35 Years Running
35 Years Running
How a trip to Wendy's became the fastest way to make 300 students feel like family.
Somewhere in San Francisco, there's a neighborhood of people asking, "What the heck is a Frosty Run?"
Blame it on Ted Cotsen '91, the originator of the first-week-of-school tradition at St. Andrew's. Cotsen, now a teacher in the Bay Area, wears every vintage Frosty Run t-shirt that a grateful Saint sends his way. "I have so many," he says. "My neighbors must be very confused."
The Frosty Run began in 1991, when the main event on a particular wintry Saturday night was a basketball game. Cotsen, co-president of the then-named Student Activities Committee (SAC, now Form Council), was hoping for a little more excitement. A city kid, he found the adjustment to St. Andrew's difficult. "It felt a little country," he says. He confided in now lifelong best friend Edwin Williamson '91, who told him, "You can be sad you're not in the city, or you can do something to change it."
He chose change, in the form of organizing an event that put nearly 300 kids on buses and sent them to Wendy's. He had no idea what he was walking into.
Neither did freshman Boyd Kieffer '30, decades later. Kieffer, from North Carolina, showed up for his own first week with a head start on the mythology but none of the details—his dad, Class of 1997, has quite a few Frosty Runs under his belt, and kept every one of them to himself. "He didn't warn me," Kieffer says, laughing.
Thirty-five years later, and we're still getting brain-freezes.
Susan Prior Thomaes '94 was in the room for Cotsen's original pitch. "I can still remember that SAC meeting," she says. "We looked at him like he was crazy." But was it crazy enough to work?
Cotsen presented his idea innocently enough. "We're just going to take any interested kid for Frosties after the game," Cotsen says. It could have just been a footnote to SAS history. Instead, it's a throughline. "I was operating that the event is not the game, the event is the Frosty Run." SAC made posters: "Frosty is Coming." The senior class got behind it, the underclassmen followed. "It kept getting bigger," Cotsen remembers.
Big enough that the then senior class advisor, Dave DeSalvo P'00,'04, asked the obvious: "Does Wendy's know we're coming?" Whereas today's Saints hit four Wendy's on the Frosty Run—one per class—in 1991, there was just one, nestled in small-town Smyrna.
"I remember calling to tell them a large number of kids was coming and that I hoped they'd be ready," Cotsen says. "I don't think they believed me."
Four buses rolled out that Saturday night, each one with its own mixtape. On one of those buses sat current Head of School Joy McGrath '92.
She landed at St. Andrew's as a new junior from just down the road in Smyrna, which made her first Frosty Run stranger than most. "I knew everybody in that Wendy's," she says, laughing. "I found myself going around saying, 'I'm so sorry, my whole school is here.'
"I just remember the camaraderie," she says. "Everybody getting on a bus and going somewhere together"—the specific St. Andrew's talent for turning something ordinary into the extraordinary.
The bus still does exactly that. Temilola Oloworaran '30 came to St. Andrew's from New York, drawn by a campus that "felt more like a family than a school." The bus ride confirmed her belief before she'd even ordered a Frosty. "We were all just singing songs together and it felt like family already," she says. "Even though we had only known each other for a week, it felt like months."
Kieffer ended up the lone boy on an all-girls bus and thus came home with a new title. "I became an honorary Pelican," he says, so named for the girls' dorm, Pell.
Although the original Frosty Run happened in winter, it shifted to become a cornerstone of the opening of school experience. "Now it's something that introduces people to this community," McGrath says. "It's an acclimation to St. Andrew's culture:" gather up, do something silly without a screen in sight, and by the time the buses pull back in, you've had a delicious first taste of what this place is.
The "agency" that Cotsen says St. Andrew's gives students is something McGrath sees as an inheritance. "Our students are empowered to take the culture and make it their own," she says. During the first week of school this year, in Engelhard Hall, she passed it down: "We're here in this room to give you the culture," she told students. "It's yours. It's about your choices. It's about your decisions."
That ownership matters, she says, because St. Andrew's asks students to do hard things—in the classroom, on the stage, on the fields, on dorm—and “we fail at hard things more often than we succeed,” she says. You can only take that kind of risk, she insists, if you're rooted in something else first. A tradition this low-stakes, this goofy and out of step, is where that rootedness starts. "You have to know that everybody's there for you," she says, "and that this is a community that does everything—fail, succeed—together."
Oloworaran—for whom this was only the second Frosty of her life—watched that rootedness go to work in real time. She says two of the quietest kids in her class, peers she had observed not straying outside their comfort zones, blossomed on the Frosty Run. "Afterward, they got closer with a lot of people," she says.
Kieffer, for his part, figured out fast that it was never about the Frosty. "It's about something bigger: spending time as a class,” he says. “We were there as one community. It didn't matter who you were, or where you're from."
What St. Andrew's is, McGrath says—and by default, what the Frosty Run is—is "an opportunity to turn back time."
"Everybody knows they're leaving their phones behind for this one," she says. (St. Andrew's is a phone-free school, although students can take them in most cases when they leave campus). "Traditions like the Frosty Run offer the face-to-face building blocks of human connection and friendship. You can't use technology for that." Get it wrong, she points out, and "these moments of joy and childhood start to disintegrate and slip through our fingers. … When students are in high school, they need to be children.”
Hayden Kobel '30 arrived at the same conclusion. He found something almost philosophical in a cup of ice cream. "The older you get, you hit this gray area where something like having ice cream with friends feels different," he says. "When you're a kid, doing that with friends, you look forward to it. It's fun. It's happy." That, he says, was the whole point of the day. "You shouldn't have to stress about certain things," he says. "You should just get to have a good time, to be a kid. That's what we got to do, and it was magical."
Ask any Saint, any class year, what the Frosty Run gave them, and you'll likely get some version of the same answer. Perhaps Elizabeth Reynolds '93 put it simplest: "To this day, a Frosty still feels like home."