Courtney Neese ’00: 

Walking through our campus today, it’s hard to imagine a time when The Hill School wasn’t coed, but as we approach The Hill School’s 175th anniversary, it’s worth noting that for most of those years, Hill was an all-male institution. There was a time when women at Hill weren’t permitted to wear pantsuits, when their role was relegated to pouring coffee for male teachers and students, when pregnant women were barred from the dining hall, and when new female teachers received vacuum cleaners as welcome gifts. The very idea of coeducation was treated as absurd, greeted with “riotous laughter” when the 6th form performed a skit about it in the early 1940s, deemed “dangerous” by our debate team in the late 1940s, dismissed as “impractical” by administration in the 1950s, and mocked in April Fools headlines throughout the 1960s. Even into the 1970s and 1980s, arguments against coeducation persisted: it was “unnatural,” “too great a risk,” would harm male students’ college prospects, and as late as 1989, could create “a terrible rush for young boys and girls to leap from childhood to adulthood.” When the school finally embraced coeducation in 1998, the last all-male graduating class wore shirts reading “The Last Proud Class” as they jumped into the Dell. But when 89 of us walked onto campus that fall, new shirts appeared declaring “The FIRST Proud Class.” One proud class after another has followed, as we’ve celebrated our first female prefects, SGA senators, team captains, Honor Council presidents, department chairs, assistant heads of school, chaplains, academic deans, and our first female Head of School. Looking back 26 years after my own Hill graduation, I’m filled with immense pride knowing that an already great school became even greater in 1998, and I’m confident that this decision to embrace our full community of students has laid the foundation for the next 175 years to be nothing short of extraordinary. 

Chris Delucia: 

On the Friday evening of Nov 2, 2018 during Lawrenceville Weekend, a major storm hit Pottstown and everyone in the Hill dorms had to go down and huddle in the basement or first floor for several hours. The next morning, McMains and I went to the golf course to get ready for the L’Ville race and discovered that a tornado had ripped at least 20 giant trees completely out of the ground and we had to reroute the course. 

It was an exciting day, L’Ville had won the MAPL championship and they were very strong that year. However, we ran amazingly well, and when it finished, the score was 28-28. There was one point of displacement, our sixth runner finished 10th, beating their #5, adding one point, to create the tie. As it turns out, the “tie breaker” was the place of the sixth man, so Trent Lopata ’19 not only brought us into the tie, he was the tiebreaker that gave us the win over Lawrenceville.