Fr. Van Dyke, Mr. Glennon, Dr. Maginnis, Dean Rodruiguez, family, friends, and the class of 2023, good morning.
Standing here today and looking at my classmates, it is hard for me to see the changes that have occurred these past years. On the surface, there are few obvious differences. Take me for example. Coming into Prep, I was a five-foot-seven kid whose voice cracked almost every time he spoke. Today, I’m a proud five foot eight, and the voice cracks are only a little less frequent. You may even hear one as I’m speaking today.
On the surface, yes, aside from a few buzz cuts and new facial hair that we tried to hide from Dean Rod, it is hard to notice all the changes of the past four years. However, if we look back in minutes rather than years, we see how our class became the young men we are today. And I think we made those minutes count.
When I first came to Prep as a fourteen year old, I was looking for a school with great academics and athletics, and I thought that I had all the minutes in the world to experience this exciting new place. There would be endless games and plays to attend, piles of quizzes, and truckloads of homework assignments. New people, new experiences, some good, some challenging. But now, as a graduating senior, time seems to have warped, days have passed in seconds, and these years we thought would never end have, in fact, come to a close. So I want to take a few minutes to reflect on the community we built while we were here.
It feels like just days ago that we nervously laughed as the applause of upperclassmen bounced off the walls of the chapel at the Mass of the Holy Spirit, or when we felt the cool water splash our heads and stomachs as we were baptized into the student section of football games. Then there was our first homework assignment, and then our second and third and fourth, and we realized freshman year was going to be harder than we expected.
Despite this, I remember joy in huddling around Alexander Maloy as he pumped his fist after winning the Freshmen Ping Pong tournament. I remember the awkward conversations in the field house with the Stone Ridge girls during our Friday night mixer, and the all too familiar walk of shame back to our friends when they wouldn’t give us their numbers.
Our sophomore year we counted the minutes--and they were long minutes--until we could return to campus just to sit two people at a table during lunch in the field house, and I certainly will never forget that first chicken patty back in the South Room. I can feel the buzzing of my phone in my pocket as we texted each other during online classes. I can still hear Mr. Smith's voice as he yelled for us to stop closing each other’s computers during our classes in the MPR. I feel the spring breeze as we walked through the quad again at the end of sophomore year. And I remember ripping our shirts off after Colin Burns scored a diving goal to put us up in the IAC championship lacrosse game against Bullis.
Then junior year we were really back. No more Zoom! And no more sleeping in late on Wednesdays before driving in for a COVID test in the Hanley Center. Gone too were sympathy points from teachers, and in its place we discovered the academic rigor our parents had been promised. Back too was Kairos. Where we honestly opened up with each other for the first time about ourselves and our relationships with God, family, and friends and stayed up way too late telling stories in our cabins. We followed the lead of Frankie Anstett, Patrick Dufour, and Teddy Kavanaugh as they belted “O God Beyond All Praising” at mass. We giggled like kids watching Dr. Hendren perform in “Footloose,” and we cheered our lungs out when Antonio Perotta hit home runs into Golf Lane.
This year the joy of our being together continued as Isaiah Rose back-flipped in front of the entire student body; we proudly watched Andrew Matthews carry the senior class on his back during basketball senior night as the only senior to represent this class on the team. We splashed our classmates in the dunk tank on field day, and we jumped and hugged one another as we hoisted three shiny IAC trophies in the air on the new stadium field.
Through the past four years, together we have built, minute by minute, a community. In every “we love our seniors” chant, we became a community of spirit. Through every practice and every hand stuck out to help a teammate up, we became a community of competitors. In every line memorized for the play, we became entertainers and performers. With every painting and mug we crafted on the third floor of Hass and every paper we helped a classmate write, we became creators. In every chariot built for the race and every poster plastered on the walls of the George, we became a community. In these minutes, on these fields, in these classrooms, and right where you are sitting today, our class found itself. Through all of the minutes that make up what seem like the fastest four years of my life, we became brothers, and none of us could be here today without one another.
Now, it has only recently hit me that all of these minutes that once felt endless have somehow become four full years. And while there is comfort in knowing Dean Rod will never remove my license plate again because I parked in the teacher’s lot, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Scared of what life will be like outside of Georgetown Prep. We are so accustomed to Mr. Atayi waving to welcome us onto campus each morning, to Oscar Rosas greeting us with a smile and a fist bump as we line up to enter the South Room for lunch. At the end of the day, as we leave for home and homework, the sight of Mr. Graham hitting golf balls. These relationships that we have formed in this place are so simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary that letting go of them makes me wonder if I will ever build a community like the one we have here today. I worry that as I leave this place behind, leave these people behind, I will never love a place for all of its people and quirks as I have loved Prep.
Though I say I am scared, I believe that the world should be scared of us because there is no amount of preparation that can make anyone ready for what this class has to offer. This class is full of leaders that seize the day and make the most of big moments. And Louie Lou, Will Jarvis, and Donhee Cui were there with their cameras to capture every minute. I fully expect to see Seamus Malloy and Croix Harris on Broadway. And I believe Rocky Zhang is the real inventor of Chat GPT, and that Daniel Xu is well on his way to finding a solution to world peace. This class no doubt has the capacity to change the world, and at the heart of that change are the minutes that we spent together on this campus and in places like Pine Ridge, Ivanhoe, and the inner cities of Baltimore and Los Angeles where we immersed ourselves in communities unlike our own and which taught us as much as any class we took.
Back at home, we spent hours in quiet rooms playing intense hangman games on the whiteboards, only stopping to finish Calculus homework. For weeks we came running to class in a pool of sweat because we just had to play one more spikeball game. By sharing our minutes, we built a community.
From this community, we will all take with us Q’s smile, the laughs we shared in the George Café while eating chocolate muffins, the shouts and hollers that rang through the quad on Friday afternoons, the hours we spent trying to memorize Latin synopses. And while I know all of these minutes will fade, I also know they make me who I am, and I feel certain that we as a class will hold them close to our hearts so they do not slip away.
Fr. Van Dyke and Fr. Sauter have taught us that St. Ignatius’ most important virtue was gratitude, so I would like to say thank you. Thank you to my brother Connor, who put up with me for four years here and has to put up with me for another four years in college. That’s a lot of minutes. Thank you to the teachers who inspired me every day to do work with a true passion. Whether it was Mrs. Nichols yelling encouragement to the entire math floor or Dr. Ochs preparing the display of the 100 Years at Prep Exhibit, our teachers taught us what it means to be not only completely dedicated to our disciplines but also invested in others and in our work. You were role models to us all. Thank you to the grounds crew who were hard at work--long before we arrived at school--keeping our campus as beautiful as you see it today. Thank you to the dining staff not just for the chicken patties, but for the love that prepared and served our food every day. And thank you to our parents who gave us the opportunity to attend Prep. They have made sacrifices we can only strive to repay, and we know just how fortunate we are to have had this experience.
And last, thank you to the class of 2023. I came to this school looking for good academics and athletics, and I came away with friends who I will have for life. You gave me the best four years any 5’8 kid could ever wish for. You made the minutes count for me.
Thank you.
Will Keegan ‘23
