In My Own Words

Good evening. My name is Will Sheets, and it is an honor to stand up and say thank you all for being here. A special thank you to Bishop Eifert, Principal Rowe, our incredible teachers and staff, and, most importantly, the parents and families of us graduates. Without your love, care, and support, Covington Catholic simply would not be what it is today.

And to the graduating Class of 2025: congratulations. What a moment. What a year. What a legacy.

I know it is cliché, but it truly feels like it was just that first morning heading into what would be the best four years of my life. I vividly remember my dad telling me as I was dropped off, “don't be too cool for school.” Hands down the best advice I have ever gotten, but I will come back to that.

This year in journalism, the class responsible for creating the yearbook, we had an interesting task to hand in. CovCath is 100 years old. Over 8,500 colonels, hundreds of teachers and staff, 28 state championships, 18 principals, 3 school buildings, 1 goal, and 1 message. How do we fit all that into a yearbook?

So we dug deep. We pored over decades of yearbooks, photos, stories, and traditions. We asked ourselves three big questions: What has made CovCath successful for 100 years? Who are the people who brought us to this point? And what are the traditions that have shaped who we are?

Through all of that research, through the stories, the photos, and the memories, my love and appreciation for this place only grew.

We started with the people. Because at the end of the day, the truest measure of a school isn't in its buildings or trophies. It's in its people.

Take Mr. Kaelin, Coach Krumps, Coach Tieman, and Mr. Hartman, five men with a combined 221 years of love and service to the Covington Catholic community. You'd be hard pressed to find that kind of commitment anywhere else. And it made us ask: why? Why stay here for 40, sometimes 50 years?

What is that energy? That spirit? That something beneath the seven hours of classes, the tests, the homework, the hard plastic desks, and the fluorescent lights?

We realized we had to look deeper, into student life, because that's where the heart of CovCath lives.

And once we did, all these parallels began to appear. One hundred years of the Colonel Spirit.

That's what makes CovCath special. Every school has school spirit, but not like CovCath. Ours is deeper, stronger, and rooted. It's brotherhood. It's a passion for service and doing what is right. The love of learning. The hunger to compete and win. And above all, the duty to be your brother's keeper.

Colonel Spirit has existed, evolved, and grown for 100 years. It's why teachers stay. It's why alumni say these were the best four years of their lives. And it's why CovCath doesn't just survive year after year, it thrives.

The pictures make it clear. Teenage boys, painted head to toe in blue and white, marching through the streets of Fort Mitchell. Crowds screaming with excitement at football and basketball games. A student body gathered together for Mass. Kids making silly faces behind the math teacher's back.

CovCath students just being CovCath students.

And what's amazing is how connected it all is. How these moments, decades apart, still look and feel the same. It's in those pictures that you realize we are bonded by tradition and spirit.

As I look back on my four years, and on CovCath's hundred, it makes me think of that advice my dad always gave me: “don't be too cool for school.”

Lately there's been a push in our generation toward what I'd call the “nonchalant” mindset. If you're not familiar, nonchalant means appearing casually calm, relaxed, or unconcerned, not displaying anxiety, interest, or enthusiasm.

And unfortunately, that mindset has crept into CovCath at times. You see it when people act disinterested in a classmate's success in sports. In not caring about your grades. In going through your day without a second thought about how your actions affect others. Simply being too cool for school. In other words, a lack of that Colonel Spirit.

And I believe that spirit, the brotherhood, the energy, the pride, is the exact opposite of nonchalance.

Because when I think about the people who have made CovCath great, the teachers, the alumni, our teammates and classmates, they were never nonchalant. They cared deeply. They had an unshakable enthusiasm. They loved fully and showed up completely.

So, forgive my poor English, but I think to love and care without fear, to give your full self to something meaningful, is to be chalant.

Look at the people you admire. I promise you they are “chalant.” Mr. Kaelin, Coach Krumps, Father Hennigan, and Coach Herts, just to name a few, are far from uncaring or lacking interest. They care so deeply about this school and its people, and it shows. Those first Colonel Crazies, the ones who dared to start new traditions and who loved and cared for this school like no other, they are the reason we stand here today as graduates of Covington Catholic.

So, to the Class of 2025: as we step out of this gym and into the next chapter of our lives, we must remember what brought us here. Remember that Colonel Spirit. The way it feels to be part of something bigger than ourselves. The way it feels to show up early, stay late, cheer loud, and care deeply.

We must carry that spirit with us, into college, into work, into relationships, into the hard days and the good ones. Be the guy who shows up. Be the guy who tries. Be the guy who's chalant.

Because the world doesn't need more cool, detached, indifferent men. It needs men who love boldly, serve faithfully, lead humbly, and never forget where they came from. The world needs more Colonels.

And we came from something special.

So thank you, CovCath, for the laughs, the lessons, the brotherhood, and the spirit. And thank you, Class of 2025, for making these the best four years of my life.

Here's to the next 100. Roll Colonels.

Jake was the best risk I ever took. I don't know his last name, and I don't know where he is now.

It was an early Saturday morning, and my cross country team and I were running around a park beneath the Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati. With a few loops left, a guy our age came up and started talking. He wasn't well put together. We guessed he might be homeless, but he was easy to talk to. I asked his name. He said Jake. We kept running.

A month later, we were back. As we walked down the stairs, I saw someone sleeping on the rope bridge. I recognized the shoes. It was Jake.

I sent the team ahead and stayed behind. He told me he was still sleeping outside. His mom had been sent to jail. He never knew his dad. I asked if he wanted to get White Castle with us after the run. He said yes. That afternoon, we sat in a parking lot, eating, and talking. Jake told me he had started smoking to cope, and that he had a court date the next day for sleeping in a park.

I couldn't believe it.

I brought him home, gave him a shower, and packed a backpack with better clothes for court. When I dropped him off, he handed me his vape and said he was going to try to clean up and find a job.

I haven't seen Jake since. But I think about him more than he knows. He opened my eyes.

What stayed with me wasn't just his situation. It was how preventable it felt. Jake didn't lack intelligence or personality. He lacked access to stability and opportunity, and someone willing to take a chance on him. I kept thinking about how different his life might look if even one door had opened earlier.

That question followed me into COMM 1800, where we debated shareholder versus stakeholder value. The dominant model of maximizing returns didn't necessarily feel wrong, just incomplete, because Jake existed entirely outside it. He wasn't a customer, employee, or investor, but he was still affected by the decisions businesses and institutions made without considering him.

I left that class convinced that businesses should do more than create internal value. They should expand access externally. I've only become more convinced of this as I've seen what technology, especially AI, can do. Companies like NetObjex are using AI to identify homeless individuals without IDs and reconnect them to systems of support. The barriers that once limited impact, such as cost, scale, and distribution, are shrinking. Businesses now have the tools to do more good, more efficiently, than ever before. The question is whether we will choose to.

That's what I want to learn at McIntire. Not just how to build something profitable, but how to build something that accounts for the Jakes of the world. He helped me more than I helped him. I'd like to spend my career returning the favor.

My palms were sweaty and my stomach was in knots as I approached Tate, my high school's student body vice president, on the first day of freshman orientation planning. It was my first big day as school president and I needed him to take the lead in designing a house sorting experience for incoming freshmen. The challenge wasn't the job itself. It was me. I wanted to lead through service, but I was at a loss as to how I should delegate.

I worried that telling Tate to lead might suggest a traditional, top down style, but at the same time I knew I couldn't manage every part of orientation on my own. That internal conflict made it difficult to work with my team. I overthought everything and almost kept responsibilities I should have handed off.

Ultimately, I approached Tate and simply asked what he thought. He said yes immediately and executed it perfectly, creating one of the most memorable parts of orientation. Watching him thrive made it clear I should never have worried.

This taught me that good collaboration isn't about doing everything yourself or avoiding delegation. It's about investing in other people's skills. Servant leadership doesn't mean doing everything under the sun. It means creating space for others to contribute and succeed. Now I approach teamwork by sharing ownership, trusting people's strengths, and elevating the whole group, which beats anything I could do alone.

It hit me on a free afternoon senior year. Twelve days, me and Alex, one old Chevy left to me in Uncle Possie's will. Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, and a Mumford and Sons concert. The Western Adventure.

My parents were always outdoorsy. They took me backwoods camping, taught me how to start a fire, and instilled a love for the wild. Slowly, that love became mine. So, sitting in class thinking about summer, I started to plan: itinerary, campsites, gear lists, contingencies, and a 600 dollar budget each. Then came the hardest part, convincing our parents to let us spend twelve days in some of the most untamed wilderness in America alone. To our surprise, yes. With the green light, we got to work.

Campsite lotteries, backup routes, truck maintenance, and finally a satellite phone. Then we were on the road.

I've never felt freedom like that. We woke up in tents, hiked eighty miles of backcountry, and cooked over a camp burner. Bears came through our campsite, the truck broke down, and we slept soaking wet more than once, but we laughed through all of it.

Out there, I discovered a love for solving problems from scratch. No instructions, no safety net, just the two of us. We learned to plan carefully, then trust ourselves when the plan fell apart. Some things can only be found when you actually go looking for them. This summer, we're headed northeast to find them again.

The income statement looked like nothing I had ever seen. It looked like a mess.

Over the past two semesters, I've had a remote internship at a small financial growth advisory firm called eGateway. I found the opportunity through a Vanderbilt senior who encouraged me to reach out. The firm takes a couple of interns each year to help with entry level work in exchange for exposure to real deal flow.

One Monday in early March, my supervisor sent me a company's raw financials. My job was to label each item with a tracking code and build a model that connects to our standard templates. Those clean statements would feed other models. The margin for error was low.

I had a choice: use AI to handle most of the work, or build the model myself, understand it, and use AI only to check my work. I chose the latter.

The process was humbling. I got the model to run, but I realized how much I didn't fully understand, especially how different metrics can tell one story on paper and another in real life.

I had built the car, but I didn't know how to drive it. I came in thinking I understood financial statements, and this showed me the gap between recognition and real understanding. AI could have done it faster, maybe cleaner, but it wouldn't have exposed what I was missing. Those gaps are what I want to find, and what I'm driven to close.