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Community Corner

Senate Candidate Remembers Lessons Learned at Centreville High School

Discipline and hard work paid off for Jamie Radtke.

As the new kid at in 1992, Jamie Radtke faced the teen-aged angst-ridden obstacle of making new friends in an unfamiliar place while trying to graduate on time as a high school senior.

Because she was in a military family, she was used to moving, but this was her third high school in four years. 

“You have no idea what a challenge it was to start a new high school in senior year,” Radtke said. “It was tough.”

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The fact that the school was new—it had opened in 1991—was a plus, and she joined the women’s fast-pitch softball team as a way to meet new people. Years later, she takes the lessons of hard work and discipline she learned on the CVHS baseball field and applies them to her campaign for U.S. Senate.

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A Tea Party activist, Radtke is running against former , who has widespread name recognition, in June 12 state Republican primary election. This is her first run at statewide elected public office, but she is undaunted (Allen has raised about $6 million in donations to her $700,000). She remembers the uphill battle at CVHS.

“My one strong memory from high school was from softball team; we had a lot of good athletes there,” she said. “The coaches had high expectations and we all had to work very hard, with a lot of discipline. I made a lot of good friends on the team.

“I came from a slow-pitch baseball team, so I had to adjust. I lifted weights five days a week,” she said. “And we practiced all week. If it rained, we came into the school cafeteria and practiced sliding by putting towels down on the floor.”

“You didn’t get a day off because it was raining,” she said.

She was bitten by the public service bug a year earlier when she was a junior at a high school in Newport News. The principal rebuffed her attempts to start a club for Christian athletes.  Undeterred, she appealed to the school board and won.

“He was talking about how they couldn’t allow it because of the separation of church and state, which as a 16-year-old I didn’t understand,” she said. “I did the research and worked with an attorney and got the club.

“I guess that made me see for the first time that one person does matter,” she said. “You don’t think you can make a difference as one person, but really, one person can change your community.”

She said she hopes to do that in her campaign to win the open Senate seat. Government spending is the campaign’s overarching issue and she wants to provide a new, conservative voice in Congress to rein in federal spending, she said.

Correction: a previous version of this story stated that Radtke attended four high schools in three years. It was three high schools in four years. 

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