Page 12 - The Edge: Issue 7

Black o Blue
Story by Rhiannon Drysdale
From band to soccer, there really is no stopping Dylan Black.
Long before Dylan Black, 12, first set foot on our school campus, he was a boy visiting relatives in Maryland. These particular relatives did not live far from the city of Annapolis, so it was inevitable that he would eventually go to the city itself. Perhaps even he does not know whether it happened on the first visit, or on a
later one, but sooner or later, in the city of Annapolis itself, he saw them: Young men and women in crisp white or dark blue uniforms, wearing stiff white, black-brimmed caps.
They were the midshipmen of the United States Naval Academy, also known as ‘mids’. But to the boy traveling up north, they were something awe-inspiring, something amazing. Something that he wanted to be. But could he?
“It started out as a sort of ‘what if’ dream,” Black said.
For a long time, Black did not mention his ‘what-if’ dream. When he came to Edgewood as a seventh grader, he began to do what he would become well known for: he did everything he could, and he did it well. He and Theo Cox, 12, another seventh grader at the time, were the only seventh graders to make the junior varsity (JV) soccer team. Even back then, the two were not new to being each other’s teammates, having played soccer together since they were four and five years old. Making JV as a
seventh grader is kind of a big deal. Making any team as a seventh
grader is no easy feat, and yet Black and Cox both pulled it off.
What really set Black apart, however, was not only what he did on the field, but what he accomplished when off. From before seventh grade, he had been playing double bass. Once he was
in seventh grade, however, he quickly found himself an integral member of the band program, playing a new instrument— clarinet—even more than bass. By eighth, he was playing in
two separate school bands, in two separate class periods.
By ninth grade, in his first guidance meeting as a high- schooler with Ms. Cheryl Krestan, he knew for sure what he wanted to do. He enjoyed challenges, both physical and mental. He did the best he could do in everything, no matter the circumstances. So perhaps, it should not have come as a surprise to everyone in the room when Black told Ms. Krestan that he wanted to go the the Naval Academy. It did anyway, because ninth graders tend not
to know exactly where they are going to college—but that was not about to stop Black.
The good news was, he was already on the right track. That year, he made the leap from JV to the Varsity soccer team, something all but unheard of for a freshman with a talented team comprised of mostly upperclassmen. Not only that, but Black took his first AP class: AP World History, one of the hardest AP classes there is with a national pass rate of 56.2% on the exam.
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Black could have made any one of those things