making the best of everything that we have.”
Besides being a scholar, Wikstrom has succeeded as a runner.
She won the Oakland Section championship in cross country last fall and holds the Oakland Section record in the three-mile (cross country) and the 1,500, 1,600 and 3,000 (track and field).
She also claimed section titles in the 800, 1,600 and 4x400 relay in 2018 and 2019.
Wikstrom plans to run at Harvard.
“Eleanor is a very unique individual,” Skyline track and field and cross country coach Sean Kohles said about his captain in a CIF news release. “She inspires and challenges others to be better. She is empathetic, uplifting, fair, stern, and able to see the big picture.”
The pandemic prevented Wikstrom from the opportunity to defend her track championships this spring, which has not been easy to digest.
“Coming into May is definitely a little difficult because this is the time of the year everything is culminating,” she said. “We would have had section championships in the upcoming week, We would have had state championships the last weekend of May.
“But I think I’m getting more adjusted to my closure looking different than I was expecting it to.”
Barrett `Bear’ Nunley of Tulare Union was also recognized as a CIF scholar-athlete of the year.
Wikstrom and Nunley, among 374 candidates for the award that dates to 1982, will each receive a $5,000 scholarship.
The CIF also gave $1,000 scholarships to 20 section winners.
The Bay Area section honorees included Sacred Heart Cathedral’s Alden Standley and Branham’s Evan Franco of the Central Coast Section, Las Lomas’ Emma Casey and St. Joseph Notre Dame’s Zavier Annis of the North Coast Section, Coliseum College Prep Academy’s Carla Franco-Felix and David Robles of the Oakland Section and Mission’s Elena Rodriguez and Raoul Wallenberg’s Adam Chirackal of the San Francisco Section.