Kelly Walker Named 2026 Baccalaureate Speaker

It was a perfect spring day—bright, the ocean right there—when Kelly Walker P’12, ’13 stood at a pay phone on the corner of Front Street and the entrance of Tabor Academy and called her mother.

Fresh out of college, 21 years old, interviewing for a job she wasn't sure she'd take. She had come to Tabor to teach and to coach, the same two things she had always wanted to do, and she had spent the morning talking to people in the language department and meeting a man named Peter Webster—then Headmaster—who told her, simply, what the community was like. The campus was quiet. Most everyone was off at games.

Standing at the payphone, she remembers saying: "Mom, this place is beautiful."

She told her mother that if they offered her a job, she thought she'd come.
That was 1987.
The offer came.
She’s still here.

Walker arrived at Tabor a three-sport high school athlete who had gone on to play tennis at Hamilton College, where she captained the team her senior year and was a New York State doubles finalist twice over. She had a bachelor's degree in Spanish and no illusions about staying long. "I thought, I could do this for a few years," she says, "and then I'd probably go do something else."

What changed wasn't a single decision. It was an accumulation of things—opportunity, community, the feeling of a place that kept offering her something new to learn. She taught Spanish. She coached field hockey and tennis. She worked in admissions, in advancement, and in student life. She served as a residential dean and an interim dean of students. She spent more than two decades in the athletic office. She currently serves as the Director of Co-Curriculars and Athletics. Each time a door opened, she walked through it.

"I've been described by friends and family as an incredibly loyal person," she says. "And I'm always looking for ways to help make Tabor better."

Seawolves Show Up

There is a story she tells about her first year here—about what it means to show up.

She was a brand-new assistant coach, barely older than the players, working under Carrie Lovejoy, who was also, that October, nine months pregnant. Walker showed up to practice one afternoon to find Lovejoy standing on the field hockey field with a stopwatch.

She assumed they were timing drills.
They were not timing drills.
Carrie was timing her contractions. 

"Carl's coming in a few minutes," Carrie told her. "To pick me up." After the Lovejoys departed for the hospital, Walker, a novice coach, finished out the practice and got the girls ready for their upcoming game. 

Game day arrived a few days later. Walker had her notes, her plan, everything in order. She got the team to St. George's School, ran warmups, and looked up—there was the Lovejoy's car pulling into the lot. Carrie and Carl got out of the car. Carrie, four days postpartum, Carl by her side, getting her settled in a chair next to the bench with a newborn, in the cold. She wasn't about to send a 21-year-old to coach a game alone.

"I was like, this woman is a badass," Walker laughs.

But the laugh doesn't quite cover what she means. What she means is that she was watching, and she was learning about what it means to show up for others. She decided in that moment what kind of person she wanted to be.

"It showed me that I need to be present, especially for the women that I coach," she says. "I need to show them I’m here. You matter, you're important, and I'm not bailing out."

Seawolves Show Pride

When Walker is asked what she's most proud of after nearly four decades, she doesn't point to a program or a record. She pauses, and then she says: helping students find confidence in themselves. Especially the many women she has coached.

It is not the kind of answer that fits neatly on a plaque. But it is the kind that stays with you.

Her own children grew up on this campus—Channing ’12 and Anne ’13—both Tabor graduates. Her son, she recalls, sat on the bench a lot playing varsity soccer for Ian Patrick ’84. Channing wasn't always the best player, initially he didn't always play that much, but learned to struggle and work hard. He went on to row at the University of California, Berkeley for four years. He told her once that he thinks not playing much his first two years on the team probably benefited him. When he got to Cal, he was behind a deep roster of European and Australian international talent with a lot more experience. Many of the other Americans from his class quit but he had the competitive experience from Tabor soccer to be able to compete and catch up to the foreign kids in order to make the nationals squad his junior and senior years.

Seawolves Speak 

In 39 years, Walker has spoken at athletic awards ceremonies and Hall of Fame inductions. She has given All School Meeting announcements. She has stood in front of classrooms and locker rooms and, of course, on fields and courts—including one time, next to a mentor with a stopwatch. 

But she has never given a Chapel Talk.

This spring, she gives the 2026 Baccalaureate address—the ultimate Chapel Talk.

When Head of School Tony Jaccaci asked her about giving the address, she remembers saying, "Tony, this is the one thing I've never done."

She is thinking about what she wants to say—something about relationships that don't end when you walk off this campus, about the doors that keep opening, about gratitude for what this place gives you even when you're too close to it to see it clearly. She is thinking about the senior class she has known, the advisees and the athletes, and what she hopes they carry.

Walker already knows what they will remember when they come back. She has watched it happen at every reunion for nearly four decades.

It won't be a class they aced or a game they won, though those things matter too. It will be a morning on the dock. A moment with someone they didn't expect to befriend. The particular light of this place, this water, this community—the very parts of Tabor that have kept her, all these years, from going anywhere else.