Thriving through change – Gilford student's essay wins best in state

GILFORD — Gilford High School has pulled off a stock market sweep. Last month, Owen Richardson won a regional stock market game offered by a finance industry association. Last week, the school held a special assembly to honor another Gilford student who penned the winning essay in the statewide “Investwrite Competition.”

For her accomplishment, Reece Sadler received a gift card, gifts from the SIFMA Foundation, an association for the U.S. securities industry, as well as swag from GHS. The essay contest challenged students to think about change – how change has affected their lives, and how businesses have had to navigate changes in the marketplace.

Steve O’Riordan, business teacher at GHS, said what set Sadler’s essay apart was her personal touch.

“I read every essay that people write,” O’Riordan said, adding that Sadler’s was “so well written, and it touched the heart.”

In her essay, Sadler recounted one of the biggest changes in her life, which occurred three years ago when her family moved from Lincoln, Neb., to Gilford in the spring of her eighth grade school year.

“Moving across the country to a completely unfamiliar place has played an immense part in shaping who have become,” Sadler wrote in her essay. She was quiet at first, she wrote, while she sought a place to fit in. It didn’t take her too long, though, as she has made friends, found a job, earned membership in the National Honor Society and is captain of the varsity soccer team. “Through all the highs and lows of change, I’ve managed to come out better on the other side,” she wrote.

That experience is contrasted with that of Eastman Kodak, which was sitting on the top of the film photography world when digital photography was beginning to emerge. It was a Kodak engineer that built the first digital camera, in fact. The chief executive officer recognized that the company had about ten years before film would be succeeded by electronic image recording – but unlike Sadler, Eastman Kodak failed to embrace the dawn of a new day.

“A business’s success depends on not only their popularity and income, but also their ability to bounce back from unfortunate circumstances,” Sadler wrote.

Sadler credited her father, Casey, for suggesting Kodak for her essay. He’s the reason that the family moved, so that he could advance his career from being the sales manager of a motorcycle shop in Lincoln, to being a district manager for Kawaski in the Northeast.

Taking after her father, Sadler plans to study business, perhaps business law, in college.

Sadler didn’t know until partway through the assembly that hers was the winning essay.

“I thought it was good, but I didn’t think it would win any awards or anything,” Sadler said. She figured it out pretty quickly when the details of the essay were listed by a representative from SIFMA, who joined the assembly virtually.

“I was shaking, I was very nervous, it’s very exciting,” Sadler said about sitting in the audience and hearing her essay described. When she was finally called to the stage, her parents stepped out from behind the curtain, with hugs and flowers to bestow upon their daughter.

Lori, her mother, said she was “proud, but not surprised.” Her daughter has high expectations for herself, she said, “and she achieves them.”

Casey, her father, said he’s pleased she shares his interest in business, and that, three years later, he knows it was the right decision to move his family from the heartland to New England.

“We were very grateful how we were greeted when we moved to Gilford,” Casey said. “It’s a great place to be.”

The days leading up to last week’s assembly were difficult for him, though. The school had informed them that their daughter won and would be surprised at a class-wide assembly on Friday. They were invited to come, but couldn’t spill the beans.

“That was very, very hard,” Casey said.

“I had to talk him down,” Lori added.

Then, as the assembly drew near, Sadler asked her father to read another essay she was working on, and he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s really well written. Someday, you’re going to win a prize,” he told her.