.358 | to Ed Profumo, from Tim Stiven

I want to thank my Loyola Marymount Water Polo Coach Ed Profumo for the career that has now spanned 35 years. In 1981, during the first month of freshman year, a fire alarm went off right next to my room. It was so loud, I went down another hall to escape. There was a door open that I walked into, and there was Brian Day, who had a water polo poster on the wall. “Do you play water polo?”, I asked. “Yeah”, he said, “I'm on the team here too. You should come out.” So I did! When we won only 3 games in the season, I started - when we got better, I played less. When we made the Top 20, I was proud to be on a team that had become my fraternity. My Coach during my sophomore year was Ed Profumo. I got along with him really well. He was a great coach with a style that I tried to emulate when I coached as well.

He left to work at Loyola High School to teach math after my junior year. I graduated in 1985, and I applied to Loyola High School but was denied.  The Principal (who should also be included in this story) Fr. Gordon Benneit SJ, told me I needed at least a year under my belt until I took on 35 boys in an elite Jesuit High School. 

Here is where gratitude comes in.

I reapplied the following year and was hired to teach History. Ed Profumo, my old coach, was now the Varsity coach and I was asked to be the JV coach. What I didn’t know was that the Captain of my team at Loyola Marymount was also applying for the same job. He was also a History major. It was between him and me. Coach Profumo told the principal who to choose.  I had the intellect and the temperament - and got the job. And I loved my time at Loyola High School, it truly served as an apprenticeship to my future career. Three years later, I had an opportunity to teach in Geneva Switzerland, so I resigned at Loyola High School.

Before I left, I needed to teach summer school for some travel money. The chair of the History Department at Loyola had worked summer school at The Brentwood School in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.  I got that summer school job, and had an amazing time with those students. It just clicked. In just 8 weeks, I had a reputation there. After a year teaching in Geneva, it was time to return to US. I needed to get my job back. I called from the Hotel Interlocken, one to Loyola, one to Brentwood. Loyola tells me that if I had called a week earlier, I would have gotten my job back. Next call, Brentwood, the Headmaster says, “You’re hired!” Hired over the phone, all because of that summer session job, that I got from the chair of the department from the school that Ed Profumo was instrumental in getting me hired. My 15 years of teaching, 14 as Class Dean, Humanities Department Chair was enough for me to be hired by San Dieguito Union High School District at San Diego County Office of Education’s Nancy Giberson in 2006, just as Canyon Crest Academy hired its second class for history teachers. And here I am in Chicago dropping my son off at Loyola University Chicago.

An added note on gratitude. At the very moment that I am dropping my son off at Loyola Chicago, I am also working day and night to get staff and students of the Mawoud Academy in Kabul Afghanistan somewhere safe. My WhatsApp is ringing day and night with terrified high school students who my students at Canyon Crest Academy have been corresponding to on Zoom every other week since the late Spring. One 19 year old is going to college, the other one just bribed his way into a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan.  The others, especially the girls, are still stuck at home, still in Kabul. The Taliban have already previously targeted the teachers - and the school had already been bombed by ISIS or the Taliban in 2018.  My opposite in Kabul Profe Najibullah Yousefi fears only for his family. He told me, “I will fight them with books, I will fight them with words.” 

Gratitude for the life that I live here in the United States, in California, in San Diego, in Chicago, and those students who read the same books as mine, who have the same talents, the same aspirations and dreams. Anyone’s future and destiny are as much effort as providence. You have to have both.  I owe Ed Profumo this:  the hope that I can be to Najubullah what Ed Profumo was to me. That would be my act of gratitude.