This is the final story in the series, Seniors On the Move, which are intended to be a look back and a look ahead, while capturing a moment in time. To read about more senior reflections and their thoughts on the future, click here.
Tom Yanez does not remember a time when he wasn’t playing soccer.
“It started before my memory,” he says, as if puzzled by a question implying there even was anything before soccer. “I remember Kindergarten,” he says, concentrating hard. “You know how when you think back, and you can’t remember when you were a baby, and then, at a certain age, you can sort of start remembering things?” He shrugs here. “I started playing soccer before I can remember things.”
At first, he played other sports, too, including baseball and flag football, but starting at the age of seven, Tom began to specialize in soccer. He joined a competitive travel club, made the A team easily, and played in his spare time with his older brother, Dan.
“By seven or eight, he was serious about it,” recalls his mom, Coleen Yanez. “He was all in.” He tried a few instruments in elementary school, but “nothing that took. The only thing that ever had some prominence was soccer.”
Tom was a “creative and curious kid,” insists his father, Antonio Yanez, noting that he expressed interest in a wide range of activities. “Having said that, the one thing that was always a constant was soccer.”
Mrs. Yanez echoes this. “The one thing that was always a driving force for him was soccer.”
Throughout his time at Pingry, he focused on soccer in the fall. He didn’t play other sports until the very end of his senior year, when he joined Varsity Boys Lacrosse with a few of his friends, and only dabbled lightly in a club or two. He was well liked, but perhaps hard to get to know. “He’s very hard to read,” admits David Fahey ’99, Associate Head Coach of the Boys’ Varsity Soccer Team. “Tommy is a closed book. He’s not an open guy.” His calm and composed demeanor was matched by an unshakeable confidence and focus. ”He’s got a beautiful confidence, bordering on cockiness,” admires Coach Fahey. Bordering? “The way you want an athlete to be.”
Still, Coach Fahey is keenly aware that this can sometimes be misunderstood. “Tommy is the kind of kid who is often miscast as cocky or brash by people who don’t know him, by people that don’t understand all the hard work that he’s put in to get to where he is, and all the focus and prioritization that he has.”
When the Pingry soccer season—always intensely demanding—ended, the idea of taking a day off from soccer never occurred to him. After the final game, when did he resume his travel club?
“The next day,” he says.
Not even one day off?
“No.”
So there it was. Tom Yanez played soccer and that was it. There was no more to it.
Or was there?
***
Last spring, Upper School English Teacher Tom Keating took over a spring elective course called Contemporary American Poetry. It was his first time teaching the course, and he had some trepidation about how well it would be received. “Loving it doesn’t mean you can teach it to others,” explains Mr. Keating candidly. Among the students in his class was a then– junior-year varsity soccer player, Tom Yanez. “Full disclosure, I’ve never seen him play soccer,” admits Mr. Keating regretfully, before explaining how busy his fall schedule has become. “But I’ve heard he’s a great player and a great teammate.”
The poetry class was new, therefore, to the students as well as the teacher. “I wanted to try and capture and express my feelings about poetry to my students,” says Mr. Keating. “And I wondered if that was going to happen. And it did happen. And Tom was an important part of the reason why the class succeeded.”
Mr. Keating found Tom to be an unusual student (“He has a personality and a demeanor that are very hard to read at first glance”), one who could initially appear uninterested before surprising those around him with his fresh perspective. “You’re put off, initially,” Mr. Keating admits. “But then he always comes through with some kind of insight, some kind of a revelation.”
Mr. Keating, who loves literature and poetry and is a brilliant writer himself, was thoughtful when asked about his student. He considered his student and decided there is one word that describes Tom Yanez the most:
Insouciant.
“Look it up,” he advised this confused writer, before continuing:
Mr. Keating: “That’s the word I associate with him. When a discussion starts in class, he may appear uninterested or critical of the subject or poem or whatever the issue is under consideration. And then, you know, when you press him on it—and I almost think this is something he invites—he has something really interesting to say. And he makes kind of a fast pivot—maybe there’s an analogous soccer move—but he makes a fast pivot from something that seemed almost irreverent to something that is really insightful. And I mention this because I see it over and over again. It’s a pattern. And it’s a very valuable force to have in class because he’ll start leading you down the path to a wrong impression of him and then, just kind of magically, he’ll switch gears. And I know he’s bright and he’s naturally curious about the material, but he has this way of lulling your appreciation for that and then quickly turning it around. Some of the coolest, most offhand, offbeat insights in class have come from him… He appears somewhere between enigmatic and a bit detached , but then he manages to turn things into a moment in which the rest of us see something we hadn’t seen before.”
In short, an athlete who, by outside appearances, specialized only in soccer starting at the age of seven is, in the words of the ever-discerning Mr. Keating, “a genuine intellectual.” Perhaps the rest of the world was underestimating Tom Yanez, and if they wanted to pigeonhole him, then so be it. But there is no fooling Mr. Keating, who remains impressed with his student.
“He has a mind like a steel trap,” he says and smiles. “He remembers details. If I try to catch him on something, he’ll quote me back something I said a month earlier. He misses nothing. It’s quite interesting,” he says, and then adds, “But he is whimsical and playful and yes, insouciant. That’s him.”
Mr. Keating also had Tom in his more freewheeling, informal Freedom course this year, where students are given a handshake when they contribute a surprising insight—whether it be controversial, humorous, or unexpected—that electrifies the class. “He’s gotten more than his share of handshakes,” he says proudly. “He just has this ability to capture and galvanize moments in class.”
Mr. Keating considers Tom Yanez and shakes his head, seemingly impressed, amused, and mystified all at once. “Definitely charismatic,” he says. “There’s nothing superficial about him. He’s got a lot of depth intellectually. He’s also got a natural fluency as a writer.”
So there it was. Tom Yanez is a brilliant thinker. Underestimate at your own risk.
What more is there?
“And,” Mr. Keating adds, almost as an afterthought, “I hear he’s a damn good soccer player.”
He wraps up the interview with a smile. “I don’t worry about him succeeding in life—let me put it to you that way.”
***
If Mr. Keating wants to watch his soon-to-be former student play, he’ll have to catch a train to Boston next year, where Tom will be playing soccer for Tufts University, alongside his older brother, Dan. If he does make the trip, he may just recognize a similarity between his former student’s intellectualism and his style of play, which is striking for how composed and calm he remains. No matter the intensity of the game, Tom projects an air of coolness, an unflappable focus that expresses itself in some of the smoothest soccer one can see.
“I tend to be pretty calm,” says Tom. “I try not to lose my cool when I’m playing. And I just try to have fun when I play. I’m at my best when I have fun and I’m relaxed on the field.” Paradoxically, Tom insists that a passion he’s devoted himself to for most of his life should not be taken too seriously. “If you take it too seriously, then you’re not having fun, and then you’re a little uptight and rigid and you’re not willing to take risks.” To him, it’s all very simple. “If I’m having fun, I’m willing to try things.”
Coach Fahey describes Tom’s style this way. “There’s an elegance to it,” he says. “A simplicity. He’s not a flashy player—yet he has all the technical ability to be flashy, he’s got all the skills to flash, but Tom understands the game at a core level, and he would rather do it the simple, elegant, high-efficiency way rather than the exciting fancy ‘oohs and ahhs’ crowd-pleasing way.” It’s simply not his style to be a showman. “There’s no attention seeking or grabbing for the spotlight,” Coach Fahey observes, and then struggles to put Tom’s style into words. “I don’t want to call it workmanlike… workmanlike are the kids that are like brass-knuckle fighters. That’s workman. He’s more… symphonic. There’s just a beautiful elegance to it, a simple, high-efficiency to the way he does things.”
Mr. Yanez is more succinct. “Tom plays beautiful soccer.”
Perhaps that calm, unflappable air, that unaffected demeanor and playful approach—insouciant—comes from a more intuitive way of moving through the world. After all, when comparing Tom’s unique approach to life to that of his older brother, Dan, Mrs. Yanez observes, “Dan is very much, ‘I’m at A, and I want to go to Z, so I’m going to go to B, C, D, and so on,” she says. “Everything is pretty plotted out.”
And Tom?
“I wouldn’t use the word artistic…” begins Mr. Yanez.
“It’s not quite free spirited…” searches Mrs. Yanez for the right description.
“It’s more art than science,” observes Mr. Yanez.
In soccer, players use deception to confuse and surprise their opponents. “It’s one of the skills that soccer players rely on fundamentally to keep the ball,” explains Coach Fahey. Whether it’s a trick or simply a change of pace or direction, it’s an effective strategy, especially if an opponent is underestimating a player. “A player does a deceptive move to make their opponent lose their scent,” he says. “The idea is to let them think you’re a certain way, so that when you make your move, you leave them in your dust.”
A fast pivot, Mr. Keating had said.
The creative thinker who earned more than his fair share of handshakes by surprising the class is no different than the artistic, intuitive player in the game. A sort of poet on the pitch, bound for Tufts, and whatever life holds beyond high school, where no doubt it gets easier for the world to see the fuller picture, the way teachers like Mr. Keating already do.
“He’s just a very cool kid.”
***
Second photo by Anthony "Truncs" Truncale '26
To contact the author: Sara Courtney, Communications Writer