LHS Health Teacher Timothy Sheridan highlights his teenage years spent on the basketball court playing at Wachusett Regional High School. Over time, Sheridan built a friend group of his team’s players. Despite his athletic skills, Timothy was always an anxious kid, turning down opportunities that made him nervous.
Sheridan’s worries stemmed from not feeling sure of what the future had in store for him. He was raised in a small home in Rutland, MA, built in 1770. This household included his artist mother, his musician father, and his theater sister. He found himself feeling like the “black sheep” of the family since he wasn’t into the arts, he preferred shooting hoops.
In school, Sheridan was a strong student and a rule follower. He always showed effort when completing assignments.
He reminisced on his time delivering pizzas at a local pizza place in his hometown called Parrot Pizza. He remembers driving in his mom’s mini van while listening to his burned CD’s while on a time crunch to deliver the pizza. He recalls a memory of when his friends would call in for pizza, but then would never come into the store to pick it up . At the end of the day, he would go straight to his friends’ house and enjoy the pizza all together.
Sheridan’s daily life consisted of listening to a lot of big rap artists such as Lil Wanye, Kayne West, and Drake, and playing video games on his X-Box with his friends.
During these years, Sheridan said that his mother and sister influenced him the most, given that his father worked a lot of the time. He found himself wishing for a male figure for guidance in how to navigate teenage boy specific things.
In place of this, his main influence was the friends in his teenage circle. His mother also shed a big light, raising him to be the person he is now, by teaching him responsibility, and he feels gratitude considering all the hard work and sacrifices she made.
Sheridan’s mom was always incredibly understanding when it came to things like grades, his future career, and who he was as a person overall. She was very accepting and always just wanted him to be a good person.
At one point, Sheridan’s mom became ill, and this seriously worried him because he was young, didn’t want his mom to be in pain, and didn’t want to lose a very important figure in his life.
His mom’s positive attitude throughout everything encouraged him to work harder and to be a better him overall. He recalls her telling him that no test score or assignment grade defined who he was. She said to him, “It’s not written on your grave-stone.” ensuring to her son that soon none of these worries will matter anymore.
Yet Sheridan also reflects on the things that he didn’t worry about that did really end up mattering, such as choosing a career path which he found hard to navigate since he didn’t really know what else he was passionate about besides his love for basketball.
This love for basketball did end up putting a bit of pressure on Tim when it came time to decide where he would spend the next 4 years of his life. Timothy’s father worked for the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and his older sister also attended the college to pursue her love of the arts. This gave Tim the opportunity to attend the college, yet he battled with the internal decision of playing basketball for Holy Cross or attending another school to play D3 basketball.
Tim ultimately didn’t end up getting into Holy Cross after he had already turned down the other schools he was getting offers from, so he reached back out to the schools who had recruited him and asked for a second opportunity to play for them.
Framingham State ended up being Tim’s home for his freshman-junior year, he didn’t end up sticking with basketball for all three years but focused on his studies. His senior year he ended up transferring to Fitchburg State University to be closer to home since he had some personal life things going on.
He was upset by Holy Cross turning him away at first because his dad really wanted him to attend, yet his parents were proud of him for following his own path. For Tim, a more realistic career path was to be a therapist or a psychiatrist. Yet, he dreamed big as all teenagers do and wished he could’ve been an NBA player. Tim now works here at LHS and has been for the past 4 years. He started out as a math teacher, then he became an attendance monitor, and now he’s a health teacher.
