By Isabella Ying
While the new school year is a daunting time for many, senior Kai LaBarrie is anticipating the upcoming nine months with excitement and positive vibes. After a busy summer in which she recovered from an injury and traveled to Greece with the school, she’s more than ready for the year.
Perhaps most importantly, she wants to help others be ready for the year, too. In addition to flag football, soccer, and rigorous coursework, she is a senior PAL. In this long-standing Lovett tradition, zealous seniors pair up with freshmen advisories to aid in the adjustment to the upper school.
When deciding to be a PALl, Kai recalled her own freshman year. “I know how difficult of a transition it was, and how new everything can be,” she said Monday afternoon, her warm voice juxtaposing with the droning chatter in the Vasser-Woolley Library. “I just think it’s helpful to have friendly faces to look up to; I just want everyone to have a great time,” she added.
Kai knows that there’s more to being a PAL than just a desire to help the upper school’s youngest and freshest Lions. There’s a lot of preparation that goes into acting on it.
“We had three conferences that we had to do training for,” she explained. She said that on the first day, “we got all of our papers that told us what we’re going to do with y’all each day. And we have talked about questions, like how to talk to you guys, basically in games.”
Out of the three days, however, her favorite was the second. “We went on a fake tour,” she said. “We walked around the school by ourselves, where we would go when we had you guys.”
On the last day of training, Kai and the other senior pals found out which advisor they were paired with and who was in that advisory. Kai is the Bayless advisory’s girl PAL. She’s working alongside Blake Waller. Mr. Bayless is a first-time advisor at the Lovett School—which means that she’s also helping him, in addition to the freshmen, in his first year of advisory.
The PAL experience Kai is most looking forward to is the Camp Coleman retreat in September. “We do team bonding stuff, or just fun stuff like campfires,” she said.
Forming tight bonds takes time, and she knows she has some work to do with a few of her freshmen. “Some of my advisees don’t really speak to me,” she explained, slightly disappointed. When she tried to greet one of them, she recalled that “he looked so scared.”
Life for Kai is not all about winning over freshmen. She’s excited for “senior activities, because the only thing that’s basically different this year is actually getting fun stuff.” Kai is also anticipating finally using her senior privileges, which she’s “going to use tomorrow,” she added.
With everything she has going on as a mentor, student, and athlete, Kai thinks her final year at Lovett is already shaping up to be a promising one. “I’m feeling great,” she said.
And, she wants to remind us all: “Everything’s going to work out.”
