New Track Revives Interest in one of Huntington’s All-Time Best
The summer opening of a new outdoor track at Huntington High School led to some reminiscing in the community about good times past for the high school girls’ program and one star in particular that many seem to have forgotten: Pia Palladino.
Born in England and raised in Italy, Ms. Palladino moved to the United States as a teenager and enrolled at Huntington. By the time she graduated everyone knew her name. A decorated student, two-time New York state track champion and high school All-American, she earned an athletic scholarship to Georgetown University.
After her graduation from Huntington in 1979, Ms. Palladino starred for the newly minted Hoya program. As a true freshman, she was the school’s first All-American in cross country. That was just the start of a fabulous career that eventually landed her in the Georgetown Athletic Hall of Fame.
Before she was finished as a Hoya, Ms. Palladino was a five-time captain of the cross country and track and field teams, grabbed All-American honors again, this time in the 5,000m run and set two Georgetown distance medley records and six new individual school marks.
Today Ms. Palladino is assistant curator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, located at 1000 5th Ave. in Manhattan, where her husband, Laurence Kanter also works as a curator. Together they have two sons and live in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
The Huntington grad is fluent in four languages, including Italian, French and Spanish. At Georgetown she studied Classics on the Hilltop, aiming for a career as an archeologist. She participated in summer excavations in Greece and France and was an intern at a sculpture gallery in New York City, according to her Hall of Fame profile.
Her winning ways on the track carried over into the classroom, too. She was on Georgetown’s Dean’s List and earned the Robert A. Duffey Scholar-Athlete Award as a senior. It is the highest honor the school gives to a student-athlete for “excellence in academics and athletics.”
Ms. Palladino went on to obtain a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in art history. The fellowship she earned to attend graduate school forced her to end her competitive career, which had continued even after her Georgetown graduation.
She landed the position at the Met in 1992 after finishing her doctoral dissertation in Italy. Her professional career has included authoring or co-authoring five books on Renaissance artwork and writing dozens of articles and book reviews.
Her Huntington track career began as a sprinter, but she soon found her niche as a middle and long distance runner. Her 1976 cross country time of 18:59.9 on the course at Sunken Meadow State Park remains to this day as the 16th fastest in Suffolk history.
Ms. Palladino was only the second women’s track and field/cross country athlete to be enshrined in the Georgetown Athletic Hall of Fame.
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