Cheney High scholar Sam Fix plays soccer with a vengeance
Sometimes Cheney High School’s Sam Fix is Clark Kent and sometimes he’s Superman.
He’s normally a quiet and studious student who, according to his soccer coach Rene Caro, “always has his nose in a book.” His academic abilities and passions clearly stand out. After all, he is one of this year’s valedictorians and has a perfect SAT score in mathematics.
“But that catches you off guard,” Fix’s coach noted. “That’s Sam in his regular-kid clothes. On the soccer field, he’s something else – a natural, an intelligent and gifted player who is absolutely the player you want to have on your team. You need something done out there, Sam’s your guy, the person you can depend on to get the team out of a pickle. I mean this in the best way, he’s an animal on the field.”
This year Cheney High School’s soccer team has gone undefeated in Great Northern League competition. Fix is captain of the team.
Fix has played soccer for 14 of his 18 years, including both school and club soccer. He has volunteered as a soccer coach, including at Whitworth College’s soccer camps “as a way for me to repay the community for everything that was done for me growing up and playing soccer.”
He also volunteers at Special Olympics track meets.
But Sam Fix is probably better known for his academic life at school, where he is historian of the National Honor Society and president of the sports medicine club. As a participant in FBLA, he qualified in four events for state competition, but couldn’t attend because of soccer conflicts. He is also biliterate in Spanish, having taken a test to establish his skills in reading and writing the language.
“Yes,” said Caro, “that’s the two sides of Sam and what makes him him.”
The son of Jeff Fix, who owns a small networking company, and Ruthanne Fix, a hospice nurse, Sam Fix has lived most of his life in Cheney where, while accomplished in all areas of studies, he has focused largely on math. In seventh grade he took high school geometry. And since he completed the highest-level math course that is offered last year, he took physics instead in his senior year.
“It’s my favorite subject, mostly because of the math involved,” Fix said.
He loves math because he finds it objective, because he likes the logic used to find the answers – and that there are always answers to be found. Plus, it really makes him strive. He wrote in his college essay it’s important to shoot for unattainable goals because you’ll end up in a higher place than if you didn’t.
His father graduated from Whitman College, and his siblings – twins Sarah and Ellie, 22, and Jeffrey, 20 – are currently enrolled there. Fix is pretty certain he’ll join them this fall, where he expects to study math, with an eventual eye on engineering.
It doesn’t hurt either that Whitman has a soccer team.