Love Stories

Paige (Springer) Daggett '90 & Bradley Daggett '90

Paige: We met walking across the football field, pre-season, before our junior year, the first year for both of us. I was walking away from campus with some girlfriends, and he was walking back toward campus. We were just friends at Peddie and in the same crowd, and then we both ended up at the University of Alabama, and we began dating when we were there. Another Peddie alumna, Tricia Robles ’89, gathered a little Peddie reunion in Tuscaloosa because Dino Pascarelli ’91 was coming to town, so we hung out that weekend and began dating after that.

It’s so nice for the two of us to have had Peddie in common and we have a lot of the same friends to this day. We’ve kept in touch with so many of our Peddie friends. We share that as our past, and we share it as our present because it was such a great time. And Brad feels the same way. It’s so nice that we can both look back at that together and continue to have it as part of our lives. 

We’ve been together at every reunion; we definitely make it back every five years for the big ones. On our 25th, we had all five kids with us, and Brad was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame for baseball. That was such a special day. His roommate John Coffey ’90 came back to be a part of the ceremony, and my roommate and best friend, Zi-yah Esbenshade ’90, and Denise Sullivan ’90, my oldest daughter’s godmother, came back to support Brad. 

Peter McClellan ’90 is a classmate of ours and a teammate of Brad’s. Having him be at Peddie, and Mary Tennyson Mahoney ’94, is so wonderful. It’s just the feeling of Peddie and what it gave both of us at a time in our life when we both needed it — needed to be independent and go to boarding school — and Peddie was a game-changer for both of us. We keep in touch with a lot of our classmates. We both loved it. For different reasons, we both needed it at that time in our lives, and it gave us a similar 
springboard to our lives.