Indiana University of Pennsylvania Athletics

IUP Athletic Hall of Fame By-Laws require that a former student-athlete must have completed his or her campus athletic career not less than 10 years ago to be considered for induction.
Only one individual, Tammy Donnelly-Siusser last September, had been honored so soon after graduating. Today's induction of three-year teammate Dr. Elisa Benzoni-Rosenhein only a year later was just as much a natural choice.
It applauds the latter's becoming an All-American five times within four years of competing in cross country and track and field, all for coach Ed Fry.
Four medals were won in cross country, highlighted by a third-place finish, behind two Olympians, at the NCAA Division II national championship meet in Evansville, Indiana, in 1987, the same year Benzonr won the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference individual title (as IUP finished first as a team for the fifth straight year) and was runner-up at the NCAA Northeast regional.
"Weezie," as she is almost universally known, went to Nationals in '87 having had to recover from an injury sustained by colliding with an automobile in practice two months before.
The following spring (1988) she won PSAC trophies for both the 3000 and 5000 meter runs and became a track and field All-American by finishing fifth in the 5000 meter at the NCAA Division II national meet in San Angelo, Texas.
The Dean's List chemistry major and biology minor delivered all this as prologue to completing a doctor of osteopathy degree at the University of New England in Maine in 1993 and a five-year internship and residency at Christiana Care Hospital, part of the Medical Center of Delaware, this past spring.
This summer she joined a practice, Physicians for Women, with seven other doctors in Danbury, Connecticut, after having completed a 1993-94 internship at Berkshire Medical School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
In her medical schooling, Benzoni earned her share of awards, among them a chief residency and resident Teacher of the Year honor.
Nothing new to IUP's 1987 recipient of the Sally B. Johnson Scholarship (that goes annually to the university's outstanding woman student-athlete) who was twice granted the chemistry department's academic achievement award and who in 1986 was named the Pittsburgh area Woman Athlete of the Year.
While in Delaware, Benzoni maintained her interest in running by coaching University of Delaware cross country and track teams as a volunteer, embarking on a road race from time to time, and by running five to eight miles for herself every day.
She and Dr. Brian Rosenhein, an internist, married in 1994, have a son, two-year-old Alexander, and are expecting a second child whose due date is New Year's Eve.