Isabel “Izzy” Richey: Athlete, Musician, Future Valedictorian…

Isabel+Izzy+Richey%3A+Athlete%2C+Musician%2C+Future+Valedictorian...

Charlotte Bol, Contributor

You may have heard of her smarts, or her prowess in sports, but all and all, Isabel Richey is a force to be reckoned with. She participates in band, multiple athletics, and after-school clubs. 

Izzy has been playing basketball and volleyball most of her life and still sticks with it to this day. “When I was younger, on my basketball team, my coach never played me and kept telling me ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough.’” She then went on to join a club team in seventh grade and became proficient, guiding her to making the JV basketball team in her first year. Her interest in volleyball started in sixth grade and continues to this day. She played here in this year’s season, which just ended, with her team winning twelve games and losing seven. She plans to join a club team for volleyball and the SHS 2021 girls’ basketball team.  

Her passion for music started in the third grade when first started playing the saxophone.“I always wanted to play the saxophone, it was a huge dream of mine.” In seventh and eighth grade, she was in one of the best middle school bands in Tucson. Her advanced band and her jazz band both placed highest as possible at festival, which was gaining a superior with distinction. She also started the French horn in seventh grade and continues to play both of her instruments in the Sahuaro advanced orchestra and the advanced band. She is now working towards auditioning for the regional band. 

She is a powerhouse in all her physical and academic studies. Even through the hardest freshman year possible, she still pushed out of it with all As in her classes and currently has a 4.2 GPA. Izzy strives to be valedictorian or salutatorian of her graduating class in 2024. She plans on attending the University of Chicago or Virginia Tech to get her doctorate in paleontology, field, or lab study, “I’ve always really loved dinosaurs ever since I was little. It’s my lifelong dream to be able to study them.”  

Izzy also participates in an ambassador program at the U of A called the TRAP program (Teen reading ambassador program). In this program,+ she actively tries to get other kids her age to engage in reading and gaining new knowledge. They read books and meet the authors of said books and go to all kinds of events, like the Tucson Festival of Books.  

Izzy is also incredibly open about her Italian heritage. Most of her family comes from Italy and her grandmother immigrated from Palermo, Sicily to America in her teenage years. Her grandparents met in America, but her grandfather still holds his Italian culture dearly. She is really close with her Italian relatives who speak Italian. Izzy loves everything about Italy. Her favorite band in fact is Måneskin, an Italian rock band.  

Her interests spread far and wide and her funny personality is contagious. I have been lucky to know Izzy throughout our high school experience together and I can say firsthand how great she is.