Tara Tate is all about helping people heal.

The numbers tell the story.

The numbers are in, and — no surprise, really — they speak volumes about the growth, success, and impact of The Peavey Project.

One Saturday morning back in the spring of 2019, Karen Doxey was enjoying a quiet walk around the pastoral expanse of Collegiate’s Robins Campus before a full slate of events, scheduled that, day began.

Collegiate gets older each year, but its students remain the same age.

Coaching is much more than game plans, X’s and O’s, wins and losses. 

The temperature had risen to the mid-90's, humidity was thick in the air, and storm clouds were rolling in from the west as I began the south-of-the-creek leg of my summer self-guided tour around Collegiate’s North Mooreland Road campus this past Tuesday afternoon.

Spend even a few minutes with John Dau, and you will no doubt sense his imposing presence.

“How can a building on the east be named ‘West’?” I asked my friend, who’s been around long enough that he’s seen pretty much everything. “I’m sure there’s a story.”

One day recently, I took a walking tour of Collegiate’s North Mooreland Road campus with Alex Smith as my guide. 

They drift in one by one, the ailing, the injured, and those simply in need of a Band-Aid or bag filled with ice.

It’s never been about Bill Reeves.

A year ago, my family and I celebrated Thanksgiving Day at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center.

For Hudson Taylor, life is all about wrestling, respect, and enlightenment.

It’s a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in late October, and the hottest ticket in town is the back yard festivities at the large brick house at the intersection of Old Oak Road and Hillsdale Drive just west of the University of Richmond campus.

His head was swimming from the anesthesia-induced nausea.

Tennis, some might say, is an individual sport.

Most school days, a long, serpentine line of forest-green buses and vans appears in the drive around the Jacobs Gym and Seal Center, ready for use that afternoon by Collegiate’s athletic teams.

You don’t have to look far around Collegiate to find stories that inspire and motivate.

“Got a minute?” Alex Smith asked me one morning recently when our paths crossed outside his office.

There was this story making the rounds some years back about Ashley Taylor Gudknecht, a 2004 Collegiate graduate who at the time was a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy.

Scott Bartholomew celebrated Christmas at home, compliments of a joint American-Iraqi security pact signed in 2008 and the Iraqi government’s steadfast refusal to extend it past the December 31, 2011, deadline.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, CO. – I grew up in Larchmont, a section of Norfolk where one of the few open spaces was the large public playground with concrete basketball courts where the neighborhood guys and I spent much of our free time.

Some final thoughts as we bid farewell to the 2010-2011 school year.

There was a time not all that long ago when Collegiate’s most talented artists displayed their greatest creations in a gallery…in downtown Richmond.

When I arrived at Collegiate full time in September 1972, I was one of the youngest and least experienced members of the faculty.

No one goes through life unscathed.

Every once in a while, unbeknownst to anyone, I slip out late at night and go for a run.

What a great weekend it was for Homecoming!

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WY – I am not a tourist. Never have been. Never will be.

In the still of the locker room before the championship game of the 1952 Indiana high school basketball tournament, Preacher Purl inspired the underdog Hickory Huskers with a straight-to-the-point story of the greatest upset of them all.

You don’t have to look much beyond those gigantic piles of dirty snow around the Collegiate campus to know that this has been a really tough winter.

Nothing (except hunting and football, maybe) gets Charlie McFall more fired up than extolling the virtues of Collegiate School sports, past, present, and future.

She planned to be an artist.

As an English teacher, I’ve always been of the opinion that books are far superior to the movies made from them.

Billowing gray clouds covered the morning sky, and the cool breeze suggested that rain, prominent in the forecast, was just seconds away.

Her days roll past at NASCAR speed.

There was a moment in the mid-90's when Collegiate was playing St. Catherine's in a fiercely contested semifinal game in the League of Independent Schools basketball tournament.

One day last fall, Charlie McFall and I were heading west toward Collegiate’s Robins Campus in Goochland County. The windows of his black Ford F-150 were down, our cell phones were uncharacteristically quiet, and for a few uninterrupted minutes during that familiar, four-mile drive, we were talking, as usual, about anything and everything.

“Good day!” said the self-possessed lad of 9 with all the earnestness and gusto he could muster. “My name is William Prentis. I am a merchant in Williamsburg, the grand capital of Virginia. I am of the middling sort because I work with my hands. I was born on October 10, 1699. My family moved to Williamsburg in 1715 when I was 16 years of age. My father was a merchant, and I learned the trade by helping in his shop.”

Dawn is breaking over Robious Landing Park as Stephen and Michael Chilmaid hoist their boats over their shoulders, carry them to the riverbank, and gently place them into the James.

Every time Barbara Boyd shuttled Collegiate’s athletic teams to practices or games, she reported back to her husband Harry, a Henrico County police officer, what a great part-time job she had. The atmosphere was something special, she told him. The people were so nice, polite, and friendly. The time she spent driving the bus simply flew by.

As a senior at Collegiate, Granville Scott played the lead role of Elwood P. Dowd in the performance of Harvey on the old Memorial Hall stage.

As a kid, Neil Weiser loved baseball. In fact, he loved it so much that he regularly joined the other guys in his Toledo neighborhood early each summer morning and played until darkness sent them home.

The young fellow on the left of your screen is Murphy. As you can see, he’s a cute, cuddly, good-natured little dog. We’re not exactly certain what breed he is, though. Might be part golden retriever. Might have some poodle in him. Maybe some lhasa apso. Some day soon, he’ll have a DNA test. Then we’ll know for sure.

Back in the 60’s and well into the 70’s, Lindsay Wortham was the preeminent female tennis player in Central Virginia. In fact, the 1969 Collegiate graduate was so successful that her résumé included a host of city, state, and mid-Atlantic age-group championships and forays deep into tournaments at the national level.

We did not weave the web of life.

 We are merely strands in it.

 Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Indians

Even under the best of circumstances, the opening of school can be crazy. Kate Parthemos knows. For 15 years, she’s managed the Cougar Shop, the hub of frenetic activity during the week that our 1,500-plus students arrive.

Rohan Hazra is an acclaimed scholar and respected physician who is devoted to helping children stricken with HIV lead happy, productive lives. His credentials for such a humanitarian endeavor are impeccable.

Fifty years. 

It’s 7:21 a.m. and cold. Really cold. Single-digit cold. February cold. The sky, which brought a light dusting of snow the night before, is still overcast, gloomy, almost depressing. A brisk wind sweeps across the Collegiate campus, swirling the leaves around the Jacobs Gym parking lot as a few early risers pull in, hop from their cars, and hastily make their way toward the classroom buildings.

All the 5-year-old towhead wanted to do was splash around in the deep end with his friends. Problem was, he couldn’t swim, but his parents offered a practical solution. Take lessons, they told him. Get comfortable in the water. Then, you can join all the other kids in the pool. 

She was an unsteady 8-year-old, still trying desperately to find her way. School so far had been a mighty struggle. While she was finally making progress academically, the young girl’s self-esteem was rock-bottom low, and life just didn’t seem to make much sense. How could it?

It’s almost Christmas break, time to stop for a couple of weeks, give thanks, and take stock. As a coach at Collegiate for almost four decades, this hiatus, in the wake of the fall athletic season allows me a few days to slow down a bit, pause, and reflect. Three thoughts linger.

Teach science for long, and you learn to be flexible. Paradigms change. Knowledge that seems irrefutable one day might be altered by discovery the next. No one knows this fact of life better than Burrell Stultz, who’s taught Collegiate’s third and fourth graders since February 1968.

Had a bad day?

Stressed out?

Life dealt you a lousy hand?

Last spring when he interviewed for the position of assistant head of Collegiate’s Upper School, Patrick Loach fielded a question that caught him a bit off guard. Which accomplishment during your tenure as the school’s director of technology, he was asked, makes you proudest?

There are easier ways to support a cause than riding a bicycle 105 miles across Death Valley with the thermometer topping out at 104 degrees. The endeavor makes perfect sense, though, for Cameron Miksch, a Collegiate sophomore, and his father Jack. 

Amid thousands of highly trained, adrenalin-fueled compatriots, Anne Hunter Smith Myers completed the Boston Marathon this past Monday in the very respectable time of 3:49.02.

John Bullard has always had a wide but seemingly contradictory range of interests. All his life, the 1977 Collegiate graduate has been an avid hunter and fisherman. He was a rugged, aggressive, tough-as-nails halfback and cornerback on some of Grover Jones’ best football teams. On the track, he was a sprinter. There were faster runners, to be sure, but none competed with more intensity. He has a B.S in management economics from Hampden-Sydney and has worked in sales, construction, and commercial real estate. But he’s always had another side, an aesthetic side.

Mike Henry vividly recalls the defining moment in his development as, well, a really funny guy. 

As one who has been around independent schools as a student and teacher for the better part of four decades, I’ve heard over and over and over the importance of preparing young people for college. That’s why Keith Evans’ words near the end of his address to the faculty at an August meeting grabbed my attention.

One pleasant afternoon this summer, I was camped out in my usual spot near the diving well at the Kanawha Recreation Association engrossed in the latest edition of Sports Illustrated. Maybe it’s the result of three-plus decades of eating lunch in a school cafeteria, but I’ve always found I can concentrate pretty well at the pool despite the constant activity, noise, and occasional splashes that otherwise might be distractions.

For several months, John Chewning sensed in his heart that something was very wrong. A former college soccer player and a 4:30 high school miler, he was accustomed to rushing headlong through each day, getting by on caffeine and adrenaline, and shouldering the responsibility of several able-bodied people.

Each summer for the past decade, the golfing achievements of Boodie Wiltshire McGurn have been regularly documented in the local media. Though the 1971 Collegiate graduate picked up the sport in earnest well into adulthood, her impressive résumé includes Richmond Women’s Golf Association championships in 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2004, a Virginia State Golf Association open title in 2003, and a victory in the VSGA senior’s tournament in 2004.

As darkness fell on the Collegiate campus Monday evening, Glen Dandridge stood shovel in hand at the south end of Nunnally Hall and watched torrents of rainwater wash down a flight of concrete steps and, thankfully, past the entrance to Cougar Care. The 6-6 giant of a man who serves as manager of transportation and maintenance had battled the deluge created by Tropical Storm Gaston for the better part of two hours.

The very first thing you notice about Andrew Slay is his smile. Get to know him – and what a treat it is to know him – and you’ll also notice his intellect, his courage, his sense of humor, and his humility.

My watch reads 8:30. It’s Saturday night, and I’m sitting on a cold, hard aluminum bleacher in the Estes Athletic Center at Fork Union Military Academy. I’ve been here since 9:30 a.m.

They were three old friends, living within walking distance of each other in the Deerwood Condominiums just a short hop up Mooreland Road from Collegiate.  More often than not, Betsy Sutton, Anne Jones, and Mancha White shared the events of the day over dinner, sometimes at Mancha’s as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy played on the television and sometimes at the Tiki-Tiki, their favorite hangout.

It’s early May, and most of our seniors have made their choices about where and how they’ll spend the next four years. For a few, the balancing act will include competing in intercollegiate athletics. Some are absolutely positive that they’ll have the time, energy, and talent to take their game to “the next level.” Others are not so certain.

The story you are about to hear is true. The names haven't been changed to protect the innocent because we're all innocent. Except, of course, the deer, but we didn't know his name in the first place. Deer have names like Bambi, but this deer-actually a very large buck that 15 years ago this week crashed through a front-hall window of the Middle School-sure as heck wasn't any Bambi. 

Let me preface this travelogue by telling you that my idea of adventurous is taking my wife to some place other than Phil’s or Arby’s for dinner.  So when I decided one recent Wednesday evening to fly to Boston three days later, I was taking a bold leap into uncharted territory, both literally and figuratively.

Open the 2002 Collegiate yearbook to page 114, and you’ll find a picture of Ryan Schilling, smiling as always, above the words which so eloquently  express his indefatigable outlook on life.

The question seemed basic enough, yet John Daniel reflected for a moment, smiled, then struggled for the perfect answer that would adequately express the thoughts he held inside.

The most enduring lessons we learn are often forged in the teachable moments of our youth.

It was one of those nasty days in the winter of 2000 when Lynne Berkness drove from the development office to the Lower School to run a quick errand.  Her task completed, she sloshed through the chilling rain to her car,  but when she tried to crank up the engine, the battery was stone cold dead.

When you get past the part where the technician sticks your finger, or when that harpoon-sized needle slides into your vein for the very first time, giving blood is really a feel-good experience.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it.

And I feel fine…”