On January 10, 2025, the Williston Northampton School inducted its latest class into the school’s Cum Laude Society. Sarah Fay ’11, a Cum Laude inductee during her time at Williston, returned to the school to give a keynote speech. Below are her remarks in full, and you can view the speech on our YouTube page.
Good morning everyone! Thank you so much for that introduction, and thank you so much for having me here. I’m truly honored to be up here. Today we are celebrating the academic achievements of the newest inductees of the Cum Laude Society – and let me say first, congratulations.
On any day of celebration like this, we also are inclined to spend some time in reflection and in gratitude. Looking at where we are encourages us to reflect on all of the effort and growth it took to get here and reminds us to give thanks to those who helped us along the way.
As the speaker this morning, I believe my role is to help guide some of this reflection, not just for the new inductees but for all of us. The only way I know how to do that is by sharing my own story and some of my own reflections. I also don’t feel like I have the authority to do this in any other way, so personal stories it is!
So, who am I? What’s my story? You heard a little bit about me already, but I graduated from Williston in 2011. I then moved to Boston and started school at MIT, where I studied mechanical engineering both as an undergraduate and then immediately afterwards as a graduate student. Obviously, just couldn’t get enough school! However, it turns out that graduate school doesn’t always look like school with classrooms, homeworks, and tests; it really starts to look like “research,” which for me, has its pluses and minuses. The main plus is that my field is super cool. I work in engineering for sports, and my PhD project was developing 3D printed running shoes with adidas that I get to wear around. I’m particularly fortunate to have found this field because I love sports. At Williston, I played field hockey, squash, and water polo, and then I continued on to play varsity field hockey and squash at MIT (and actually some club water polo here and there). When I started grad school, I joined the MIT field hockey coaching staff, which I continued with up until this fall when I started my new job here in the pioneer valley, which was my first fall away from field hockey since 2004. Yikes didn’t do the math until I wrote this speech. Anyways, that brings me up-to-date: I am currently an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Smith College, where I teach courses and have my own research lab aimed at using the tools of engineering to improve accessibility and inclusion in sports.
That’s the short bio. I’ll dive into some of those things later (and happy to chat one-on-one about anything I don’t get to today), but let me pause to say:
If you knew me in high school, and some of you in the audience did, you would not be surprised to hear that this has been my trajectory. That’s because many of the seeds of who I am now were planted during my six years at Williston. And I suspect many of you have already planted some of these seeds as well.
So today, I want to focus our reflection on the seeds. We are all growing gardens. We have all planted seeds and will continue to plant more. What’s most important, though, is that we all get to choose which seeds we water, feed, and nurture. We get to pick what grows in the garden.
What types of things am I growing my garden these days? What are the parts of my identity that I find myself nurturing the most? I am a learner. I am a teacher. I am engineer. And I am passionate about sports and the value they bring to life. Again, many of the seeds of these identities, were planted here at Williston, sometimes in specific defining moments and sometimes more gradually through quiet consistency.
Here is the tale of one of these defining moments and the different ways I’ve watered its seeds along the way.
As I told you, I played squash as my winter sport while I was here. At the time, and I don’t know what it’s like now, it wasn’t the most popular sport, which meant I was able to make the varsity team in eighth grade. The team was largely upperclassmen, and there I was, the geeky little middle schooler. I was happy just to breathe the same air as some of these cool high schoolers. But in all honesty, it was really nice to have access to role models and see real-life examples of who I could become in the next four years. This is one of the best benefits of the athletics program at Williston.
At the end of the season, we went down to Pomfret for an overnight to compete in the New England Squash championship. Again, seven mostly juniors and seniors and geeky little me. I’m pretty sure I brought my Rubik’s cube. This weekend was the most time we had spent together off of the court, and these moments, especially the silly hotel sleepover conversations, are what has stuck with me truly forever. It has nothing to do with what was said and everything to do with how it made me feel. These upperclassmen spoke to me like a peer, asking me about my life, telling me about theirs. It was a genuine feeling of inclusion and belonging. I have no better way to describe how special this was.
I was so moved by this experience, as ordinary as it may seem, that I felt an overwhelming desire to express my gratitude to my teammates, especially the graduating seniors. In preparation for Team Night – not sure if it’s still called that – I wrote a speech to deliver which thanked these seniors for their contributions and highlighted the impact they each had on me. This reflection and public expression of gratitude helped me process the experience and start to build a list of the qualities I wanted to have when I myself became the leader of the team. For every Team Night for every sport after that, I continued to write and share these notes of gratitude, each time, further watering and nurturing the seeds that were planted during that first squash weekend in Connecticut.
Fast forward to the summer before my senior year of college, my field hockey coach, Cheryl, sent me and the other two rising seniors an email title “Come as you are, stay for who you will become” asking us to think about our goals around the team culture we were about to create. While my co-captains were to determine to be the fittest team in the conference and the winning-est team in the conference, my response to the email read:
My goal is for us to be the happiest team in the NEWMAC…You know the Maya Angelou quote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you’ve said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I find this to be very true in general, and I think it would give us a good eye for setting our goals for the season. I have an incredible memory for numbers (birthdays, passcodes, other important dates), but I never remember the scores of our games or my squash matches. I sometimes don’t even remember if we won or lost. What I do remember are the fields we played on, the music we listened to, and the silly moments and bus rides we’ve shared as teammates. While we have commitment to ourselves, to the program and to DAPER to do our best to perform at our best, I don’t know that our goals should be as focused on our win-loss record, a NEWMAC championship, our goal-scoring data, etc. I want to optimize our moments of connection with our teammates. I think this will be the real mark of a successful season, one that we look back on (extremely) fondly. Honestly, this might just be the ticket to the numerical successes as well.
I wonder where that idea came from? Directly from my experience on teams at Williston, especially my eighth grade squash team. Fortunately, Cheryl, the coach, and I are aligned on this, and it was our mission to create this team culture during my senior year but then also in the 5 years we coached together afterwards, right up until her retirement in 2020. Many years of watering and nurturing these seeds together.
One of Cheryl’s other favorite sayings, in line with the Maya Angelou quote, comes from Teddy Roosevelt, “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” This sentiment is a succinct explanation of the leadership philosophy I have been cultivating since those young middle school days. It is so important to me that I included it in the statement of my teaching philosophy that I had to submit in all of my job applications this past year. As a professor, I aim to lead with empathy. Students need to know that they are cared for and supported in their learning in order for them to feel safe and comfortable engaging in the classroom and the lab (also an example that was set for me in many of my classrooms here).
Also in my job applications, I had to articulate what my research directions would be. Here’s the first paragraph of my statement I wrote about my research for my job application to Smith.
My goal as a researcher is to use the tools of design and engineering to improve equity in sports. I grew up as an athlete, playing a different sport every season up until I finished college and became a coach. My experiences in sports have shaped who I am as a person; sports were always a safe environment for me to take risks, and they served as the classroom where I learned the importance of dedication, teamwork, and resiliency. I was fortunate enough to have the support and resources to pursue sports my whole life, but globally, access to these opportunities is not always the norm. While there are many types of barriers limiting the access that women and other marginalized groups have to sports, some of these barriers can be reduced by effective design and engineering solutions, and I am poised to create a undergraduate research program to tackle such obstacles.
Again, my experiences on teams at Williston and beyond were so moving to my personal growth and development that it is my mission to use my skillset as an engineer to help provide this opportunity to anyone who wants it. It’s safe to say those plants are in full bloom.
And just as an aside, a little nugget, my lab is currently working on redesigning soccer cleats to reduce ACL injuries in female players. So if you’ve had an ACL injury or are interested in the topic come find me and we can chat more.
Back to the seeds. That one experience at Squash New Englands in eighth grade directly connects to who I am now, what I do, and how I do it. The seeds were planted. But I chose to fully lean in on those special feelings of inclusion and belonging. I chose to use those moments to learn what kind of inclusive leader I wanted to be. I chose to cement those ideas with routine reflection and expressions of gratitude – which are key pieces of my learning process now. I set forth these pillars of inclusion and people-first as my philosophy and identity as a teacher. And the whole of these experiences has helped me become the passionate sports engineer that I am today.
If we really want to run away with the metaphor, we can think of today as a day of harvest, where we look back at what grew from the seeds we planted at the beginning of our time at Williston. Okay, actually maybe graduation day is more of a day of harvest and today is more like the day when the first fruits are ripe and we get to do a sneaky taste test. Honestly, I’m not a gardener or a botanist and probably shouldn’t have picked a metaphor based on something I know so little about.
I do hope hearing my story encourages you do some reflection, your little taste test, thinking about what you planted, what you might plant next, and which crops deserve your attention, especially those of you, like the new class of inductees, who are about to go find some new soil to grow in.