Brooks Taylor ’06

Written April 2015

When Brooks Taylor left Harding Academy, he made an adventurous choice: he opted to matriculate at the Taft School, a New England boarding school about a thousand miles from Nashville. “It put me far out of my comfort zone as a 14-year-old leaving my mom and dad by going to Connecticut to school—but it ended up being an amazing experience,” he says. “It taught me to be independent and it pushed me both academically and athletically.”

It should be no surprise, then, that Brooks is now a world explorer working for an adventure travel company. “We take families and individuals on hiking and biking tours all over the world,” he says. When not traveling for his job, he is likely to be traversing the globe on his own. This spring he spent a couple of months abroad, first in Kenya visiting his brother, Chase (who was a Harding student from second to sixth grade), and then taking a bike trip with a friend through Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Monaco, France, and Spain. The experience involved camping out, staying in hostels, and “seeing the world off the beaten track.”

Although he travels far and wide, Brooks knows that Harding stays with him. “Harding had and continues to have a positive impact on me,” he says. He considers some of his classmates who began with him in kindergarten to be “lifelong friends.” Strong, positive relationships were at the heart of the experience. He says, “Going to a school with such small classes I was able to get to know my classmates very well. This also allowed the teachers to be able to focus on individual students and build relationships. Teachers like Mr. [Jay] Taylor, Mr. [Patrick] Noon and Mrs. [Jennifer] Wienblatt were able to become more than teachers and build friendships with students.”

Brooks was welcomed back to campus last fall, when he took the job of coaching the boys junior varsity soccer team. His knowledge of Harding and his soccer experience made him well qualified for the position. The captain of his team at Taft, Brooks was named All-Connecticut and All-New England before heading to Gettysburg College, where he was a four-year starter and a history major. He says, “It was really fun getting to know the kids and teaching them a thing or two about the sport. My soccer coaches at Harding were Coach Dunn and Coach Kelly, and they had a lasting impact on me as a young man and athlete so I hoped to give a fraction of that to the team this fall.”

Eventually, Brooks might find himself on a conventional career path, but for now he is happy to be “working half the year and traveling with what I earned for the other half. I figure its better to create a unique resume through travel and gaining valuable life experiences rather than jumping straight into a more traditional line of work.”

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