True Blue Spotlight

q & a with members of pingry ’ s true blue society

Jack Grier ’19

What inspires you about Pingry today? While the Pottersville Campus, the Bugliari Athletics Center, and the renovated classrooms definitely add to the Pingry experience, the individuals inspire me the most. Notwithstanding COVID-19’s detrimental impact on student learning and activities, teachers still felt motivated to instruct and lead activities, and students persevered to learn and run clubs. Additionally, conversations with my former teachers on my return visit to Pingry in May 2022 helped me realize that the close bonds between faculty members and students (and even alumni) continued to thrive, due to peoples’ strong commitment to making everyone’s life better in the face of a global pandemic.

Thanks to the Communications and Advancement Teams, social media posts and videos of various virtual events allowed me to observe the School’s impeccable transition from 2020 to 2022. The resilience displayed by the Pingry community went above and beyond what my university and my [Pingry] classmates’ current schools did to improve their situations. I am earnestly proud to be an alumnus of an institution that exudes immense spirit, regardless of how tough the times are.

What is your fondest Pingry memory? What has been your proudest moment as a Pingry alumnus? Given our interest in tutoring, my friend Zan Rabney (’19) and I founded the “Humanities Center” in our senior year to complement the student-run “STEM Center.” Although our top-choice universities had already accepted us, we sacrificed our time to devise a practice AP U.S. History Exam from scratch and proctor it on a Faculty Collaboration Day. I promised myself that I would finish writing comments on all 12 DBQs [Document-Based Questions] and Long Essays by the end of the day. The four-hour-long process quickly taught me that my numerous complaints regarding teachers who hand back papers late were completely unwarranted. While returning the graded tests to the students’ mailboxes the next morning, I grew increasingly appreciative of all of my teachers for their hard work and dedication to ensuring that our community remains a safe and innovative place for learning.

I still can’t process how many compliments I received later that afternoon. However, the individuals who thought that I had somehow transformed their lives never considered my profound gratitude for their mere participation. I had initially believed that no one would register to take our practice exam, so witnessing a dozen participants fill a classroom made me deeply grateful for the supportive community to which I belonged.

Did Pingry ever encourage or challenge you to try something outside of your comfort zone? What was that experience like? From an academic standpoint, Pingry encourages students to engage in global experiences. In my junior year, Monsieur [Steve] Benoit [World & Classical Languages Department Chair and Upper School French Teacher] organized a trip to visit Québec and Montréal. After having studied the language for 12 years, I had reached a point in my academic career when immersing myself in a French-speaking setting became necessary. A simple five-day program allowed me to develop enough oral and auditory competency to apply all of the skills that I had learned over the years. When I visited Paris last summer and people failed to recognize me as an American tourist, I thought back to this formative time.

While athletics did not dominate my life as it did for others, it still taught me many valuable lessons. I had golfed recreationally for several years, but competitive golf was on a vastly different level. At the end of my sophomore season, Coach [Joe] Forte recommended a golf camp. I trained strenuously and returned to school the next year for weekly workouts at the BAC under Coach Forte’s supervision. As I proceeded to shoot multiple low rounds for the next two years, I always recalled how Coach Forte’s assurance both advanced my athletics career and guided me toward the values of hard work and determination.

TRUE BLUE SOCIETY

Those who have given to The Pingry Fund for three or more consecutive years