Senior of the Year: Jack Gordon
By LOGAN BECKERLE ‘27
Confident following their victory against the prominent St. Sebastian’s Arrows, the Big Red varsity hockey team gears up to play against Portsmouth Abbey School. Fans are riled up in the Exeter rink as they await the entrance of the home team. When the door to the rink swings open, out comes senior and captain Jack Gordon with his troop close behind. The arena is electric with swarms of red flooding the eyes of each and every player. They all know the stakes, especially for the seniors, as this may be one of their last games ever on the ice, but they looked to Gordon for confidence, and he led them to a strong 7-0 victory.
Gordon arrived at Exeter as a prep from Princeton, NJ, and was placed in Main Street Dormitory. Now, he is a proctor in the dorm, holding a key role in educating underclassmen with academics and rich dorm culture. Outside of the dorm, Gordon holds several other leadership roles, including being the captain of the boys varsity hockey team and the Exeter Economics team, which holds national titles in several economics tournaments. He also co-heads ESSO skating, which teaches young children how to ice skate, and The Exeter Review, a newspaper on campus.
Gordon’s life before Exeter was unique and revolved around his love for academia and winter sports. From a young age, he felt the urge to learn more about the world he lived in and seeked out the answers. He lived near Princeton University, where he recalled often visiting the bookstore. “In the simplest way, Princeton has an amazing bookstore,” Gordon said. “From a young age, I was able to go and pick out all these books about the stuff that interests me. ” Even at a young age when many were learning the alphabet and learning how to write their names, Jack was out and buying books. He yearned to learn more.
Gordon also helps to unite the community with the largest Exeter Student Service Organization club, ESSO Ice Skating. Skating was a hobby that Jack Gordon picked up as soon as he could walk—he found it as an escape from his stressful school work, but also just something fun he could do with friends back home.
Along with skating, Gordon has played ice hockey for the majority of his life. He was placed on the varsity team as a prep who was smaller than everyone else, but he knew that if he put in the work it would be worth it. “Hockey taught me about the importance of hard work,” he said. “I came in as a freshman when I was probably the smallest and youngest guy. I could never really see myself being on the varsity hockey team and having a crucial role there, but by putting in the work I was able to get there.”
Since then, Gordon has taken a main stage on the team by helping the team defeated the St. Sebastian’s hockey team, which was the highest seeded team in the prep division at the time. “The day before the game, at practice, Coach was telling us, ‘You guys have the chance to shock the world here. Everybody thinks they’re gonna beat it up on you guys, but if you play your game and you play it in the right way, you can really take it to ‘em.’ And that’s what happened… It was great to see all our work payoff and celebrate with the team. That was a great memory,” Gordon recalled.
This game was definitely one of the prime examples of never putting yourself out of the picture. Even though the rival team had seven Division 1 recruits, Gordon and Coach Tim Mitropoulos rallied their troops to defeat one of the best teams in the Northeast, making for a great closing memory for the seniors on the team.
Growing up so close to an education powerhouse like Princeton University allowed Gordon to find his love for academics. Economics has been a cornerstone in his life for a very long time: at age five, he opened up Jack Enterprises, and sold decorated pens to classmates. “One day, they had something called the Princeton Entrepreneurial Hub,” he recalled. “It’s the university’s space to help out students. I stumbled in there at five years old and knocked on the door. The undergraduate students were there, and they helped me out in my business. Resources like that were important to me. I would stress that that culture was important—it put an emphasis on academics and excellence.”
This formative culture of excellence foreshadowed many events in the future as Gordon officially became a member of the Cum Laude society at Exeter. “He always puts maximum effort into everything he does, whether it is a lift, a practice, or something like a paper or a final project,” said Gordon’s friend and senior Max Webster.
Among his many titles, Gordon’s pursuit of economics as a co-head of the Exeter Economics Association resulted in the team’s second place win at the 2023 National Economics Challenge, an extremely respected competition with over 10,000 competitors. He was subsequently featured on CNBC as a spokesperson and team captain. Individually, Gordon also won the 2023 Harvard Pre-Collegiate Economics Challenge and was a runner up the prior year.
Gordon felt that coming to the Academy was the gateway for him to be able to pursue and excel in his many passions. “The thing I always tell people about Exeter is that Exeter can create time I think in a weird way,” he said. “I’m a guy who has a lot of different hobbies, a lot of different passions, and if I want to pursue all that back at home, I’d have to drive 30 minutes to the ice rink. To find an economics team as good as we have here, I’d have to drive an hour. If I wanted to read in the library of that size, I’d have to drive 15 minutes over to the Prince University Library. If I wanted to even get food, in a way, I’d have to drive to that.”
One of Gordon’s unexpected hobbies is cooking. “I try to cook Beef Wellington,” he mentioned. “I’ve done that two Christmases in a row now—tough, steady improvement both times. But I’m trying to be a better cook, so I’ve also been trying to do a little French cooking in a garden style. ”
On a similar note, he loves listening to music in his free time. “My favorite album is ‘Jazz is for Ordinary People’ by berlioz,” he shared, and he identifies with it for a unique reason. “I love that it’s a mix of jazz and house music and I think it’s just a cool idea. I said I’m a guy that likes to do many different things, and it may not be immediately obvious how they mesh together. … Just like you wouldn’t think like economics and hockey would.”
In addition, Gordon often reads novels to help keep his mind in check. Some of his favorite books are Mrs. Always by Virginia Woolf, an introspective novel about a woman’s thoughts as she walks around London, and Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kaman, an economics book that “challenges a lot of the traditional assumptions we have about things like supply and demand and how that might be affected by the way people actually act.” In many ways, these books help to symbolize Gordon as a person: an economics lover someone who spends a lot of time in his head; a quick thinker who has tons of thoughts in one day and analyzes each and every detail.
As a proctor, Gordon has become a significant role model in Main Street Dormitory, often hosting interactive dorm events like cookie-making and helping to facilitate dorm culture. “I think that dorm culture’s really important to me,” Gordon said. “Dorms are a microcosm of the world. We have talented violinists, we have basketball players, and all these people are living under the same roof. ”
Gordon emphasized the importance of strong relationships and mentorship between upperclassmen and lowerclassmen, which he first received at Exeter and now hopes to pass on to younger Exonians. “I think the seniors in my freshman year made a big impact on me, which is something I appreciate here a lot,” he said. “Sometimes, they gave me a rough time, but I think that was important. They weren’t just like, ‘Everything’s going to make fine sense.’ No. If I did something stupid, they would tell me. And that was important. They kind of helped keep me alive that way. ”
Planning and conducting dorm events are one of Gordon’s favorite parts of being a proctor. One night, the Main Street boys planned a thoughtful cookie-making event for the custodians that seemed to be going wrong at every step, but Gordon found a way to make it work and have fun. “We went down in the basement and the oven was broken, but we figured it out,” Gordon recalled. “We were trying to make cookies for the custodians, so I brought everybody together. We got the whole class and a speaker, and we were playing holiday music when I realized that I didn’t have baking sheets. I didn’t want to disappoint, because I had already built up to this event and got all the supplies. I had all the flour and the butter that I didn’t want to go to waste. And I had everybody in the common room singing Christmas carols. So I found a pie sheet and we cooked, as a dorm, pie sized cookies. That was such a great time.”
Although Gordon is a role model to many, he mentioned his teachers Tim Whittemore, Tyler Caldwell, and Alexa Caldwell, as four dorm faculty that he has lots of admiration for and who helped him evolve at Exeter. A. Caldwell recalled times playing a game called “Code Words” and their competitive relationship: “Though Jack was usually busy during study hours, every time he joined in Code Names, the intensity level would rise. It was always a rare but exciting night when my team would beat Jack’s team.” Since A. Caldwell first met Gordon when she moved to the dorm in his upper year, she knew him as an essential piece of the Main Street culture.
All of Gordon’s friends and teachers praised Gordon’s infectious personality and admirable work ethic. ”I just want to thank you for being a great captain, an inspiration, and overall a great person,” said Webster, addressing his former captain.
Coach Mitropoulos added, “Thank you, Jack, for being a terrific Exonian, who led by example, was unselfish, and made the Exeter community a better place. I wish you the best of luck in your time after Exeter.”
Gordon is an Exonian, graduating in the class of 2024, but he’s also so much more. He’s a chef, a proctor, a leader, and a student. He’s a reader, skater, and music-lover. He is someone who puts everything he has into something and does everything possible to benefit the community around him. Overall, Gordon is someone who is destined to be successful in whatever he pursues, whether it’s a national economics tournament or cooking Popeyes turkey.
