A Lifetime Impact: Mr. Friesen

Mr. Friesen, Computer Teacher and JV Basketball Coach - My first interaction with Mr. Friesen was on the basketball court. I hadn't excelled in intramural basketball, but like any other sport for me, it involved competition so I played. I didn't understand the fundamentals of the game beyond don't double dribble, don't travel and heave the ball at the basket (I was a scrawny malnurished missionary kid). One particular open gym while shooting at a basket by myself, Mr. Friesen took the time to come over and show me one simple pointer - on my shooting hand, hold the ball on my finger tips instead of in my palm. He gave me that one simple instruction and he let me be the rest of that day. I eventually made the JV squad and he began to teach me the game of basketball. He invested time teaching me the game, but kept his expectations high. Over Christmas all of the missionaries in our mission would gather for a week long conference. Someone had the bright idea that Mr. Friesen and his wife would be a great couple to lead the sessions for us teens-the sessions were great, but the fringe benefits were less than desireable. Each morning at about 6am, when I was still recovering from having watched the latest bowl game, he'd wake me to go running to stay in shape since it was mid-season. He pushed me hard, had high expectations and didn't let me fail. After the first game of my Junior year, a game in which I had been yelling instructions to my teammates throughout the game, inadvertently letting the other team and everyone else in the gym for that matter know that we were in a 1-3-1 defense, Mr. Friesen pulled me aside and pointed out that my teammates had been listening to me, that I had been an on-the-court leader. He also mentioned we'd be implementing signals so I wouldn't give away our defensive scheme.

In the classroom, Mr. Friesen unleashed my love for computers, particularly programming. I was bitten by the programming bug early, as early as grade 4. As I reached high school, Mr. Friesen was in the early stages of introducing a new programming curriculum based on Turbo Pascal. I think he mostly taught himself and built the new program from scratch. The new curriculum was the exact set of challenges I needed to spur me on to strive for more. He taught us in a way that was open to our ideas. Other than Computer Applications, which I pretty much already knew since I was teaching missionaries how to use WordPerfect and the ill-fated WordStar, I took every computer course Mr. Friesen offered during my time in high school, culminating in AP Computer Science. He came oh so close to getting me to go to his alma mater, Taylor University to study Computer Science. I had the chance to visit the Taylor campus at the end of my Junior year in college and had I visited the campus prior to deciding which college to attend, I probably would've picked Taylor.

Mr. Friesen's taking my undeveloped abilities on the basketball court and in programming computers and molding them to reach a greater potential have stayed with me to this day. Even though it doesn't help me make a living, I still shoot a consistent free throw. And the computer expertise I gleaned from all those courses is used daily as I now try to strip apart the code behind webpages, create more and more complicated functions in Excel spreadsheets and enhance our databases.

Mr. Friesen's impact on my life was so fundamental and has had such long lasting an impact, I hope that I have but a smidge of a similar opportunity to influence the lives of the kids in our school.