Katie Kutz
Bishop O’Connell High School
“Disciplined” may be the best word to describe Katie Kutz. On weekdays during the school year, the star pitcher for Bishop O’Connell’s softball team would rise at 3:30 a.m., eat breakfast, take her vitamins, work out and arrive at school at 7 a.m. She’d finish most of her homework at school and then head to softball practice from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. She was usually in bed by 7:30.
The hard work paid off: Kutz led her high school softball team to the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association Division I championships two years in a row and was named Virginia Gatorade Softball Player of the Year. This fall, she heads to Oklahoma State on a full softball scholarship, after graduating with a 4.5 GPA.
“She does everything with intent and purpose, probably more than I’ve seen in other athletes,” says Bishop O’Connell’s head softball coach, Suzy Willemssen. “Her attention to detail is unmatched.”
Kutz tried soccer at an early age (it wasn’t her thing), then switched to T-ball. At 8, she joined the Vienna Stars 10U fastpitch softball travel team and started playing in tournaments, keeping up with the sport through middle and high school.
She likes that it’s a game of strategy. “There are no cookie-cutter games; everything’s different,” says the McLean resident, now 18. “With every individual batter, you’re trying to almost deceive them into swinging for pitches.”
She’s also a competitive bodybuilder, having entered her first amateur competition at 16, winning every class she entered and leaving the contest crowned overall bikini champion. Her bodybuilding interest began during Covid quarantine. She tried a 30-day home fitness challenge on TikTok and was hooked. Once the world reopened, she started going to a gym and lifting weights.
But the newfound obsession had a downside: Kutz developed an eating disorder, became tired and weak, and her pitching began to suffer. She credits her recovery to “God’s grace” and a fitness coach at the gym who taught her the importance of proper nutrition.
She became so fascinated by the connection between nutrition and wellness—and so alarmed by the fad diets she kept seeing on social media—that she decided to become a registered dietitian. She plans to major in nutritional sciences in college.
“A lot of girls look up ‘How do I get thin?’ online,” she says. “I want to be part of a movement to teach people the right way to fuel their bodies.”
Elijah Hughes
Washington-Liberty High School
Elijah Hughes is an all-around athlete if ever there was one. He made W-L’s varsity football team as a ninth-grader, and by sophomore year was also a starting center on the basketball team and a pitcher on the baseball team. As a junior, he hopped on the track and field team for one season and qualified for states in shot put.
But his first love is football.
“There’s no better feeling than making a tackle behind the line of scrimmage and everybody celebrating,” says the Arlington phenom, who turns 18 in June. He graduated with a 4.0 GPA and was recruited by Stanford, Virginia Tech, UVA and the University of Miami, to name a few, but he’s taking his love of the game to Division I powerhouse University of Southern California, where he plans to study business and play football on a full scholarship.
Hughes wasn’t always the gridiron threat that he is today. As a seventh-grade cornerback for the Arlington Youth Football Club, he was the smallest player in his weight class, terrified of getting pummeled on the field. “I’d pretend to get blocked and hope someone else made the tackle,” he recalls. “One time, I ran away from the ball.”
After gaining 30 pounds and a bit of confidence over the summer, he began playing defense in eighth grade and never stopped. Now, 6 feet 3 inches and 270 pounds, the defensive lineman was named Northern Virginia Hall of Fame football player of the year last fall and made first team all-state.
He counts his father, who played football at the Air Force Academy, and older brother, who currently plays for the Hokies, among his role models.
Josh Shapiro, W-L’s football coach, says Hughes is one of the best players he’s ever encountered: “He has a mindset that’s incredibly disciplined. His work ethic is tireless. His drive to succeed is second to none.”
Hughes also credits his mom, a psychologist, with helping make him the athlete he is today. At the beginning of high school, he struggled with performance anxiety and turned to her for guidance. She taught him the importance of staying in the moment and repeating certain phrases to calm himself down. He’s learned to trust his instincts.
“If you think too much, you’ll miss an opportunity,” he says. “On any given day you can have the best game ever or the worst game of your career. You never know what’s going to happen. That’s the beauty of it.”
Olivia Zhang
McLean High School
When Olivia Zhang was in middle school, her grandfather and elementary school teacher both died of cancer. Those losses inspired her to found Cancer Kids First, which enlists volunteers to make care packages of books and toys for pediatric cancer patients. The organization now partners with 69 hospitals in the U.S. and abroad and boasts more than 28,000 volunteers in 70 chapters.
“Pursuing a cause I started in memory of two loved ones brings me a lot of joy,” says the McLean teen, who sold handmade bracelets and artwork to help pay for her grandfather’s chemo treatments in China. “Seeing everybody united and not letting grief outweigh their desire to help is so great to see in my generation.”
Zhang, 18, graduated with a 4.6 GPA and plans to major in global health at Harvard. Disturbed by the inequalities in health care, she says she’d like to start a telehealth company to bring virtual cancer care to areas lacking a major hospital or research center.
As student body president in both her junior and senior years, she launched the “Be a Good Neighbor” initiative, which each month chooses a community group to support. She also served as president of her school’s Financial Literacy and Business Club, which promotes financial literacy through workshops and “Shark Tank” competitions.
“She puts everybody ahead of herself,” says McLean Principal Ellen Reilly. “She has a lot in her life that she’s dealing with, but seems to be able to keep her focus and do it with grace.”
Of all the lessons Zhang learned in high school, one of the most important was how to delegate. When her sophomore math grade began to drop, her teacher suggested that perhaps her extracurricular endeavors were taking too much of her time. Zhang responded by creating leadership teams within Cancer Kids First and organizing her day into blocks of time for homework, friends and family.
In college, she intends to continue her work with the organization she created. “It’s become such an integral part of my life that I can’t imagine not doing it,” she says.
Alexander Steinbach
Meridian High School
Alex Steinbach exudes joy, even over Zoom. A natural performer, he sang in three school bands, was cast as the lead in Meridian High School’s fall production of Pippin, served as marketing coordinator for his school’s theater department, emceed monthly school coffeehouse concerts and was a member of the District 10 Choir.
Perhaps even more remarkable is that Steinbach entered Meridian as a senior—a transfer student from Germany, where he lived with his family for seven years before they returned to the U.S. It was a tough transition, helped by his ability to make friends easily. “I was sort of a mama hen, taking other people under my wing,” he says. “I joined everything, and when you join everything, people know who you are.”
Steinbach didn’t waste any time upon arrival in Falls Church. By the time he met with school counselor Valerie Chesley to register for classes, he had already contacted Meridian’s choir director. “He really wanted to immerse himself in our community,” Chesley says. “The way he treats other students is so welcoming.”
The first day of senior year, he linked up with another transfer student (also from Germany) and created the Mustang Mysteries Club, a student-led group of true-crime enthusiasts. In January, the club wrote a murder mystery and hosted an interactive Murder Mystery Night charity fundraiser. Steinbach trained his classmates to play detectives, suspects and witnesses, and audience members paid $10 a ticket to help solve the crime. The endeavor raised $1,000 for the Innocence Project.
Steinbach, 18, has been writing screenplays since sixth grade. He wants to work in TV or film and hopes to start his career in London. This fall he’ll begin college at the EICAR International Film School in Paris.
Julia Brodsky
H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program
Julia Brodsky was always good at math, but it wasn’t until she took her first calculus class that she realized its mind-bending potential.
“Math had always been a thing you plug numbers into and you just do computations,” says the Arlington teen, who turns 18 in July. “Calculus isn’t like that; you have to think outside the box.”
By her junior year at H-B Woodlawn, Brodsky was taking multivariable calculus and was a teaching assistant in a BC calculus class.
By senior year, she was studying linear algebra online through Johns Hopkins University and doing an independent study in number theory.
Science is another passion. After staging a science fair project on electrocoagulation, which showed how electrical currents could be used in wastewater treatment, Brodsky was accepted to the Virginia Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science and Technology. She later worked as a paid apprentice at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, conducting (as her supervisor described it) “PhD candidate-level” microbiology research.
In 2023, Brodsky was named a top 300 Scholar in the 82nd Regeneron Science Talent Search. “She’s self-motivated to an extent that’s really unusual,” says Liz Waters, her adviser at H-B. “She has always been fascinated by the world around her.”
Outside the classroom, Brodsky played the oboe in the school jazz band, was co-president of H-B’s Best Buddies chapter, and co-captained the crew team at Washington-Liberty. “The mental hurdles you have to get through to do crew are intense,” she says, “but made me a better person.”
Brodsky took 10 AP exams, earning the highest possible score (5) on all of them, and is fluent in Italian. She graduated with a 4.35 GPA and will attend MIT in the fall.
Dominic King
Bishop O’Connell High School
One of Dominic King’s best memories of his grandmother was the time she taught him multiplication and division during a flight from Chicago to Phoenix. He was 6 and fell in love with math.
He was the kid who built elaborate Lego structures and saved the instruction manuals. At 11, he built his first computer using tutorials he found online. The summer after his sophomore year, he was selected for the Virginia Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science and Technology.
He describes math as comforting. “You have a problem, and you form a methodology to solve it,” says the McLean resident, 18, who finished high school with a 4.6 GPA and plans to major in computer science at Duke University. “There are steps to follow; there’s a routine. Even if there’s not a clear way through, you can fall back on things that you know.”
At the start of the pandemic, King talked his grandfather through how to use Zoom and FaceTime. Soon, elderly neighbors were asking him to help set up their Amazon Echos and other devices. Realizing how much senior citizens could benefit from technology guidance, he started Project Digitize the Gap, a nonprofit that helps older people with in-home network setup, security and cybersafety. He recruited classmates as volunteers and built a website with free tutorials.
“It’s a great idea, especially for those [older] generations that want to be tech-savvy,” says Bill Betthauser, King’s economics teacher at Bishop O’Connell. “He has a positive, upbeat attitude, really wanting to help other people.”
The summer after his junior year, King landed an internship with the chair of George Mason University’s Cybersecurity Engineering program, where he investigated 5G security protocols and collaborated with researchers from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
As a senior, he played catcher for Bishop O’Connell’s baseball team after spending much of his junior spring in the dugout. But he played a vital role that season, too: The coach had him analyze the opposing team’s pitching patterns—a job ideally suited to his strengths.
“It was analogous to what I was doing with cybersecurity,” he says. “I called it ‘hacking the game.’ ”
Marceline Castrillon
Wakefield High School
Marceline Castrillon took a photography elective on a whim her sophomore year. She exhibited such skill and artistry that her art teacher, Jina Davidson, allowed her to take an advanced photo class the following year, and AP Art and Design after that.
Her hyper-stylized portraits are dreamlike and metaphorical. One features a girl with a Mohawk. A young man in a flower headband is reminiscent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.
“There’s a surrealistic, otherworldly feeling to the images,” Davidson says. “She takes the inner beauty of all her subjects and magnifies it.”
Castrillon was a finalist in a juried high school art exhibit at Marymount University and one of eight gold metal portfolio winners nationwide in this year’s Scholastic Art Awards. “I like the fact that artists and photographers can capture time and emotions,” says the Arlington teen, who turns 18 in July. “You don’t need to have long words attached; you can just grasp the meaning from an image.”
Photography isn’t her only talent. During high school, Castrillon was the costume director for Wakefield’s theater program, played the viola and held down a part-time job at Sweetgreen. For her senior project she created a multimedia magazine called Vampgirl, delving into politics, pop culture, art, fashion, music and film.
She and a friend also started the Future Doctors Society, a student-led group that explores medical careers and hosts monthly lectures by health care professionals. Other branches of the group have since formed at Yorktown and Washington-Liberty, as well as at a high school in Connecticut. Castrillon says she became interested in medicine after being diagnosed with a minor case of scoliosis as a child. Orthopedic surgery is one career path she’s now considering.
She was accepted to Brown University and Parsons School of Design, but has decided to attend LIM College in New York City this fall.
Castrillon was born male but identifies as female. She has transitioned—a process she says would likely have happened in college, but was accelerated by her feelings of isolation during the pandemic. Her parents and teachers have been supportive, and her art has been a powerful medium for expression. “I’ve been really, really lucky to be in an environment that’s so protective,” she says, “unlike in other parts of the country.”
Ribka Desta
Yorktown High School
Ribka Desta always wanted to be an author. On Career Day at Arlington Science Focus Elementary, she dressed up in a long brown dress, her hair in a bun and a book at her side, because that’s what she thought authors looked like. In fourth grade, she wrote a memoir and passed it around to her classmates. “That’s when I realized I was good at writing,” she says, “and I loved being good at writing.”
Now 18, the Arlington teen has embraced poetry as her preferred medium. Selected as Arlington County’s Youth Poet Laureate for 2023, she has shared her work in spoken-word events at Busboys & Poets and at libraries in D.C.
A child of immigrants from Ethiopia who arrived in the U.S. not speaking English, she describes her poems as “very raw.”
“With poetry, you can write about yourself in metaphors and make things beautiful,” she says. “Poetry gives you unlimited time to think about things.”
The literary form also gives her a way to express her complicated relationship with her mom, which she does in “Writing for my mother”:
Sometimes, I write long, bitter monologues about my mother,
when I’m tired of the echolocation we do in burning bright rooms,
when she sees me in black and white.
She wouldn’t understand my writing anyways
(the dancing between the lines,
the desperate references).
Kelly Dillon, the faculty adviser for Yorktown’s literary magazine, praises Desta’s “clear sense of voice.” “Ribka’s really unique because she has stayed true to herself. She tackles difficult subjects, but in a brave way.”
In high school, Desta was president of Yorktown’s Letters of Love Club, which writes letters to people in hospitals, nursing homes and veterans’ facilities. She also mentored kids in after-school programs at AHC, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing.
“I love volunteering because I can be who I needed when I was younger,” she says. “I want to be the person who can help them with homework or just have fun.”
Desta heads to Stanford this fall on a four-year, full-ride QuestBridge scholarship.
Benjamin Joel
The Potomac School
Benjamin Joel comes from a long line of educators. His grandmother and grandfather were teachers. His mother, an attorney, has taught at Georgetown Law. So when schools closed at the start of the pandemic and experts issued dire predictions of mass learning losses, Joel took action. Together with his older brother, Alex, he founded Intutorly, a free online service that matches volunteer tutors—virtually all of them high school students—with struggling students who request help.
Since March 2020, Intutorly has provided 15,000 hours of free tutoring to 1,200 students in the U.S. and overseas. The service counts more than 1,000 volunteer tutors in its ranks.
“I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship,” says the 18-year-old McLean resident, who sailed through high school with straight A’s. “I thought, what better time than now to create this? It truly is making an impact.”
Joel, a National Merit Scholar and U.S. Presidential Scholar semifinalist, will soon join his brother at Dartmouth, where they plan to continue operating the nonprofit. Intutorly received a first-place award in a University of Delaware entrepreneurship contest, and Joel himself was awarded a $1,000 grant from the U.S. State Department to pay for administrative costs and marketing.
In addition to managing the nonprofit as CEO, he also tutors a 12-year-old girl in Afghanistan whose school was closed by the Taliban. “She’s one of my biggest inspirations because she’s been able to remain positive and resilient,” he says.
An intern in the office of Virginia House member Dan Helmer, Joel competed on Potomac School’s speech and debate teams, and plans to major in government in college. In his spare time, he is an award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. He works part time as a chef at Roots Kitchen & Bar in McLean and has started a photography project to document back-of-the-house restaurant workers.
“This kid does not waste time,” says Myles Teasley, who teaches modern world history and U.S. foreign policy at Potomac. “He has an intellectual horsepower that is pretty rare.”
Alex Pomper
Langley High School
Alex Pomper was always a big reader. Over time, he acquired more books than he had space for, but donating them to his local library or trying to resell them in affluent McLean didn’t feel like the right thing to do. So he started emailing organizations that serve low-income clients, while simultaneously collecting book donations from classmates and their families.
The enthusiastic response led to the 2022 launch of Give a Kid a Book, an effort that, to date, has collected more than 8,000 gently used titles and donated them through organizations in D.C., as well as Arlington, Fairfax and Prince George’s counties. “The ability to read is the greatest gift we have in our modern age,” says the 17-year-old Langley High School graduate. “That gives meaning to what I’m doing.”
Twice a month, Pomper is a fixture at the Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC), where he sets out a display of books that families can peruse while waiting in line for food. He asks kids what kinds of stories they like and is usually able to find a book that matches their interests.
Bad weather doesn’t deter him, says Kim Roehl, AFAC’s volunteer manager: “He works so well with the kids. He’s thinking about the community. That’s just beautiful to see.”
Growing up participating in family discussions about politics and policy (his father is an international trade consultant and his mother is a writer), Pomper is also politically active. He volunteered with the campaigns of Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and Joe Biden. In May, he was named a National Merit Scholar.
He has an interest in science, too. He took an AP Biology class through Johns Hopkins University the summer after his sophomore year. The following summer, he interned with a professor at Virginia Tech, cleaning up data for a project charting the changing trade networks in Italy during the 1600s.
A co-leader of Langley High School’s chemistry club, Pomper heads to Johns Hopkins this fall, where he is considering a double major in the humanities and biochemistry.
In Memoriam
Braylon Meade
Washington-Liberty High School
Braylon Meade seemed to have more hours in his day than the average human. On weekdays he would arrive at school a little after 8 a.m., having already knocked out two hours of basketball training at a gym in Alexandria. He took a full IB course load at W-L and participated in two varsity sports—football and basketball. He coached youth basketball, volunteered in the food pantry at his church and helped organize his school’s annual Hoops for Cancer charity fundraiser.
“He was the busiest of all of us and somehow always had time for the people he loved,” says Christine Wilson, his girlfriend of almost three years. “He had so much energy.”
On and off the basketball court, Meade’s work ethic was infectious. During Covid, he kept his fellow teammates active and motivated by organizing workouts on Zoom or outdoors in local parks. His default was to go above and beyond, always with a positive attitude and a mischievous grin.
“He changed how I viewed basketball—and life in general,” says his friend and teammate James McIntyre. “He showed me that you have to work hard to be good at something. You can’t just go through the motions.”
Meade had just made W-L’s varsity basketball team for the second year in a row when he was hit and killed by a drunk driver in November 2022, a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Friends and teachers remember him as unselfish, driven, inclusive, kind, and a role model to many.
“Braylon worked hard in anything he put his mind to,” says his computer science teacher, Paul Bui. “He came into the classroom super-positive, sat in the front row, never cut corners, always added to the conversation. He knew how to work on teams and was just as much there to support his classmates as he was to learn.”
He was funny, too. Friends laugh recalling the “absurd” nonsense language Meade created—a lexicon that made its way into his daily conversations. And his cheeky essay about navigating the world as a “ginger” that earned him a spot at his dream school, the University of Michigan, where he’d hoped to study computer science.
While so much of his story is left unwritten, it’s clear that his was a life of extraordinary meaning and purpose.
—Adrienne Wichard-Edds