Senior goodbye: Samuel Benvignati

Dear Archbishop Carroll,

Thank you. Thank you for everything: all the ups and downs, all the memories, and the friendships I made. Coming into Carroll, I was scared because I wasn’t from a Catholic school and I only knew about 2 people that were going to Carroll. I thought that the entirely of freshman would be scary because that’s what everyone told me. Instead, it was one of the best years of my life. It started off slow, just like freshman year is supposed to, but then a group was formed and we all bonded pretty fast. Freshman year felt so long, which gave me a chance to get friendly with a lot of people and make a lot of memories. I will never forget my first Carroll football game. Under the lights at our homecoming game against Neumann, we caught a game winning touchdown with seconds to go. It was unreal and then the dance was even better. Then there was that snow storm that kept almost everyone that couldn’t drive in the school. It was around Christmas so they let kids stay in the auditorium and watch that until the buses could make it. One of the last but best memories of freshman year was new teacher Mr. Kropp doing a rap about Archbishop Carroll and it actually wasn’t that bad. Freshman year was easily one of the best years of my life, but that leads us into the year that got cut short. 

Sophomore year started off just as good as freshman year. There was a lot of life in the school and the teachers were awesome. Everything felt amazing. The sports teams were good, the student sections were crazy, and my grades were great. The best part about it, though, was baseball. I was going nuts during winter workouts and into tryouts. I made varsity and was going to start on varsity as a sophomore. It was almost like everything was going too good. COVID completely ruined everything and ended my sophomore year.

Junior year was awful. I’m not going to sugar coat it, I didn’t have much fun at all. It was a weird year. We had to wear masks the whole year and almost everything was canceled because of COVID. We had no pep rallies, no dances, no fans for sports — everything was worse. Throughout high school I was never one of the kids that hated school. I actually enjoyed it a lot and wanted to come in. It may not seem like that, Mrs. Gimpel, because I’m always late but I promise you it’s true. Half of the students were out every day because of the two different groups so I didn’t get to see some of my friends the entire year. The baseball team was bad and this may seem weird but the energy in the hallway was just awful. Everything seemed darker and it was like no one wanted to be there. 

Senior year: easily the best school year of my life. It’s been amazing. I committed to play baseball in college and I got closer to a lot of my friends. I also got closer to God because of Kairos. The baseball team has been great the whole season and were going to the playoffs on Saturday. With the whole school coming in at once again, I got to see so many of my friends that I didn’t see for a while. The only thing that I wish there was more of was school activities like pep rallies and stuff like that. Freshman and sophomore year were full of them but I feel like senior year barely had anything. In my mind the reason why this year was so great was because I didn’t want to have any regrets leaving high school. I was never the biggest social guy and I’m still not but I was really bad at doing stuff with my school friends the first two years of high school. This year I wanted to change that. The only regret that I have is not going out sooner. I think Carroll has some pretty amazing people that I want to be friends with outside of high school, but with me not being around them a lot I wasted opportunities to get closer with them. I talked about this at Kairos. I said how I had 8 months to get as close to these people as possible and when I walk on that stage in a couple weeks. I don’t know if I got close enough. I think I ran out of time.