— Vince Lombardi

Christina Walter has had a knack for being able to pick them up and lay them down.

“Since kindergarten, I was always the fastest kid in the class. I would beat all the boys,” the Bemus Point native recalled with a chuckle.

By the time she reached seventh grade, Christina joined the Maple Grove track and field team, and she literally took off from there, a journey that not only placed her among the best sprinters in the state during her years on Dutch Hollow Road, but it also confirmed that athletic success and academic achievement aren’t mutually exclusive.

Christina Walter

So imagine the proud moment that her parents, Peter and Carla, will experience on June 5 when their 22-year-old daughter will walk across the stage in front of Nassau Hall at Princeton University to accept her diploma.

The soon-to-be-owner of a bachelor’s degree in engineering, operations research and financial engineering at one of the world’s most prestigious schools, Christina has a career already waiting for her in equity trading at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan.

Her first day on the job is July 11.

“It was kind of a dream of mine,” she said. ” … I wanted to go somewhere, try out a bigger city, I guess. I’m really happy how things turned out.”

On your mark, get set …

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Princeton truly needs no introduction as an institution of higher learning. But did you know that of the school’s alumni, two have been U.S. presidents; 16 have been winners of the Nobel Prize; and 22 have been named Rhodes Scholars in the last 10 years alone.

Remarkably, there are only 5,232 undergraduates enrolled. In other words, Christina found herself in some select company when she arrived on campus in the fall of 2014. But even though she was the class valedictorian at Maple Grove, scored a perfect 2,400 on her Scholastic Aptitude Test and was an all-state track star, she admitted that the transition to college wasn’t easy.

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“In some ways, I wasn’t as well adjusted as some of the other kids, so It was a challenge,” she said.

But she eventually found her way, and not just while living on the idyllic campus in northern New Jersey.

“They encourage you to go to places you’d otherwise not go,” she said.

So, she did just that.

In the summer after her freshman year, she joined members of her track team on a trip to Cuba, and the school organized and financed a trip to Zambia where she helped develop and implement a course in software engineering for underprivileged students with a fellow intern. While there, she also mentored students in techniques for academic and personal success, such as goal-setting and entrepreneurial thinking.

There was more.

In the summer of 2016, she worked as a marketing intern for Andela, a New York City company which claims to be “building the next generation of global technologies.” And for good measure, in the summer of 2017, Christina worked as an equity analyst for Morgan Stanley in the Big Apple. Before she returned to school last fall, she had already secured a full-time job there upon her graduation.

“I’ve met people from all over the world,” she said.

One thing she hadn’t met with any real consistency in her first three years at Princeton, however, was making contributions to the track & field program on an individual basis.

That all changed in 2017-18.

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Even the best athletes have to pay their dues, especially when they are fortunate enough to find themselves at a Division I program. So even though Christina had accomplished so much in high school, it had become a challenge for her to leave the kind of athletic mark at Princeton that she’d been making academically.

But with the figurative finish line to her college career in sight, the ultra-determined Christina put a plan into action that reaped huge dividends for the Tigers’ track team.

“I think a lot about having a healthy balance between school work, athletics and sleeping, which is really hard to maintain,” she said. ” … After a lot of hard work, staying organized and maintaining an academic and athletic balance, I was able to finally make that happen this year.”

The results prove it.

Earlier this month at the Ivy League Outdoor Championships at the University of Pennsylvania, Christina finished third in a personal-best 11.80 in the 100 meters, which was the third-fastest time in Princeton history. She also ran a personal-best 24.45 in the 200, good for sixth on the Tigers’ all-time list. Other accomplishments include a 7.56 clocking in the indoor 60-meter dash, which is first in program history, and a 24.41 in the indoor 200, which is tied for second on the Tigers’ all-time list.

“I’m super happy how my athletic career panned out,” Christina said.

A decade since joining the Maple Grove track team, and at least that long since she began pursuing academic excellence with a vengeance, she can finally take a deep breath after her graduation early next month.

To celebrate, she and a friend will enjoy a nearly three-week trip to Europe where they’ll tour the Netherlands, Germany and France.

“I’ve been wanting to go to Paris since the seventh grade when I took a French class at Maple Grove,” she said. “It’s kind of a 10-year dream that is finally going to happen.”

Who says dreams can’t come true?