OLEAN — Thirty-one area high school seniors honored at the 34th annual Big 30 Academic Scholarship Banquet will soon begin the next chapters of their young lives.
And to keep the momentum going in college and beyond, keynote speaker Brian Martin, host of the Teaching Champions podcast, asked the students to keep three words in mind: failure, curiosity and energy, as well as three stories from three inspiring figures.
“I would encourage you to write these names down because we can learn a lot from other people,” he said Thursday evening. “These are three high achievers just like yourselves.”
The success of Sara Blakely, the youngest self-made female billionaire and founder of Spanx, began with $5,000 in the bank and led to taking on the male-dominated finance world, Martin said, but it wasn’t easy. Her perseverance and ability to keep going came from her unique mindset regarding failure.
“The biggest lesson she got that made her a billionaire came when she was young,” Martin said. “She said she would come home from school, and her dad would welcome her in, they would go to the dinner table and her dad would ask her about school. … The one thing he wanted to know was, ‘What did you fail at today?’”
Blakely said those experiences helped put in her mind that true failure wasn’t the lack of success but the lack of even trying. Martin said there will be setbacks and missteps, but there are things the students can take away from those failures and keep working toward their goals.
Next, Kobe Bryant may be best known as one of the greatest NBA players of all time, but Martin said that his interests and pursuits extended to speaking five languages, publishing several books, winning an Oscar and an Emmy, playing classical music and being an advocate for women’s sports.
“Kobe Bryant was a lot more than just a basketball player, and this all goes with being curious,” Martin said.
After a series of missed shots during a must-win playoff game led to the Los Angeles Lakers losing, an 18-year-old Bryant said winning is exciting, but losing is exciting too, because there are clues and answers on how to get better.
“He says, ‘Well, better, how,’” Martin explained. “In anything that you do, what did you do well, what could you do better and how are you going to get better next time?”
Finally, lessons from William McRaven, a retired U.S. Navy four-star admiral and Special Operations commander, can teach the students about energy from an incident during Navy SEAL basic training, known as Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S).
“During this week, there’s no sleep, you’re not getting enough food, and all day long it’s up and down, doing drill after drill, caked in mud, and then nighttime hits,” Martin explained.
While the SEALs are struggling to get through the night, McRaven shared that one of the instructors comes to the group and tells them they have hot coffee and soup for them, but only if five of them quit. As one of the candidates got up, somebody down the line started singing. Pretty soon, all of them were singing and the candidate who started walking away came back to the group.
“Together, they fought through the night, and it was all about the energy that you give off,” Martin said. “The energy you give off when you walk into your professional space or around your friends or inside of the family unit, it matters. We all get to decide what energy we give.”
A second-grade teacher at Western New York schools for more than 20 years, Martin said the decade that has passed between when the seniors were in second grade and now may seem like a long time, but to others in the room, it has gone by in the blink of an eye.
“What you have achieved, what you have done, what you have learned in a short amount of time — in ten years — is pretty amazing,” he said. “Think about where you’ll be ten years from now — what you’ll have learned, the experience you’ll have had, the gifts that you will give the world, what your resume will look like.”
The annual banquet, held at the Woodside Tavern, was attended by the students, their parents and principals from the Times Herald sports coverage area known as the Big 30, comprising over 30 school districts from New York and Pennsylvania.
Each of the students who attended from their respective school districts was honored with a plaque for excellence in academics, extracurricular activities and community involvement. A committee of high school principals has bestowed more than $70,000 in scholarships to students since 1990.
Six seniors who received $500 Big 30 scholarships are Grace Close from Bradford Area High School, Lilah Cudney from Franklinville Central School, Rylee Shae Thompson from Oswayo Valley High School, Adelyn Bell from Otto-Eldred High School, Jacob Herrick from Salamanca High School and Magdalena Parish from West Valley Central School.
Other members of the 2025 Big 30 Academic All-Stars are: Ipshita Patra, Allegany-Limestone; Ethan Warriner, Andover; Alexis Lentz, Austin; Jenna Hill, Belfast; Raegan Giardini, Bolivar-Richubrg; Alexander Crowell, Cattaraugus-Little Valley; Cal Robert Dunn, Coudersport; Finnian Ricketts, Cuba-Rushford; Siying Sun, Ellicottville; Evelyn Cox, Fillmore; Melody Dombrowski, Friendship; Ryan Daciw, Genesee Valley; Tyler Richards, Hinsdake; Natalie Dunworth, Johnsonburg; Brayden Byham, Kane; Evan Snyder, Olean; Ava Rae Moss, Pioneer; Juuso Young, Port Allegany; Christopher Osgood, Portville; Madelia Griffith, Randolph; Richard Guy Elliott III, Ridgway; Hailey Illerbrun, Scio; Haydn Riekofsky, Smethport; Marissa Weinhauer, Wellsville; and Katrina Lewis, Whitesville.
