Incoming Head of School Heather Mock is known for her nurturing and genuinely sunny disposition. She’s run or helped run several eminent schools and founded Compositive Primary in Colorado, building it from the ground up. For all her attributes and accolades, there is one small anecdote she seldom shares because it still ruffles her feathers: Heather was once a contestant on Jeopardy! and it didn’t end well. But it did become a future opportunity to reflect.

In 2003, Heather and a colleague attended the Denver tryouts for the famous game show. After taking a number of tests, she made it through, but her friend did not. She was called onto the show a few weeks later. She loves Trivial Pursuit and trivia, so it was an exciting, surprising accomplishment.

Prior to competing, Heather and her dad talked about strategizing for Final Jeopardy!, specifically how people in first place tend to bet to cover. But Heather dismissed the notion other than wondering what the final category might be. She didn’t presume she’d be in first place on the day of the contest. Regardless, her father was so excited for her that he went out to Los Angeles to watch her episode film.

As the show approached, Heather says she treated it like a lark, “Like, oh, whatever, this will just be fun.” Then, as the episode wore on, she realized she was doing quite well. She found herself with a sizeable lead and maintained a first-place position most of the game.

But then, “I made this really colossal mistake.” Heather made the classic Jeopardy! misstep: she forgot to say, “What is?” before responding to a big-money answer. “I remember it so well, like it sort of haunts me.” Heather describes that, in the moment, late host Alex Trebek paused, and she wondered, “Why is he pausing? It felt like forever! It probably wasn’t that long.” Then, of course, Alex finally alerted her to her crucial omission. A contestant who was doing poorly, score-wise, buzzed in and took the points that would’ve been hers.

Unfortunately, her strategizing faltered after that. Come the final round, Heather bet to cover but didn’t calculate how much smaller her lead had become. She laughs thinking about that earlier conversation with her dad, where she wasn’t focused on betting for first place but instead for second. “In second place, people often just bet everything because, oh, why not?” They take the mathematical chance against a distant first-place opponent. But Heather’s big missed question had moved her back from being untouchable, come the final round, to within striking distance of defeat. “So, I was in first place, and I bet to cover. But we both got it wrong, and the other [second-place] guy hadn’t bet anything.”

Heather is still a little annoyed; she would’ve liked to have figured out the second-place player’s move. She admits, “I was a little bit obsessive afterward. The worst is, if I hadn't forgotten to say, ‘What is?’ I would’ve been far enough ahead that [the Final Jeopardy! round] wouldn’t have mattered.” As a token of her eventual acceptance of the entire experience, Heather says she’s used the incident as fodder for faculty meetings about how to learn from difficult and irreversible scenarios.

It’s the irreversibility that bothers Heather the most; because it’s a hard-and-fast rule of Jeopardy!. “If you’re on Jeopardy! once, you can never be on again. And that was pretty hard for me [to accept at first].” People often describe Heather as generally positive; if something goes awry or she errs, she most often pivots to a mindset of “try, try again.” And while she won’t get another shot to try again at Jeopardy!, our new Head of School doesn’t regret her overall experience with the show. “I’ve actually written a blog about it,” and the blog has provided her some relief. In the meantime, Heather is preparing her transition to Prep Head of School with her usual cheer and is already ingratiating herself with Prep’s close-knit community.