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Enduring Gratitude
How an Athlete Found His True North
Scott Meadow ’73, P’02 had a rocky start at Hotchkiss, but he left Lakeville confident in his talents and his future. His teachers and coaches played a crucial role in guiding him along the way. Today, as a professor of entrepreneurial finance and private equity at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he is helping graduate students chart their own paths.
BY WENDY CARLSON
SCOTT MEADOW HAD NEVER HEARD
of Hotchkiss when he was growing up in Dayton, OH. As a freshman in high school, he had lackluster grades, and he was struggling to find his true north. His parents offered to send him to a summer camp in Cornwall, CT, near Lakeville, hoping the change might turn him around. He agreed to go, but only if he had access to a facility where he could pursue his passion of weightlifting. The owner of the camp, Howard Greene, secured permission for Meadow to use Monahan Gym at Hotchkiss, a serendipitous turn of events that would prove pivotal for Meadow by summer’s end.
As a young boy with no knowledge of private schools, Meadow was impressed with Hotchkiss the moment he set foot on campus. Toward the end of that summer, without even discussing it with his parents, he asked Greene, who was also an educational consultant, if he could arrange interviews for him at boarding schools in the area.
Unbeknownst to him, Meadow had already met Peter Adams ’63, Hotchkiss’s admission
director, at Monahan. The two had actually talked on many occasions. So when he walked into the Hotchkiss admissions office for his appointment, he was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar face.
Meadow was accepted by all three schools to which he applied: Salisbury, Kent, and Hotchkiss. But it was Hotchkiss’s financial aid package that influenced his final decision. His parents weren’t thrilled about having their 15-year-old son move away from home, but they realized it was a wonderful opportunity and one they couldn’t have afforded without the School’s generous offer of a scholarship. Meadow received the Otto F. Monahan Scholarship, which was established in 1939 in the name of Hotchkiss’s director of athletics from 1896 to 1938.
It seemed as if his transition to Hotchkiss as a lower mid would be perfectly seamless, but that was far from the case.
Meadow arrived in Lakeville just when The Wall Street Journal published an article about the decline in the quality of applicants at prep schools nationwide. At one point during the summer, a reporter interviewed Greene about the private school application process, which led to an off-the-cuff interview with Meadow. The article concluded that given Meadow’s mediocre grades and the fact that his parents were not prep school alumni, his applications to boarding school amounted to “shots in the dark.”
“To my embarrassment, the entire Hotchkiss community read the article, including many alumni and the trustees,” recalls Meadow. For weeks after, the administration had to field angry calls from alumni and parents questioning why he was admitted.
“To make matters worse,” he says, “because my prior experience had not prepared me academically for Hotchkiss, I almost lost my position on the football team and nearly flunked out of school.”
The silver lining in that discouraging first year was that Meadow discovered he had a love of history, which led him to win a history book prize. Along the way, he also received encouragement from supportive faculty members, including his football coach and English instructor Blair Torrey ’50, P’74,’80, history instructor James Marks, math instructor Stephen Bolmer P’72,’73, and biology teacher and wrestling coach Ted Davis.
The summer after his lower-mid year, he was determined to become better prepared, both physically and academically. He enrolled in college classes, and he transformed himself physically. By the following fall, he had lost 50 pounds and placed in the Mr. Teenage Ohio bodybuilding competition.
When Meadow returned to campus, he had changed so much physically that at first his coaches didn’t recognize him. During his upper mid and senior years, he captained three varsity sports, including an undefeated football team. Academically, he soared. He went on to win the Ely Prize, awarded to an upper mid for outstanding combined excellence in character, athletics, and conscientiousness in study; and the Jadwin Trophy, awarded to the best athlete in the senior class.
“Blair Torrey was like the Wizard of Oz—he literally showed me that I had a brain,” he says. In English class, when Torrey asked students to write a two-page paper on a unique event in their life, Meadow wrote about what he imagined it was like to be in utero before he was born, which earned rare praise from Torrey.
“Hotchkiss changed my whole life,” says Meadow, upon reflection. Overcoming obstacles early on at Hotchkiss built his confidence and prepared him for challenges he would face in college and in his career.
“At Hotchkiss, I learned that I had value as a person, how to study, to trust my creative intuition, and to persevere,” says Meadow, who went on to achieve great success in the business world as well as in higher education.
During his senior year at Hotchkiss, Meadow set his sights on applying to Harvard. Despite discouragement from his college advisor, Meadow persisted.
During his Harvard interview, when Meadow was asked what he enjoyed, he talked about his love of poetry—and bodybuilding. The admission interviewer seemed intrigued, so Meadow decided to try something totally unorthodox. For competitions, he had often set his bodybuilding routine to the music of Antonín Dvorˇák’s Cello Concerto in B minor. So, without a second thought, he climbed on top of a chair and began humming the concerto and performing his routine.
After that, he received an A-rating from the Harvard admissions office. Torrey also wrote a letter of recommendation to Harvard, which Meadow has framed and keeps on his desk at Booth. Torrey wrote, in part, “As a person, Scott is the finest. He has that rare combination of strength and sensitivity. He is mature, loving, and charming, and no one has more vitality. In short, he is everything I would want a son to be, and we are fortunate to have him here.”
Meadow (center) is pictured with teammates on the 1973 wrestling team.
Meadow graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1977 with a major in British History and Literature. Throughout college, he continued to compete in bodybuilding competitions and won the Mr. New England title, Mr. Northern States, and Collegiate Mr. USA. After graduating from Harvard, he decided to pour his competitive energies into business. He applied and was accepted to Harvard Business School. Soon after, he married his wife, Brenda, whom he met his freshman year of high school. They went on to have three children. His daughter, Dana Meadow Faello ’02, followed him to Hotchkiss.
Several years after receiving his M.B.A., Meadow joined a newly-formed venture capital group at William Blair and Company, where his Hotchkiss connections surfaced again. Coincidentally, the firm’s managing partner, Ned Jannotta P’84, GP’12,’14,’14, had played football with Blair Torrey at Princeton and had sent his son to Hotchkiss. Meadow eventually became a partner in the firm, and after 10 years would join The Sprout Group in 1995, the private equity arm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), where Dan Lufkin ’49, P’80,’82,’88,’23 served as one of the founders.
After more than 25 years of working in private equity, Meadow has approved hundreds of equity financings, been active in fundraising, and originated, or created, more than 60 investments, including two dozen healthcare services companies and more than a dozen consumer services and retail companies. In 2005, he began his association with The Edgewater Funds of Chicago, where he remains an associate partner.
He has been recognized by Venture One as one of the top healthcare investors in the industry and is also a testifying expert witness. Among the many accomplishments of his career, he is most proud of his involvement with Sunrise Assisted Living, which started an assisted living movement across the country that has brought improved geriatric care to many. In 2011, he was awarded the Richard J. Daley Medal for his work in entrepreneurial ecology.
In 1999, a colleague who was on sabbatical from the Booth School of Business asked Meadow if he would teach his summer course. He took a liking to teaching and readily accepted an invitation from the university to continue at Booth as a clinical professor, teaching what he practiced.
As he puts it, “The first half of my life was focused on the time value of money, and the second half is focused on the money value of time.”
Since then, Meadow has won multiple teaching awards, notably as one of the top entrepreneurial professors in the world in 2015 and 2021, and as the recipient of the University Faculty Excellence Award in 2010. He is a four-time recipient of the student-nominated Phoenix Prize for displaying exceptional commitment to students. His classroom style has been described as a “mix of no-nonsense Jack Welch and raconteur Walt Disney.”
As one of his graduate students describes him: “You forget that you are learning, as you feel like you are just listening to a really great story. Then, when the tables are turned, and it’s time for students to speak, he holds no punches. He expects students to provide thoughtful questions or comments that really contribute to student learning, or they will get cut off.”
In shaping his own teaching style, Meadow often looks back on his own Hotchkiss education and those who mentored him. When he is asked for advice for students, he reaches back to his upper-mid English class and paraphrases a poem by Robert Browning, “What I aspire to be and am not, comforts me.” H
Meadow credits Hotchkiss with helping him find his own road to success. In gratitude, he has given generously to the School. He supports the L. Blair Torrey ’50 Chair in English and two scholarship funds, including the Rodgers Family Scholarship to honor his classmate Peter Rodgers. He has also given to The Hotchkiss Fund for nearly 30 years.
