Football taught Royal grad speaker to 'love the grind'

ROYAL CITY — If you’ve been a Royal High School sports fan the last four years, you’ve heard the name Sam Christensen. He excelled in football, basketball and baseball.

Christensen’s schoolmates made him the Associated Student Body president. Turns out he was a good speech writer and orator too.

Christensen can be funny too, using phrases such as: “Now it is time for me to try to inspire you all,” and “We didn’t know the easiest way to learn Spanish was by singing.”

Like most athletes, Christensen found a connection between athletics and life. He related that to the commencement audience.

“I will start with a phrase that the football team used this year,” he said. “Love the grind. The grind is the hard work that is needed to be successful in all that we do.”

Loving the grind helped Christensen and his teammates win the school’s sixth state football championship. After the weekly grind, they dominated the competition. They learned how to get back up after each time they were knocked down.

“With success always comes failure,” Christensen said. “In the future we will all make mistakes and have bad days. When you are feeling discouraged in the future, always get ready for a new day and learn to love the grind to learn from your mistakes.”

Christensen got to the heart of his speech about halfway through. He had started speaking of how the class came in as freshman and grew.

“There were many things we didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know it was a race to the cafeteria. We didn’t know the best looking guy in school would be a teacher.”

The guest speaker, chosen by the class, was former Royal teacher Jen Clark (1970s-2011). She thanked the students for the honor.

“I believe I was even a teacher for the parents of some of the parents of these graduating seniors,” she said.

Through successes and mistakes, Clark said she found her best self. Teaching did not come easy because she was an introvert. At first she thought she had to be loud and firm.

“I found that I didn’t need to be a Simon Degree type,” she said. “Once I started to rely on the Golden Rule, discipline issues just seemed to disappear for the most part.”

Clark said a highlight of her teaching career came when a particularly quiet sixth-grader wrote that, in Clark, she had found an “angel sent from Heaven.”

“It made all the trials and tribulations of a teaching career worthwhile,” Clark said.

“As the age -old saying goes,” she added, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I was ready, and you were my teachers.”