Harker has had a banner year in the athletics department with 17 students recruited by colleges and four planning to play in their sports as walk-ons.
They are: Michael Amick, UCLA, soccer; Kevin Cali, De Anza or West Valley, baseball; Chris Chang, Columbia, crew; Keri Clifford, Santa Clara, water polo; Isabelle Connell, Pepperdine, track & field; Siobhan Cox, Stanford, soccer; Karan Das-Grande, Connecticut College, water polo; Ashley Del Alto, Briar Cliff University, softball; Patricia Huang, Amherst, golf; Daria Karakoulka, Cal Lutheran, tennis; Sierra Lincoln, Cal Tech, water polo; Maverick McNealy, Stanford, golf; Sumit Minocha, Stanford, track & field; Nikhil Panu, Johns Hopkins University, basketball; Andy Perez, UC Santa Barbara, soccer; Daniza Rodriguez, Whittier College, basketball; Arhum Siddiqui, Brown, squash.
Harker held a brief gathering to celebrate the athletes and their committment to their sport just prior to graduation, attended by parents, coaches and players. To these Harker stalwarts we wish the very best of luck in their academic and athletic careers. Go alumni Eagles!
Of all the remarkable milestones Harker students achieve, none is as great or as meaningful as their final rite of passage when they receive their diplomas. The pride was palpable on May 24 at the Mountain Winery as the Class of 2013 collected their diplomas from Chris Nikoloff, head of school.
Ashvin Swaminathan represented his class as valedictorian, and his speech found a perfect balance between honoring the past and becoming ready for the future. He posed the question, “By what means did every one of us manage to triumph over our tribulations?” The answer? “Our parents.” Swaminathan adjured his classmates, “Let us vow to continue to treat our parents as our heroes,” to honor them and make them proud.
He asked his peers to vow to “never compromise on the value system that our teachers have established for us,” adding, “Let us vow to share our leftover resources with those who are not as fortunate as we are.”
The teachers who had led Swaminathan and his classmates on what he called a “beautiful scholastic safari” were on their feet moments after his talk concluded.
Keynote speaker Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, an organization dedicated to volunteerism which has nurtured projects resulting in the gifting of millions of dollars of services.
Mehta’s engaging speech was a rallying cry to fix what is “at the core of all of today’s most pressing challenges: … we have become profoundly disconnected.” He says humans are wired to give and to help each other, and asked, “Will you, Class of 2013, step up to rebuild a culture of trust, empathy and compassion?”
There are three keys to living a life of giving, Mehta said. The first is to give, the second is to receive, and the third is to dance. “Our biggest problem with giving and receiving is that we try and track it. And when we do that, we lose the beat.”
Nikoloff also had an opportunity to offer some words of wisdom to the class, which he did in a light-hearted talk titled “Love like a Labrador,” meaning unconditionally and with joy.
A two-part show on May 3, titled “In Concert,” brought together all of the upper school vocal groups to ring in the summer and bid farewell to the graduating seniors and honor them for their dedication to Harker’s performing arts programs.
The first portion of the show was dedicated primarily to songs hailing from Great Britain and the countries that were part of its once-massive empire. The upper school’s all-female chamber group Cantilena teamed up with Camerata, the mixed chamber choir, for Stephen Leek’s “Kungala (Australia),” the first song of the show. Other great selections included Camerata’s performance of “Shoot False Love” by Thomas Morley, the Monty Python classic “Brave Sir Robin” sung by the ever-popular boys a cappella group Guys’ Gig and a solo performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Silent Noon” by baritone Stephan Pellissier, grade 11. Cantilena closed the first portion of the show with their rendition of the Sting hit “Fields of Gold.”
Bel Canto kicked off the second part of the show with a pair of African folk songs and medley of songs from Leonard Bernstein’s beloved score from “West Side Story.”
Upper school show choir Downbeat concluded the concert, singing a variety of pop standards, including the poignant a cappella song by Billy Joel, “And So It Goes,” and Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the group’s now-traditional closer. They also recreated their fashion show hit, “Wings,” to the clear delight of the audience.
For the first time, the middle school varsity-A tennis team (grades 6-8) has swept both public and private league championships, winning 5-4 against Kennedy last night to clinch the second title. The team went 20-0 for the season.
This is the first time the team has gone undefeated in both the regular season and the playoffs, and the first time the team has won both the private and public middle school tennis titles. “This is about as big as it gets in middle school sports!” said Greg Lawson, assistant head of school for student affairs.
Lawson added that over the last two years, the team compiled a 36-2 record and won three of four divisional titles. “Coach John Fruttero has done amazing things with the team,” Lawson added.
“Today was not the 9-0 against Menlo last week in WBAL championship match,” Fruttero said, “but special in a very different way. The team battled from being down 4-1 for the second time this season to win 5-4. It was amazing to see these kids grow and transform themselves into a united championship team, from the inside out. It was an honor to lead them in entertaining a couple of hundred cheering fans today. What a blast!”
Harker is applying for a $5 million grant from the Valley Foundation to boost its capital campaign to raise money for a new performing arts and gymnasium complex.
“One of the criteria that grant-making foundations examine in deciding whether to award a grant to a school is parent participation in annual giving,” said Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement at Harker. “Foundations want to be sure that they are adding to stakeholder responsibility, not replacing it. Parent participation in annual giving is a widely accepted measure of parent support of the school’s mission and philosophy.”
To increase parent participation, and thus increase the chances of getting the grant, Harker has started a 5-for-5 campaign, asking parents who have not contributed to annual giving to give $5 to help Harker get $5 million.
“We have 100 percent board participation and 100 percent faculty participation,” Rosenthal noted. “We’re aiming to increase our parent participation to a similar level.”
The campaign only runs through May 31. “We’re asking those families who haven’t yet participated in annual giving to give $5, $50, $500 or $5,000 to help our children receive the $5 million grant,” Rosenthal said.
Families may make their gifts online at www.harker.org/onlinegiving or can drop off their donations at any campus’ front office, but gifts must be made by May 31 to help with the 5-for-5 compaign.
“At the upper school, my ‘soccer daughter’ loved playing on Davis Field,” said Karen Coates (Amy ’10, Shelby ’13), co-chair of the Parent Development Committee, “and my ‘swimming daughter’ felt enormous pride in swimming in the Singh Aquatic Center and competing against other private schools in the area. Nichols Hall not only provides the outstanding science facilities, it also serves as the manifestation of Harker’s direction for architectural excellence that we will see in the facilities planned for the future.”
Track and field continued their strong season this past Saturday at the league championships as both the boys and the girls teams placed third in the team standings. Claudia Tischler, grade 11, won the 1,600m after leading the entire race, then came from behind in the 800m to claim her second championship of the day. Isabelle Connell, grade 12, won the 100m in 12.24, then placed second in the 200m, setting a new Harker record in that race with a 24.85. Sumit Minocha, grade 12, roared back from sixth place all the way to second place in the final half of the 100m, finishing with 11.15. Again in the 200m, he stormed back, breaking his own meet record and cracking the 22.00 barrier with a 21.76. Corey Gonzalez, grade 10, won the 1,600m field, starting out with two 70-second laps then pulling away from the field with a 65-second lap and finally blazing a 63-second lap to win the title with a 4:29.79. He also led the entire 3,200m race from start to finish, setting a new meet record with a 9:50.37.
In 4×400 relay action, Tischler led off the race with a 62-second 1,600m relay, then handed off to Nadia Palte, grade 9, for a 66-second run and Ragini Bhattacharya, grade 12, for a 63-second lap before Connell charged forward with an unbelievable 57-second lap, sending the Eagles from fourth place all the way to first with a new school record of 4:10.10.
Julia Wang, grade 10, set a personal record in the discus with an 80’9″, giving her third place. Michael Chen, grade 12, placed second in the discus with a 124’7″ and sixth in the shot put. Matt Giammona, grade 12, placed third in shot put with a personal record of 41’1″ and wound up in sixth place in the discus.
Connell, Minocha, Gonzales, Chen and Tischler all qualified for next week’s CCS championships, as did the girls 1,600m relay team. Seven Eagles are moving on!
Swimming
Congratulations to all our swimmers and divers on a terrific season!
This weekend, Craig Neubieser, grade 10, set a personal record in the 100m butterfly, bumping up his CCS ranking from 52nd to 45th. Aaron Huang, grade 10, finished 17th out of 56 swimmers in both the 200m individual medley and the 100m breaststroke. On the girls’ side, Manon Audebert, grade 11, finished 14th overall in the 200m freestyle with a time of 1:57.16 and 13th overall in the 100m freestyle with a season-best time of 53.81. Angela Huang, grade 9, finished 15th in the 50m freestyle with a time of 25.26. The girls’ 400m freestyle relay team of Huang, Audebert, Kimmy Ma, grade 11, and Anika Mohindra, grade 9, finished 15th overall with a season-best time of 3:43.23.
Baseball
The boys closed down their season last week with a 7-1 loss to Menlo. Seniors Kevin Cali and Jacob Hoffman and sophomores David Lin and Ayush Midha all recorded hits in the final game. The boys end their year at 9-15-1 overall.
Softball
In playoffs, Harker drew the #11 seed which pitted them against sixth-seeded Aptos High last night, where they went head to head at Aptos in a very tough game. Harker led the game 2-1 until the sixth inning when Aptos pulled into the lead capitalizing on a hit and an error to take the lead and win, 3-2. Aptos is a Division II team, versus Harker’s Division III status, and each team had seven strikeouts; there were a total of five hits between both teams for the entire game (three were by Aptos). Coach Raul Rios noted that Aptos players repeatedly congratulated Harker players on a tough game, and our girls ended the season heads held high. Congrats on a great season!
Volleyball
The boys volleyball season came to a close this week in the CCS quarterfinals at Leigh High School. The Eagles fell to the Longhorns 25-27, 22-25, 24-26 to finish the season at 17-15 overall. Thank you to the supportive crowd!
Forbes published an article in mid-May on entrepreneurship in higher education. The author talked to entrepreneurial students at some of the top universities in the country – and to one from Harker, Sameer Vij, grade 11. Read on! http://onforb.es/15MVsme. Harker’s own entrepreneur program is coming on line in August. Here are some useful links:
In late April, grade 8 students Venkat Sankar, Arjun Subramaniam and Davd Zhu and grade 7 students Edgar Lin and Rajiv Movva traveled to Washington, D.C., for the National Science Bowl, in which the team placed fifth overall among 46 other teams hailing from 34 states. Middle school science teacher Vandana Kadam called the placing “a huge achievement for a school that started Science Bowl just three years ago.” Remarkably, the team went undefeated for the first nine rounds of the competition, and were just two rounds away from the championship match.
The team also managed to place 12th in a non-academic portion of the event in which the students had to build a vehicle that could carry a container of salt a distance of 20 meters in the shortest possible time, powered by a lithium ion battery. The Harker team’s vehicle went the distance in 7.6 seconds, just over one second longer than the first-place finisher’s vehicle.
Not ones to let a trip out of state go to waste, the students also saw the many sights offered by the nation’s capital, including the Natural History Museum, the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol Building.
David Zhu, grade 8, took fifth place in one of the toughest math competitions in the U.S.
Last Friday, student representatives from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense and State Department schools worldwide participated in the 2013 Raytheon Mathcounts national competition.
Each state is only allowed four competitors, making it much more difficult to qualify from California than other states; more than 250,000 students and 5,050 coaches participated in the opening round. For the national event May 9-12, 56 teams of four members each were invited to Washington, D.C.
Zhu was top scorer on the California team, with a perfect score of 46. The other California three team members were selected from a group of five students, all with 44 points, by tiebreaker. He was one of only four students nationwide who scored a perfect 46 in the State MathCounts competition. One of the others was the eventual national MathCounts champion.
In the National competition, the written round has two parts totaling 46 points. On Friday, 224 top “mathletes” competed over a two-hour period. Zhu, the only California team member to reach the top 12, scored 44 points, placing him seventh in the written round with the top 12 advancing to the countdown round. In the first part of the countdown round, “he beat his opponent,” said Vandana Kadam, middle school mathematics department chair, but was outpaced by his opponent in the next round, finishing a stellar fifth place at this year’s national MathCounts.
“This is a phenomenal achievement!,” said Kadam. “David has been extremely consistent in all math competitions during his middle school years and this is a perfect end to his MS math journey. Ranking fifth out of 224 top math students is no small feat.” Congratulations to Zhu on this major accomplishment!
The Harker School will hold a memorial in honor of Sandy Padgett, original member of the upper school faculty and founding director of Harker’s college counseling program, who passed away April 22. The celebration of Padgett’s life will be Thurs., May 30, 3:30-5:30 p.m. in the quad at the upper school campus.
Guests will be able to peruse some of the wonderful comments her former students have sent in and honor her invaluable contributions to Harker and to the lives of so many students. There will be a few formal remarks and guests can share memories from 4-5 p.m.
The school is creating a book of messages to give to the family after the event. To have a message included, email it to Nicole Hall at nicoleh@harker.org.
Padgett’s family has requested that in lieu of flowers, please send all donations to The Sandy Padgett Memorial Endowed Scholarship Fund, established in her memory. Checks can be mailed to the Sandy Padgett Memorial Fund, Harker Advancement, 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, CA 95129. Please note “Sandy Padgett Memorial Fund” in the check’s memo line.
So that we can prepare adequate refreshments, please RSVP to Nicole Hall at nicoleh@harker.org by May 24 if you plan to attend.
This has been a sad and tragic loss for the Harker community. The school continues to provide support to the students and staff, and we hope the outpouring from our community about Sandy Padgett’s impact in their lives is a comfort to her family.