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Gulf Coast grad ‘ready to go’ become a Gator
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He’s ready to hit the road.
When you ask Kent Kolegue, who everybody calls Max, about college, his face cracks into a grin.
“I’m really excited,” he said, sitting at the counter in the kitchen of his North Naples home. “I’m excited to get out of town and to move on.”
At the end of June, the Gulf Coast High School senior will pack his bags, his saxophone and his street-legal Kawasaki dirt bike and head to the University of Florida in Gainesville to start summer classes.
He’s known for years that he wanted to be a Gator after high school, and just to make sure he got into his first-choice school, Max applied to take classes the summer before his freshman year.
The strategy worked: he’s going to the school of his dreams.
Max was born in Cambridge, Mass., but his parents left the Northeast to move to Naples when he was just 9 months old — so Naples has always been his home.
At age 5, Max started wrestling, and throughout his elementary and middle school years he wrestled and played football and soccer. When he got to Gulf Coast High, Max continued wrestling and joined the cross-country team, too.
Running was relaxing, and the three to six miles he ran a day for cross-country training gave him time to think, said Max, who stands 6-foot-1.
Last year, he shaved his mile down to about six minutes, Max said, but he was quick to add that he wasn’t the fastest on the school’s team.
These days. though, you’re more likely to find him playing a game of basketball with friends or playing his tenor saxophone — practicing scales and the UF fight song, “Orange and Blue.” He’s planning to audition for the school’s marching band.
Max first picked up a saxophone when he was in sixth grade, and switched from alto to tenor sax when the middle school band needed someone to play the lower-toned instrument.
At Gulf Coast High School, Max played in wind ensemble, jazz band and marching band, practicing for hours in school and after-school, and performing at games.
“He especially likes jazz band where we play fun music and he’s had some solos,” said Robert Hamberg, Gulf Coast High School’s band director, who has known Max for four years. “He’s totally calm and cool and knows what he’s doing.”
Max was quiet as a freshman, Hamberg said, but these days he’s “twice as tall as he used to be” and “he’s come out of his shell — he’s the class clown.”
At the University of Florida, Max is looking forward to getting involved in marching band, intramural sports — and classes, of course. His older sister Marika will be a senior at the UF next year, so she’ll be able to show him the ropes.
When his parents, Kent and Robin, drop Max off, they’ll be saying goodbye to their youngest child, but it won’t be too hard, Robin said.
“Max is getting to live his dreams, and I am so happy for him,” she said. “And besides, I get to go visit.”
Max had another sister, Rachel, but she was killed in a car accident when he was in eighth grade. After that, it “was hard to go on” to high school, he said, because Rachel, who would have been a senior, wasn’t there.
But he was always motivated to do well in school, Max said, and he’ll leave high school with a weighted grade-point average of 4.85 and seven advanced placement classes under his belt.
As for what he’ll do in the future, Max has decided that he’ll study business management or finance. Last summer, he worked with an uncle who owns and operates five restaurants in California and found that he loved the challenge of running a business.
“It’s not hard for me to leave,” he said. “I’m ready to go.”
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Class of 2008
GULF COAST HIGH SCHOOL
Class size: 516
Commencement: 4 p.m. Friday, May 23, at Alico Arena at Florida Gulf Coast University
Senior class officers:
President–Morgan Hila
Vice President–Taylor Dunne
Secretary–Amanda Eisman
Treasurer–Dylan Crimmins
Senators–Erika Dunayer and Briana Greeson
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