Beginning Wednesday, Feb. 15, the applications for the 2017 Trentini Scholarship Program will be available on the Trentini Foundation’s website, www.trentinifoundation.org, and in the student services offices of both Wake Forest High School and Heritage High School.
From the interested students who apply, six senior finalists will be chosen from each school. After interviews with the Trentini Foundation’s scholarship committee, the winners will be selected and announced at the annual banquet on April 22. The top winner from Heritage will win $5,000 and Wake Forest’s top senior will take home $30,000 for his or her college expenses.
In addition to those top prizes, each Wake Forest High finalist will receive $1,000, and each Heritage finalist will receive $250. Also, a scholarship of $1,000 is awarded to a Wake Forest High senior who plans to attend a technical or community college.
Since 1981 outstanding students from Wake Forest’s non-charter public high schools have been awarded Trentini scholarships. That first year, Tony Chambers won $500. Last year, Lily Olmo won the $30,000 award. As a second-semester freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, Olmo said the award continues to motivate her as an environmental sciences major.
“Because the Trentini Foundation has given so generously to me, I am motivated to work not just on being a good student here, but on empowering myself through the education I have been given to make a difference in the world,” Olmo said. “This scholarship is one of the most important traditions in Wake Forest, because it honors Tony Trentini. Through this scholarship, the way he lived his life is able to continue in each of the lives that learn about him.”
Trentini and his family lived in Wake Forest for 11 years. He arrived in 1952 to attend Wake Forest College and stayed on afterward to teach physical education, become the town’s first recreation director and coach the high school’s first football team. The family left in 1963 because Trentini had been named a coach at Wake Forest College, then in Winston-Salem where it remains though it is now Wake Forest University. Trentini died in 1976 when he was an assistant football coach at Temple University in Philadelphia. Four years later several of the high school players and students organized to provide a scholarship that would remember Trentini for his high moral character and his emphasis on education and hard work. The stadium at Wake Forest High School has been named for him.
Trentini was recently one of the first people inducted into the Wake Forest High School Athletic Hall of Fame. The inductions were made at halftime during the Wake Forest and Heritage basketball game in late January of this year.
