As I finish my senior year I can’t help but reminisce about my freshman year at Sonoma Academy, thinking back to how different everyone in my senior class was back then. I know I definitely had memories that still stick with me: meeting all my first friends at preseason soccer practice, joining SLC and being intimidated by the upperclassmen, writing my first big essay in Jamie’s class, and trying to compete with Gus Miller (‘26) over who had a better outfit each day.
Around this time of reminiscing of the past I decided to ask other people in my class about their own memories of freshman year that they still think about, the results of this mission were as random as I predicted.
As I started gathering stories from our class, the smiles that appeared on my classmates’ faces as they tried to remember each detail of the prime time of SA and their stories filled me with so much joy. I got stories that mostly start off with “this seemed like a good idea in the moment,” but end up with someone’s face on the pavement.
Almost everyone I talked to recalled the freshman retreat as an interesting experience at the beginning of our high school journey.
Juliette Coté (‘26) showed up that day knowing almost nobody, so she coped in the only reasonable way possible: giving everyone code names. One boy was named “Polo.” Another became “Kid with Bad Haircut.”
Then, suddenly, just a few moments later, she was stranded on a platform high up in a tree with Calvin Schaeffer (‘26) and Quinn Mahoney (‘26), people she barely knew, mentally calculating how bad the fall would hurt if the harness failed.
“It was terrifying,” Coté said. “I thought, if it breaks, I’m going to die next to these two random guys.”
She didn’t die, obviously. Instead, she got back on the bus with Atticus Moss (‘26) and Josh Lim (‘26), and freshman year continued to unfold.
That’s what freshman year felt like for a lot of us at the time: everything was life or death until suddenly it wasn’t, when we realized it’s not that deep.
Meanwhile, Lange Look’s (‘26) freshman year story involved a shopping cart.
One beautiful sunny day in freshman year, it happened to be spirit week, “Anything But A Backpack Day.” Leif Warnellius Miller (‘26) had the bright idea of bringing a shopping cart, displaying his superior school spirit over everyone. Look had the very well thought-out idea of riding the cart down the hill while Beau Leary (‘26) dragged his feet behind them as a brake. What they failed to consider was that Beau would panic and lift his feet.
“We were flying,” Look told me. “We knew we were done for.”
The cart flipped at the bottom of the hill. Everyone survived with bruises, scrapes and absolutely no lessons learned.
The more I thought about this story, the more I felt it represented our class. Not the crashing part, but the willingness to throw ourselves into things before we fully knew what we were doing.
Freshman year especially felt like that. Everyone was improvising. Everyone was trying on personalities, friend groups, extracurriculars, versions of themselves. But in the end, it all worked out.
There were also stories that weren’t so hectic, stories that didn’t seem too important, but people remembered vividly.
Sierra DeGeorgey (‘26) told me about movie night freshman year, when instead of sitting with everyone else in the amphitheater, she, Mateo Elliott (‘26) and Leif Warnelius-Miller (‘26) climbed onto the big oak tree near the amphitheater and watched the movie from the branches while the whole school buzzed below them. Just the three of them above the crowd, the screen flickering through the leaves.
“It was cute,” DeGeorgey said. That’s all the story needs to be. Some memories stick because they were such huge events; you just can’t forget. Others stick in your mind because of the emotions and euphoria you felt in the moment. Some were just so random but stood out during that time period.
Ashlynn Dexter (‘26) still remembers an orientation conversation about the best bathrooms on campus after an All-Star desperately tried to save an awkward silence.
Lim remembered spending lunches crammed into the debate room with people who were trying very hard to be “cool nerds.”
Mikaela Resch (26’) tripped down the stairs in front of a “ginormous” group of senior boys on the second day of freshman year.
Moss recalled being told by Look, within minutes of sitting down in advisory for the first time, that they had supposedly been assigned the worst advisor in the entire school and needed to switch immediately.
They never switched.
Somewhere in between all those tiny moments…life just happened.
People changed constantly as we kept growing. People were developing and devoting time to the things they love: theater, debate, music, sports and art. Some just happened by chance. There were stressful weeks where everyone looked exhausted and ran entirely on caffeine. There were dances, performances, NCS championship finals, late-night homework calls and other challenges and triumphs that felt like everything in the moment. Through it all, our class still showed up for each other.
That’s what I think I’ll remember the most. Not a single event, but how our class connects with each other and the mutual respect we have for one another. The way people crowded into each other’s performances and games and presentations. The way someone would always yell louder when they knew their friend was nervous during a high stakes competition or performance. The way we learned about each other slowly, over the years, until the people who once felt random became familiar.
I think Lim said it best when he told me he missed the feeling of novelty, that feeling when everyone was new, when nobody really knew who they were yet. I also agree that there was something exciting about that uncertainty. But what replaces that feeling is better, because now we do know each other. This connection the class of 2026 has now will never fade. I couldn’t have asked for better people to spend my high school journey with.
Thank you, Class of 2026.
