A Homegrown Goodbye

Welcome President Fleegel, Superintendent Sullivan, Principal Lybert, Vice Principal Guden, school board members, faculty, family, friends, seasoned folks who just like to come to this sort of thing, and, most importantly, the Class of 2023. I have a great feeling of honor today, getting the opportunity to be a speaker here on this very important day. With this honor, I have decided to take this opportunity very seriously. So serious in fact, that it is with great care that I have decided to take the same approach that any honorable scholar at MASH would take to an important semester final essay… So I waited until the night before it was due and began typing at around 11:30… Congratulations class of 2023, we made it.

As a class, we really were able to accomplish some great things during our senior year at MASH. For one, the largest group of seniors that the boys varsity soccer team has ever seen took home its first ever outright conference championship in school history. In fact this team was so good, that a select few purple and green teams banded together to try and suspend our season… Good try, thanks for playing… Our boys basketball team also made a name for themselves, returning the conference championship right back into Coach Brown’s impressive trophy room, or as he now calls it, the living room. Now this team won games against some tough opponents and battled out some hard fought victories against conference rivals, but what’s most impressive is that it was won with zero transfers on the roster… Now while the homegrown boys dominated on the playing field, we sure had some great success in the classroom to go with it. I’m sure you have all heard of the ACT, you know the one test that has a perfect score percentage of less than 1%. Well our very own Saskatoon Damm aced that. He also told me that he finished with an extra five minutes to spare. He would have finished sooner, but he’s so good he found an error in one of the questions and fixed it for them. Not only an excellent scholar, but a gentleman as well. He wasn’t the only one who put on a show at ACT test day. Our class had one of the best performances on the ACT that this school has seen in recent years. I’m not sure if anyone saw our class as this intelligent before these results, so I think this deserves a shout out to the man upstairs… John Baylor himself. Now another thing that this class is capable of is growing some mean facial hair. Now I’m not talking about Charlie Kleist’s dyed mustache or Ty Metz’s stache that all the moms swoon over… I’m talking about the greatest beard I’ve ever seen and I’ve got two words for you… Mason Gripentrog. You are quite literally the man. When I looked at the roster of who was building the concession stand this school year, I saw Mason and just knew we were in good hands. With a beard like that, I knew it would be a job well done… Of all the accomplishments that this class has, I think the most impressive is our untouchable record, for the most times getting kicked out of the library during a single school year. Will Haavisto, I believe, holds the single day record with 5 times… If you want an autograph he will be setting up near the concession stand immediately after the ceremony. Now after all these accolades, achievements, and memories, everything we have accomplished in these short twelve years of school has led each and every one of us to this exact moment. No matter what path you took to get here, you made it here. Now from this point forward, it doesn’t matter if you were a three-sport athlete and had straight A’s. Maybe you were that student that just couldn’t find his or her way out of Guided Study Hall. Maybe you struggled with relationships. Maybe you had a tough time with the first girlfriend… and the second girlfriend… and the third girlfriend… We’ve all been there… Now this is your chance to learn about yourself and go on to bigger and better things. I had a coach who once told me that the years after high school are the ones that will allow you to take the time and reinvent yourself and find out who you really want to be. What I believe he meant by this is that high school careers do not define. This is only a small fraction of our lives, and it will soon feel insignificant to what we accomplish in the future. There are limitless possibilities for what accomplish in the real world… Just like the great philosopher Michael Jordan once said “The ceiling is the roof.”... The only question is, how far do you want to go?

Now I can stand up here and tell you that you have the world at your disposal and make everything sound easy, but the truth is, it is a cold, cruel world out there. In school if you get caught going too fast in the hallways, you probably get sent to Guided Study Hall or Mrs. Bull’s room, but now if you get caught going too fast on the roads in the real world, you’re probably going to jail. Now this might be a bit of an exaggeration, but you have to stay safe out there because we really only get one chance. There is a good chance you will also run into people who will just want to see you fail for no good reason, but you can be really successful if you just learn to tune out the noise sometimes. Take Vincent Van Gogh for example. Now Vincent Van Gogh was a great painter, one of the best to ever do it, but everyone told him, “Vincent, you can’t be a great painter, you only have one ear” and you know what he told them… “I can’t hear you.”

Before I wrap this up, I believe it would be appropriate that we recognize some of the greats that got us here today. Shout out to, Mr. Paff for allowing us to express ourselves and get off topic in your class. There were multiple classes that began with you attempting to teach us tangential velocity and ended with a heated debate over which genre of music was the greatest of all time. Thank you. Shoutout to Mr. Borchardt for acting as the father figure in the classroom I never knew I needed. Mr. B kept us in line with his no nonsense approach to cuss words in the classroom. It is because of him that the phrases “Flippin’ flappin’” and “Jeez Louise” will be a staple in my substitutes for cuss words. My AP test scores may not represent your teaching the best but trust me, it’s not you it’s me. Thank you. Shoutout to our seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Wirz. This battle hardened, school veteran really taught me what I was capable of in my short time with her as my teacher. I have to admit that I was scared of her at first, but she slowly developed a soft spot for me. I immediately became close with her, stopping every few mornings to have a chat. She showed me how to not judge a book by its cover and build a connection with someone who you may not know. Thank you. I would also like to thank Michael Jackson for making the song “Billie Jean”... not that it has anything to do with this, I just don’t think I would be where I am today without that song.

Now, here we are. The end. I hope this is not the end for the class of 2023, I hope that we are able to see each other again one day and reminisce about the great times we had here together in the halls of Medford Area Senior High. But for now, let’s just enjoy this short amount of time we have left with one another because you never realize the value of something until it’s gone. I’m sure we will all see each other again one day, but now is our time to go our separate ways and find out what it means to live. I hope we can all do something special in this world, and I hope we can all come back and talk about it sometime, but until then, thank you for all the great memories and I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Take care of yourselves out there and God bless you all. Thank you.

— Zach Rudolph