Category: Upper School

New Football Coach Has Solid Plan for Success

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.

In April, Mike Tirabassi joined Harker as head football coach, but he’s a known quantity on Davis Field as he was Harker defensive coordinator in 2012 and offensive coordinator in 2013. Previously, he was head coach at Pinewood High School and JV offensive coordinator at Santa Margarita High School.

“My coaching philosophy is very simple,” Tirabassi said. “Use football as a medium for developing life skills.” He believes learning these skills can result in people who improve both themselves and their communities. “As long as we stay true to that vision, competitive success will take care of itself,” he added.

Tirabassi also will continue developing an environment where players feel both safe and comfortable with their skills. “I believe in removing any chance of players being put into a situation in which they aren’t ready,” he said. One system he’s implementing will separate new players from experienced ones to ensure new players can learn the fundamentals of football at a suitable pace.

“Practices are going great. Our players are working very hard toward a common goal, which is a powerful thing. Everyone … is doing everything they can to make the Harker community proud.”

The coach noted that he is inspired by his players and how they want the team to be a source of pride to their fellow students. “We have talked a lot about our responsibility to represent Harker on and off the football field,” he said. “The team feels that they can bring the community together every Friday night and be a source of pride for the students, faculty and parents. It is pretty awesome how hard they are working to fulfill this obligation to their school.

“Success for us is going to come when we look up in the stands and see people from all four campuses rallying together, going crazy to support our school. We are doing everything we can do to build a team that properly represents our Harker community.

“If we have a group of players who are committed to the vision, every member of our team has the potential to have a life-changing experience and we have the potential to be a source of pride for the entire Harker community,” Tirabassi said. “This is what matters to me.”

Tirabassi also is excited to be more involved with the Harker community. “There is no place that I have ever seen that is like Harker,” he beamed. “The unadulterated care that the faculty and staff have for the students is amazing.”

Sophomore Golfer Earns Top Spot at AJGA Tourney

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.

Katherine Zhu, grade 10, won the Gary Gilchrist Golf Academy/Shanshan Feng Junior Championship in August! This is her first American Junior Golf Association win. The AJGA website noted: “With a final-round 2-under-par 70, Katherine Zhu of San Jose, California, earned her first AJGA win at 5-under-par 211. The victory was Zhu’s first AJGA win after having two previous top-three finishes in 2014.”

Naturally, the win meant lot to her. “I was excited because it is my first win and I was relieved because I was worried I’d never win anything,” she said. Zhu noted that “keeping calm and patient” was key to winning. On competing for Harker this year, she noted, “I’m really excited to see how far we’ll go this year!” Congratulations to Zhu on this accomplishment, a great way to end the summer!

Summertime Training Prepares Athletes for Fall Season

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.

The football team and the boys and girls basketball teams trained particularly hard over the summer to get into peak shape before school started, said Jaron Olson, head athletic trainer. “Girls volleyball team members were also in the gym, working on moves and staying fit for the season start.”

“I never really had a routine until postseason last year,” noted Satchi Thockchom, grade 10. “Before that the only time I was exercising was in the gym during practice. Last year I could only do arm exercises with 15s-17.5 lb weights, but now I’m ranging from the 20-27.5 lb weights. I think I’m much stronger mentally as well.”

Thockchom noted additional benefits to summer training. “Every offseason’s an opportunity. It’s also a great team-building environment for us to push each other and meet the incoming freshmen,” she said. “We had an open gym a few weeks ago, and I could see a huge difference from last year. I think a lot of that comes from staying active in the weight room.”

“Physical preparation in the weeks and months prior to the start of a sports season is critical to an athlete’s success regardless of skill level,” noted Olson. “In addition to the performance advantages, our goal with preseason strength training is to help reduce or prevent injuries.

“Student athletes who neglect to adequately prepare for the rigors of a sports season put tremendous strain on their bodies once practices commence. Essentially, trying to go from zero to 60 very quickly doesn’t always work out so well, making otherwise preventable injuries more likely. Hard work and conditioning during the summer also helps athletes acclimate to the heat before practices begin in August, which is often the hottest part of the year,” he noted.

Football had a robust summer program, training on the field as well as in the weight room in preparation for a new season with new coach Mike Tirabassi. About 25 football players trained almost daily over the summer. They were joined by more than a dozen basketball players and another dozen or so volleyball players, so there were about 50 students training several days per week, Olson said.

The athletic department hired two new people to help manage the athletes’ health. Garret Jones joined Harker this summer as strength and conditioning coach. He jumped right in, advising and directing athletes as they trained.

Jones, who has trained youth athletes to senior citizens, holds various personal and group training certifications. “My personal motto is movement quality before quantity!” he said. “Gaining strength and speed greatly reduces the risk of injury with all the acceleration and deceleration athletes must do. It is imperative to have strong muscles, joints and ligaments. Above the physical adaptions, training improves mental focus and confidence. We are teaching life skills in the weight room and every student would benefit from better quality physical activity.”

Jones is joined by Jon Marques, a certified athletic trainer, who was hired as an assistant athletic trainer. Meanwhile, Jenna Allen returns for her second year as an athletic trainer. All three work under Olson.

Having the athletic trainers will allow the department to provide better coverage for teams, particularly on the middle school campus. They will continue to address students’ needs across the spectrum from therapeutic and corrective exercises to strength training and performance enhancement, all critical elements to maintaining general health and building winning teams.

In addition, a kinesiology and sports medicine course, introduced last year and taught by Olson, will allow students who complete the course to work as athletic training student aides. They can practice taping and injury care skills on our athletes under the supervision of faculty athletic trainers.

The athletic department also added two sections of a strength and conditioning course during the school day.

“I have really enjoyed working with all the student athletes this summer,” Jones said. “The encouragement and camaraderie developed in the gym will carry over to the court or field. These athletes are going to be tough both physically and mentally, and I am really looking forward to watching them compete.”

Students SOAR in Summer Wharton School Program

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.

Harker’s business and entrepreneurship students stayed busy over the summer, participating in the SOAR (Strategy, Operations, Action, Research) program at Harker, held in partnership with the Wharton School of Business, from late July to early August. The program featured an intensive series of workshops and field trips designed to teach students about key business principles.

One exercise had teams of students simulate the process of starting a box-selling business and keeping it running for five months (condensed to a single day) while they considered factors such as demand, marketing and financial management. Students started by purchasing the materials to make the boxes, such as paper, glue and scissors, while coming up with a wage to pay the people building the boxes, which they would then sell to a buyer. With the money earned, the students are able to upgrade the technology they use to build the boxes by purchasing stencils. However, the stencils come at a high cost, so students must decide whether to keep production costs low or aim for higher quality. Later, the box makers are notified that their customer has hit a rough patch and is only able to purchase a certain number of boxes. This challenges the teams to come up with ways to keep earning profits when demand for their products is in a downturn. Finally, the teams must compete against one another when the buyer announces that only a certain total number of boxes will be purchased. Students must devise a way to entice the buyer by coming up with new pricing structures and advertising.

In another simulation, teams of students are charged with managing a car manufacturer that must close one of its divisions. Over a period of four months (each shortened to about an hour), the teams focus on improving performance based on a series of metrics. Each team member performs a highly specialized task. For the first “month,” teams focus on production and sell cars at various prices to a buyer, who purchases the cars based on appearance and performance. The students then decide on how to approach production and whether to emphasize quality, volume or cost. In the final stage of the exercise, the students are no longer restricted from performing different tasks on the production line, allowing for new production strategies to increase profit.

The first of three field trips during the SOAR program was to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which accounts for approximately 20 percent of the U.S. economy. Students first visited the vault, where they watched reserve staff count, sort and shred currency. According to the tour guides, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank shreds $56-75 million each
day. At the Fed Center, the students learned about the various functions of the Fed via guided tours and displays. Visitors can even purchase a bag of shredded U.S. currency as a souvenir.

During the next trip, the students headed to Wharton’s San Francisco campus. The students received a tour of campus facilities, including its breathtaking view of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. As a bonus, the students also attended a presentation on venture capital in Silicon Valley, conducted by adjunct professor of management Doug Collom.

On their visit to the KeyPoint Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in the country, the students played a game in which they used magnets to come up with product ideas, and heard from KeyPoint’s chief operating officer on how marketers are constantly competing for the attention of students with buying power. They also learned about the operations of human resources departments, how financial institutions leverage technology and received a crash course in finance.

Back at Harker, the students participated in an accounting course held by Color Accounting, which teaches fundamental accounting principles using unique methods. This particular exercise had students grouping different types of financial statements by color and process transactions for a fictional business.

In the Entrepreneur in the Classroom course, students broke off into teams and drew up a full business plan. Wharton professor Keith Weigelt guid- ed the teams and taught skills in a variety of areas, including sales, marketing, budgeting and presentation skills. Various activities and simulations were also used to teach the principles used by the students in the development of their plans. Completed business plans were presented by the students at the end of the SOAR program session.

Student Researchers Head to the Top of the World for Arctic Expedition

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly.

In July, with temperatures rising in California, 12 Harker students traveled to the Arctic for a special two-week research expedition focused on environmental issues including the impact of global warming. After 28 hours of travel, the crew landed in Oslo, Norway, where they visited Frogner Park and the Fram Museum, where Norway’s first ship built for polar research is kept. “We ran around the ship looking at every secret room, staircase or tool,” wrote Sharanya Balaji, grade 12, in her blog of the expedition. “We even enacted scenes from ‘Titanic’ and pretended to bail buckets of water out of the ship. It was an amazing end to our day.”

The next day was also filled with travel as the students made their way to the town of Longyearbyen, where they enjoyed lunch before boarding their cruise ship, “Le Boreal.” After a good night’s sleep, the students awoke to a great breakfast and were briefed on the day’s activities. They later landed on the shores of Isfjorden and took in the lay of the land, wandering its hills and grabbing many photos of the local flora and fauna. Following lunch, they journeyed to Poolepynten to see the many walruses that live there.

Later on the trip, the students visited the Andoyane Islands, where they received a sobering reminder of one of many ongoing environmental issues. As they walked on to the beach, “we noticed loads and loads of plastic on the ground, which really disturbed us,” said Balaji. They promptly began picking up the trash on the beach, filling nine bags weighing a total of 125 pounds. Afterward they visited Monacobreen, a large glacier that has retreated in recent years due to climate change. “Every so often, you would hear a thunderous booming sound which signified the carving of the glacier,” Balaji said. “Watching that was nothing but surreal.”

More travel was in store for the next couple of days, as the group made its way toward Greenland. Unfortunately, thick ice surrounding the island made it impossible to land, and the students were disappointed to learn that the entire Greenland portion of the expedition would have to be canceled.

The group finally reached the “top of the world” the next day at the island of Grimsey, located off the coast of Iceland, where they posed for pictures next to a signpost that pointed to various major cities and took in the breathtaking view from the island’s cliffs. They spent the next day sightseeing in Iceland, getting close to a large waterfall, buying souvenirs and visiting the Devil’s Kitchen, a park with geysers spewing sulfuric acid.

For the final excursion, the students went to Flatey Island, which is inhabited by only six people. Here, the students presented the results of the research they had conducted over the course of the expedition. After they finished, the students were treated to a 17-minute slide show recapping their travels and made the most of their remaining time in Iceland by viewing its famous lava trails and visiting a shark museum.

Into the Fringe: Conservatory Takes ‘Into the Woods’ to Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the fall 2015 Harker Quarterly. Read the full, multimedia version, including two video reports, at http://longform.harker.org/?p=6!

It’s opening night of the spring musical, and director Laura Lang-Ree already has her cast dreaming of Scotland, four months away. “You can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like,”she imparts to the students, who are probably trying anyway as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, humming in unison. She circles the cast, filling their heads with visions of the weeks leading up to the premiere, of traveling up and down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, of the spectacle of Festival Fringe, the humming growing in volume.

“1! 2! 3!” The room erupts, and the members of the cast take their places. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the oldest festival of its kind, a city-wide event with thousands of shows taking place in hundreds of venues. It began in 1947 when eight alternative theater companies arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival to perform for the large crowds that had assembled in the city. Several decades later, it is now the world’s largest arts festival, spanning weeks and offering space for nearly every kind of performer. “It’s just mindblowing, the innovation and the quality of work that happens at the Fringe,” said Lang-Ree.

Harker’s participation in Fringe dates back to 2007, when the now-defunct American Musical Theatre of San Jose saw the Harker Conservatory production of “Urinetown” and nominated it for consideration by the American High School Theater Festival. After a lengthy adjudication process and a memorable first year at Fringe, Lang-Ree decided to try to attend every four years, provided Harker was one of the selected schools. The Conservatory took “Pippin” to the festival in 2011.

Attending the Fringe is like no other experience for our students, Lang-Ree said. There’s “a big part of being an artist that people underestimate: observation. One of the main ways that we grow [as artists] is by observing and learning and then trying it for ourselves.”

Putting on a show at Fringe can be tricky. To make room for the thousands of performances at the festival, each group has a total of two hours to set up, do the show and tear down to make room for the next performer. In anticipation, veteran set designer Paul Vallerga worked tirelessly to prepare sets and props that were ready for travel and easy to put in place, while also selling the atmosphere of the production.

“It’s all going to be in such a whirlwind,” Caroline Howells ’15, who played Cinderella, predicted when rehearsals began. “I imagine that we’ll get on stage and before we know it, it will be over.”

“Into the Woods” inspired extraordinary excitement in this cast and crew. Stephen Sondheim’s famously rich and challenging score and thematic complexity has achieved legendary status in the nearly 30 years since the musical premiered. “Musically, it’s very sophisticated,” said music director Catherine Snider. “So there’s always a little bit of extra-special care that needs to go into preparing a musical when the music is simply so difficult to learn.”

Sondheim devised subtle musical motifs for each of the story’s rich assortment of fairy tale characters, all searching for their own happily-ever-afters.

Sondheim’s music is couched in a story that puts fairy tale characters into situations that contort their (and “the audience’s) preconceptions about supposedly happy endings, daring to ask what happens when people get what they think they want. Act 1 concludes with what most would deem a happy ending, but things change in Act 2.

“‘Into the Woods’ explores what happens after the happily-ever-after, when our wishes aren’t quite what we thought and what we wanted kind of falls apart,” Snider said.

It’s a lot for actors to learn and digest, but it makes for a musical that is rewarding to perform, as well as witness. “Usually in a musical, maybe the music will be harder or the dance might be harder, one element might be more difficult than the others, but for ‘Into the Woods’ it was the combination of the acting and the singing that was at a really, really high level,” said Lang-Ree. “So that’s what made it unique.”

More about Harker’s appearance at Fringe – including the street performances, the lightning-quick setup and teardown, the exciting adventures in Scotland – can be found in the full media-rich feature story, now online at news.harker.org; search on “Into the Fringe.”