Brian Monaghan: Senior Reflection

Brian+Monaghan%3A+Senior+Reflection

Brian Monaghan

I was in the fourth grade when I wasn’t drafted to the “majors” in Little League Baseball.  All of my friends had made the move to the big time of Madison recreation baseball, but not me.  Would I even play?  What would people think if I was held back?

I played.  For the first time in my life, I had experienced true rejection.

I graduated in 2009 from St. Vincent Martyr School. I played my last little league game and had a Pokémon lineup so powerful it should have been illegal. Summer was nuts, getting rides from my mom to QuickChek with my boys, staying up past 11 pm playing ping pong.

Then in the Fall of 2009 things got real.  My neck was constantly tilted upwards whenever someone spoke to me. It was like going to school with a professional football team.

I joined the football team the same year. I had two passes thrown to me the entire season. I dropped both of them. In 8th grade I moved to track. Running, in conjunction with FIFA 10, led me into my freshman year.

Under Coach John Thompson, my life changed direction, partly because most of it was spent gasping for air. Soccer made a reappearance in my life for the better.  Being on the team gave me the opportunity to meet some of my closest friends. I gained confidence as the kids who were once so massive started to resemble more of a professional soccer team: smaller, but still pretty big.

The part of my freshman year that stands out the most, however, is running for freshman class president. The fear of being on stage was its own completely unique brand of fear. I won, but the lesson I was beginning to learn was far greater. From that point onward my eyes were fixed on my senior year.

During my sophomore year I got on stage for the costume contest with Ryan Onderdonk as well as started the Ping Pong Club with Sean Morris. These two events solidified my love of the stage. I debuted the first ever ping pong shirt and placed second with Ryan as yoga instructors.

This would not be a true reflection on my time at Delbarton if there was not a section devoted to junior varsity athletics. JV was my rebirth. Two years of soccer and tennis rearranged a part of my being. JV soccer gave me the spiritual push to transition from safely walking the halls unnoticed to putting myself out there, no matter the consequence. I was rejected from varsity soccer my junior year, but this time it only took a matter of days to recover.

Junior year I struggled to do work. Schoolwork was not interesting, despite it being such a pivotal time of my life to get good grades for college. Science and math quickly identified themselves as foreign to me and I began to slip. Instead I started playing piano and writing.  Everyday I would sit down and play for thirty minutes to an hour. I wanted to create more and that opportunity presented itself after getting cut from varsity tennis my junior year. A shot in the dark, Ryan Onderdonk and I wrote “Mean gURLs”  a One Act Play.  Rejected at first, it was squeezed into the festival. For me it changed everything.

Never before had I been involved in the arts. Had I never been cut from tennis and that play not written, I honestly could not tell you who I would be today.

But the single most extraordinary event in my life was running for Student Body President. I could write a book about the fear that went into running for school office. Moving past the primaries, writing my speech began immediately; it needed to be perfect if I was going to have a chance of winning against my close friend Kyle Higgins. The day of the election I felt sick. At 7:30 that morning I walked into an empty auditorium and delivered my speech to 600 empty chairs before heading to class.

Upon hearing Kyle’s speech I almost evaporated. His speaking skills and rhetoric had received thunderous applause and a lot of laughs. Shaking like a leaf, I walked to the podium and delivered my own.

Delbarton is like most schools in that we have books and classes. Delbarton is very much unlike other schools in the lessons learned outside the classroom. Everyone experiences failure, but at Delbarton I learned what to do with it. There isn’t a textbook written by Jackson Spielvogel that outlines how to handle rejection, or a worksheet on how to turn a mistake into a victory. Fear and failure can only be learned through experience.

Looking back on my six years I can confidently say that at Delbarton I failed, but that at Delbarton, I greatly succeeded.