Sometimes, you just have to roll with it, no matter your circumstances.
Josh McDonald was doing plenty of that Saturday morning on the turf of Pony Lewis Field.
The Morgantown High School senior didn’t have a choice.
Two weeks ago Friday, he was involved in a serious car crash, leaving him with a broken neck, a snapped leg and dislocated knee.
On that same field where he had competed in varsity lacrosse just weeks before, he was smiling and looking up at the crowd that had filled both sides of the bleachers.
The latter was done, oh-so-carefully, as his neck was in a brace.
“This is what I was working for,” he said from his wheelchair.
“I wasn’t gonna miss it.”
Josh was referring to Morgantown High’s Class of 2023 Commencement, the 140th in the history of the redbrick school on Wilson Avenue.
He was among the more than 450 seniors who gathered on the sunny morning one final time before going forth.
If Josh was literally resilient, his classmates were just as much so on the metaphorical side, Principal Paul Mihalko said, as he readied for the ceremonies.
“This was the class that came in with COVID,” he said.
“They went from the promise of freshman year to being knocked out of school. Then, they were in school, and out of school, because of the pandemic,” the principal continued.
“But they worked hard, and they achieved, in academics and athletics,” he said. “That’s how I’m going to remember them. ‘Resilient,’ is the word.”
“Vigilant,” was the one for Kayla Bardogna.
Adorned in her cap and gown, she was gazing out of a classroom window, across the student section and onto the field, which sits smack in the middle of the two wings of the school.
It wasn’t nostalgia.
It was responsibility.
“Just seeing how my guys are doing,” Kayla said.
She spent senior year as head majorette of the MHS Band, renowned for its halftime shows and appearances across West Virginia and the nation.
The band was tuning up for another big performance on this day.
It was all about simply being there for one another.
Hugs and handshakes were exchanged in the bleacher rows.
Moms brought bouquets of flowers for their graduating girls – and lots of gentlemen were spied sporting the same T-shirt with the same message: “Proud Bonus Dad of a Class of 2023 Graduate.”
Marianna Morgano wasn’t the least bit shy, in bragging about the dynamic.
“We were able to adapt to whatever the world threw at us,” the senior class president said, “and this turned our high school experience into a success story.”
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