WFA: Kyle Hughes

[dlavery]

Several years ago I was riding on the bus at Disney back to the hotel one evening after the day's competition, and wearing my team t-shirt. I started talking with this amazingly energetic, excited, bubbly woman that saw the shirt and just started going on and on and on about how much fun she was having with her team at the competition. Even among the normally high-energy FIRST crowd, her enthusiam was remarkable.

A year later I was sitting in the FIRST Board meeting in Orlando during the Championships, and there she was again. This time she was giving a special talk to the members of the FIRST Board and Executive Advisory Board about the impacts of the program to her and her students. It is fair to say that her story was one of the most compelling and meaningful statements about the power of the FIRST program to make an impact that we had ever heard.

And every year since then, when I run into Kyle at the Championships, I see the same enthusiasm and committment - never wavering, never flagging, never decreasing. Every year, just talking to her for a few minutes gets me re-engergized. Kyle embodies the spirit of FIRST that we all talk about, and is a wonderful role model for the rest of us.

-dave