Wawasee graduate Hannah Likens played tennis for the Warriors while maintaining her top-class ranking. Photo by Nathan Pace.

By Nathan Pace
InkFreeNews

One might assume a valedictorian for a graduating class did everything perfectly while in high school. While Hannah Likens had the grades, she wishes she had done more clubs and extracurriculars in her four years at Wawasee High School.

“Put time into academics but don’t put all of your time in there. Be more involved in things like sports and clubs because looking for scholarships and applying for colleges, I feel like a lot of them look for more extracurricular activities,” Likens said. “Just be me more involved because I do wish I was more involved my freshman and sophomore year. Freshman and sophomore year, I just played tennis. I wasn’t involved in any clubs.”

With her graduation and valedictorian speech behind her, Likens plans to be involved more when she attends Indiana University Fort Wayne in the fall. She will study sonography to go into ultrasound.

Likens said the idea of giving a speech for the commencement ceremony initially seemed daunting. She did have a plan though to focus her speech about enjoying the journey and not just the destination.

“It kind of terrifies me. I’m not great at presentations or anything like that,” Likens said. “I do have a quote; it’s kind of enjoy being in the process of becoming. Enjoy the present moment and everything that happens.”

One example of enjoying the process was playing tennis. Likens was new to the sport as a freshman when a friend asked her to tryout with her.

“My friend, Aubrey Gerber, wanted to try out for tennis. She didn’t want to try out alone,” Likens said.

Likens played for Coach Amanda Hare and she had to fight through injuries in her tennis career. She had to sit out the sectional matches this season due to a late injury. She reached No. 1 doubles on the team where she played with Mackenzie Hackleman her senior season.

“I’m glad I did sports honestly because it kind of took my mind off of all the overwhelming schoolwork that I had. When you’re playing a sport you are solely focused on playing it, kind of helped me,” Likens said.

Balancing tennis with her schoolwork is something Likens felt she found her own system for. Her time management was about little study sessions over a week as oppose to cramming the night before.

“If I knew I had a test on Friday, I would always try to study a little bit each night instead of studying for hours on end Thursday night. I study Monday, 30 minutes, Tuesday, 30 minutes and that helped me not be so overwhelmed,” Likens said.

The Syracuse native is thankful to her parents, Angie Fitzpatrick and Brian Likens, and also wanted to give a shout out to a few of her teachers. She credits Sarah Holsopple for building her confidence toward the medical field and for Kristen Records for preparing her for Advanced Placement testing. Likens earned college credits for four classes through her AP test scores.

“I had Holsopple for multiple years for medical classes. She just teaches well. She knows a whole lot about medicine,” she said.

Records, she said, “is really good at preparing you for AP testing,” Likens said.