Six Holy Family alumni among Quincy Notre Dame Class of 2022

From friends to family

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Six of this year’s graduating seniors at Quincy Notre Dame (QND) High School share a long-standing bond.

Together through elementary school at Holy Family School in Hannibal and now four years at QND, they’ve grown from friends into nearly family.

“It’s more like a sibling relationship,” Josie Lewis said.

Abigail Beck, Ethan Beroiza, Andrew Catalpa, Zachary Friedersdorf, Lewis and Harrison Oden graduated May 15 as part of the 83-member Class of 2022. It’s the largest number of students from Holy Family in a single QND class — and a symbol of the dedication by the students and their families to continue a Catholic education.

“I like the family aspect. You know everybody, and everybody knows you,” said Beroiza, who moved from Hannibal to Quincy in eighth grade.

“It’s the community you build with each other,” said Beck, who lives in Hannibal.

“For me, it was important to stay Catholic,” said Friedersdorf, who lives in Palmyra.

“I didn’t want to be around a huge group of people. A smaller school is better for me,” said Lewis, who lives in Hannibal, and the best part “has been meeting a lot of interesting people, both in class settings and sports settings.”

Knowing each other so well helped with the transition to QND, and choir for Beck and sports — football for Friedersdorf and Beroiza, baseball for Oden, tennis for Catalpa and cross country for Lewis — soon introduced them to their new classmates.

“It’s good to meet new people. I have a lot of friends that are going to carry on past high school,” Friedersdorf said.

One of those certainly is Beroiza.

“We were in the same daycare, and once we got old enough to go to school, the same school,” Ethan said. “We’ve been best friends since forever. Now we’re going to the same college.”

Both will attend Quincy University in Quincy. Beroiza plans to major in business with a goal of opening his own business in the future. Friedersdorf wants to become a dentist.

Beck plans to go to nursing school and work in pediatrics and labor/delivery. Catalpa will study accounting at Truman State University. Lewis will study zoology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, with a goal of becoming a zookeeper, and Oden will study business at Lindenwood University in St. Charles.

The six seniors offered some advice for incoming freshmen at Quincy Notre Dame.

“Join something,” Lewis said.

“Be a part of something even if you’ve never done it before. I never played football before high school. Sophomore year I joined the team. Now I’ve got a lot more friendships, and I’m going to play in college,” Beroiza said. “It can’t hurt to try new things.”

Other suggestions include:

Talk to the teachers — “Your teachers are here to help,” Beck said. “If there’s something specific you want and you know that’s what you want, there’s a teacher there to help you. If you talk to them, it does work out.”

Be open to new experiences — “I’m not Catholic, but it helped me in my faith,” Beck said. “You get to see what different faiths are like.”

Build friendships — The six expect to stay friends, even if they don’t see each other except “randomly in a weird place, a store or a gas station,” Beroiza said.

“We probably won’t talk all the time,” Friedersdorf said. “But if we see one another, we won’t forget.”

Ms. Gertz Husar is a staff writer for the Quincy Herald Whig newspaper, which published a version of this article on May 13. The article is reprinted here with permission.

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