50th Timeline: 2006-2007 – A Year in the Life of Friends School Mullica Hill

The cold of winter led to a shift indoors for sports with separate girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Some great athletes played at Friends School Mullica Hill, but the sports programs were about opportunity for anyone interested in playing and being part of a team. Parent Chris Brown remembered how a few years earlier the School’s basketball program had helped his son, William Vega-Brown, become an athlete. “Will was, in his younger years, never particularly athletic,” remembered Chris, and he “was a very lousy basketball player, but he joined the basketball team anyway.” During the season, Brown noted that “he couldn’t sink a basket to save his life” but in “the last game of the season, all his teammates kept throwing him the ball so that he could finally sink that one basket [and] he did! At which point the entire gym and his teammates all broke into applause; and that tells me the value of friendship and the sense of community in this school. I should add that he has since become very athletic. He went on to play football, he’s working on his third-degree black belt in a second martial art and is highly athletic now. But in middle school he needed a little help and the school was there for him.” Winter was also time for the students to perform for their parents and their peers in the winter drama and at the winter music concerts. Friends School Mullica Hill also regularly engaged in acts of service during the winter, hosting Ten Thousand Villages to support third world artisans (thanks especially to Donna Gibson), and collecting items to donate to those in need.