dog days move quickly on north mooreland road
The dog days of summer are upon us, but there’s still plenty of action along North Mooreland Road.
True, another round of classes ended last week, the Learning Bridge students have completed their term, and most of the Cougar Quest activities and sports camps are memories.
You’d think Collegiate would stop for a while and take a break before the onslaught begins anew on August 18, but nooooo.
Monday morning, I arrived at my office to pick up some junk and take it to the athletic center, then make several stops around campus to catch up with folks I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks.
In the weight room, I found strength coach Brandon Johnson and 30 or so guys and girls wearing clothes sopped with perspiration.
Johnson explained that his charges had begun with a half-hour warmup and were now 90 minutes into their sport-specific regimens.
“If they weren’t sweating,” he commented, “I’d be disappointed.”
It made me tired just watching, so I headed into the Upper School where I found assistant head Patrick Loach checking his voice mail.
What’s going on? I inquired when he had finished.
“Schedules,” he said. “It’s a constant process.”
All summer, he explained, he meets with families. Students contact him with questions and requests, and he spends time tracking kids down about refinements in their plans for the upcoming year.
“Summer isn’t as slow as they used to be,” he said as he reached to answer his phone.
As I walked out the end door, I ran into George Mehfoud, class of ‘83, who was on campus for the final event of the Cochrane Summer Economics Institute sponsored by the Powell Center for Economic Literacy.
Turns out that George Mabry, a rising Collegiate senior, had been assigned to Messer Landscape of Virginia (where Mehfoud is chief financial officer) and did pretty much everything from pouring concrete to installing irrigation to estimating jobs to working in the office
“Our goal,” said Mehfoud, “was to show him all the components that go into the equation of running a business. It’s not cut and dried, not always what you learn from a textbook. What you plan for the day doesn’t always work out. We wanted him to understand that.”
Mehfoud then headed back to the office. Mabry, whom I encountered a few minutes later, was headed off to play golf with the company’s owner.
I then strolled across the bridge toward the Lower School where I found Beth Crocus grabbing a quick bite of lunch in her Nunnally Hall office.
Beth is a few days from finishing her successful first tour of duty as director of Summer Quest, a program that hosted 1,320 kids in a myriad activities.
Have you enjoyed it? I asked.
“Absolutely,” she replied with her typical ebullience. “It’s been sooooo much fun. Every day has been different. There’ve been no boring days.”
She then described the final-week offerings. Most intriguing was a program sponsored by the Virginia Fishing Adventures Camp. Each morning, the group heads off to the Chesapeake Bay or the James or the Rivanna rivers.
How do I sign up? I asked.
On my way back across campus, I spotted Walter George and Bryan Voltz, two friends on the physical plant staff standing in the shade near the shop and deep in conversation.
Things that slow today? I said.
“No,” Voltz answered without a moment’s hesitation.
Already, he’d repaired a leak in the business office and solved a problem with the well on the Robins Campus. Meanwhile, George had been busy servicing the ever-expanding fleet of green and gold vehicles.
Now, they were headed to Luck Hall to remove an outside drinking fountain that had outlived its usefulness.
“I’m waiting for the kids to come back so things will slow down a little bit,” Voltz said as we went about our business.
Heading toward my truck, I passed Lynn Haw, the Upper School secretary who, in addition to her regular tasks, had been doing a lot of folding and stuffing lately to get the various information packets in the mail.
How’s everything going? I asked.
“I really miss the students,” she said, echoing the sentiment of many. “I can’t wait for them to come back.”
