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DA: You chose several quotes for your DA yearbook page. Among them were the following lyrics from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: “If you smile at me, I will understand. That is something everybody, everywhere does in the same language."

Wallace ’85: (Laughs) “That’s my life story.”

DA: What was it like to be at Durham Academy in the early 1980s?

Wallace ’85: “I have such fond memories of DA — in part because of the academics, but much more so because it was my family. It was my community. It was my home. And it was an environment where I felt like I thrived. I loved being there. I loved going to school every day. It was just amazing. My friends were across all generations. It was the students, it was the staff, the janitors, the security guards, the teachers: There was not a distinction between how you were situated in the school. We were all just part of a family.”

DA: What are some of your favorite memories of DA?

Wallace ’85: “I remember every single teacher from kindergarten all the way through — Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Mann, Mrs. Land, Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Butters and so on. I think about the quote that, ‘It’s not what people do: It’s how they make you feel,’ and it’s how they made me feel at every step of the way. I’d go to school early just so I could spend more time with Mr. Parry because I just enjoyed the conversation. We also just did a lot of fun things. Outward Bound was amazing. I played field hockey and volleyball. I remember being on the buses and hanging out with our friend group throughout Upper School — spending a lot of time sitting around, just talking and appreciating being part of this community.”

DA: To what extent did DA inform your eventual career path and professional pursuits?

Wallace ’85: “I think of it a bit like law school. It’s not what you learn: It’s how you learn. I think some of the things that were so fantastic about Durham Academy was that it was fun to learn. It was fun to explore and create. The notion of a senior project where you can do whatever you want was pretty exciting to me. I’ve had a pretty non-traditional career path and tried lots of different things. To me, there’s a bit of a thread through them all. But the common values that were part of the Durham Academy experience — like creativity and leadership and exploring different fields and focusing on relationships as much as the actual learning — very much paved the way for me.

“I look back now and realize what a privilege it was to be at Durham Academy, which I remember as a place of humility and gratitude and service — and just the joy of learning and growing up as part of an environment that was really encouraging. I think that’s what paved the way for me to explore lots of different things and not be set in one career, one title, one profession.”

DA: You described your career as both connected and non-traditional — and it has been deeply eclectic. You studied art and were a member of the swim team at Duke University. You taught art therapy at a psychiatric institute. You were a Durham police officer for five years. You earned your law degree from N.C. Central University and have taught negotiation, mediation and international conflict management at multiple universities. And then you created your own internship within what was then known as the U.S. Olympic Committee — and helped mediate disputes for a decade — before you officially became a full-time ombuds at the USOPC in 2015. For the layperson who doesn’t do this work every day, what is the secret sauce to finding a path forward amid a dispute?

Wallace ’85: “I think the secret sauce, if you have to boil it down, is seeing the other person’s perspective, navigating down to what the basic interests are and finding creative ways to maximize the interests of all parties. The role of an ombuds — at least in this context for Team USA — is to serve as a trusted point of reference for athletes to answer questions, understand the rules, their rights, their responsibilities, and help them in problem-solving to find a path out of difficult situations. We have some interesting protections by a federal statute so that they can speak with us confidentially. We have a team of four ombuds, and we get 800 to 1,000 cases per year. There are somewhere between 55 and 60 National Governing Bodies (NGBs) — or individual sports — that we deal with. We’re working with the athletes who are representing the U.S. on the international stage and trying to make it to an Olympic or Paralympic Games.

“The most common issue that we work with is around team selection. There’s a very extensive pathway to an Olympic or Paralympic Games. So each year, we work with athletes who want to make a World Cup team, a world championships team, a Grand Prix team. A lot of the selection procedures operate on discretion, and we’re now navigating a lot of the team selection issues. The second biggest area is really around anti-doping: An athlete tests positive for something they have no idea what or how they tested positive for. We are doing investigations and hiring attorneys and working with labs to try to get supplements tested, try to find the source of what they’ve tested positive for and then try to navigate a fair resolution.

“And then there’s a whole myriad of other issues — from athlete safety to commercial sponsors to voice and decision-making. What happens when they get COVID during one of the biggest matches or games? Or what are the dynamics between teammates, athletes and coaches? Or where are they getting their insurance from? There’s no typical day.”

DA: You also generally serve as the ombuds who travels to the Olympic Games, and you’ll be in Italy next February for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games. What’s your favorite Olympics you’ve attended?

Wallace ’85: “As far as the experience in the city, 2024 Paris was by far my favorite. The venues were extraordinary. The way that Paris welcomed us was incredible. I was with some friends, and we followed Scottie Scheffler around for his first six holes, and then we had to leave because we went to go watch equestrian at the venue in Versailles — and that’s where Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart showed up. It was kind of a surreal experience.

“From Paris, we had identified about 10 medalists who would not have been there but for our support. They would have been otherwise ineligible. Those moments when an athlete is thinking they have an interrupted future and won’t be able to go to a Games — and then being able to sort of stand alongside them through the process and then see them succeed — is extraordinary.”

DA: What have you learned from the athletes with whom you’ve worked?

Wallace ’85: “They face the same things we all do with an extraordinary set of pressures and stakes. They live under a lot of scrutiny. Every elite athlete has to identify an hour of time every single day when they're going to be somewhere and they can be tested for doping, where they have to think about the protein shake that they get at the airport, where they have to think about the meat that they eat at a local diner. It's a really unique lens. There are very few athletes who make a lot of money. I think the impression generally is athletes are quite successful. But there are sacrifices that athletes make throughout the process of making a team. What's it like to get your pole vault from the U.S. to a competition in Greece? What's it like to get your sailboat there? What's it like to get your bobsled there? Just the movements across the world in order to be able to make a team are pretty striking.”

DA: What’s the best part of your job?

Wallace ’85: “There are a lot of really good parts of my job. The mission to empower athletes feels like a pretty significant and important and fun mission to pursue. Then there are the day-to-day interactions of being able to help an athlete. I think the word that I think about a lot is hope: being able to give hope to an athlete who finds himself in a really dark situation, and then see them on the other side of it. That's a lot of fun. I can remember a beach volleyball player who tested positive for COVID when he landed in Tokyo, and so he never even got to get into the city. He went straight into a government facility. We talked on Zoom every single day, multiple times a day, played cards together, watched movies, just trying to help him navigate isolation. Those moments when someone allows you in as a trusted resource? I don't take it for granted.”

DA: Is it true that you once paddle-boarded 304.6 miles from South Carolina to Virginia to raise awareness about ocean sustainability?

Wallace ’85: (Laughs) “It was a really fun trip. A friend and I did some paddle races together, and we said, ‘We should do something extraordinary.’ And then we said, ‘Well, let’s paddle from South Carolina to Virginia and see what happens.’ We met so many fun people along the way. People would come out in boats and bring us water and food. The kiteboard community in the Outer Banks said, ‘Come stay with us. You can check up here for the night.’ It’s amazing the people you can meet along the way if you don’t worry about your exact agenda or schedule or pathway.”

DA: You’ve mentioned several times the gift of creative problem-solving and how it informs much of your day-to-day work. For current and future DA students who are trying to figure out what creative problem-solving looks like in their chosen passion, what would you recommend they think about in the coming years?

Wallace ’85: “I think that a complementary word to creativity is curiosity, and really being curious about why somebody else thinks the way they do. Even the most elite athletes who appear to live a very exclusive life, or the athlete who has no money and is trying to figure out where to live — just simply ask them, ‘Tell me about your story.’ It’s an extraordinary way to connect and to find new avenues to solve problems. I think it all starts with the connection, with the curiosity and, really, the compassion to understand someone else’s situation.”

DA: Do you have any recollection of what your parents wrote for you in your DA yearbook?

Wilson ’10: (Laughs) “I do not.”

DA: They turned your name into an anagram: Talkative, Enthusiastic, Virtuous, Intelligent, Natural.

Wilson ’10: (Laughs) “Now that you bring that up: I do remember that, yes.”

DA: Do you feel like those five things still describe you?

Wilson ’10: (Smiles) “Yes. Absolutely.”

DA: In addition to your full-time role as a service access team lead with Duke Health, you’ve also been the associate director for Project Hope for Juvenile Arthritis since 2014. How did you eventually find your way into that space?

Wilson ’10: “I didn’t know it was an issue until my junior year of college at East Carolina University. I was on a call with a friend of mine, Miranda Gerber, who’s married to Chris Phillips ’10. She invited about four or five of her friends to raise awareness for arthritis by participating in an arthritis walk in Raleigh. I did not know anything about juvenile arthritis, honestly — and I didn’t know she had it — until she invited us to that walk. She’s my best friend now, and she’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. She’s a nurse. She works 12-hour shifts. I don’t understand how she does what she does half the time. But understanding her journey made me understand the disease more and made me want to help people with it. And so Miranda started Project Hope for Juvenile Arthritis.”

DA: What are your responsibilities with Project Hope?

Wilson ’10: “Advocating. We’ve gone to Washington, D.C., and the state capitol here in Raleigh to speak with representatives about funding and issues related to medical research.”

DA: What do you find is most surprising to anyone who has never thought about this issue until they heard about Project Hope?

Wilson ’10: “It’s the juvenile thing that gets most people. When you think of arthritis, you think of an older person with bad joints. But I think they don’t understand that it affects children as early as 18 months old. A lot of times, parents don’t know what it is at that point. And it’s not just joints: It’s an autoimmune disease that can affect every system in your body. There’s also a lack of doctors who focus on this and a lack of funding to get people to specialize in this because there are more people who we see have this every day. That’s something that people just aren’t aware of: that it exists and that there’s a lack of trained medical professionals to handle these issues.”

DA: October will mark your fourth year with Duke Health. What are your main responsibilities?

Wilson ’10: “In August 2023, I was promoted to service access team lead. I am basically the day-to-day operations manager for four of our cardiology clinics: two in Morrisville, one in Durham and one in Cary. I run the front desk operation for those four clinics day-to-day. I am the liaison between the front desk staff and the nursing staff and the doctors.”

DA: That’s a massive job. What are your favorite parts of your role?

Wilson ’10: “My favorite part of the job is the patients: the ones who remember you, the ones who come looking for you. I have patients who remember me when I just worked at the front desk. And since I’m no longer there, every day they don’t see me when they come in, they’ll say, ‘Where’s my friend?’ That’s my favorite part: making an impression on them. If they look for me when they come back, I think I’ve done my job right.”

DA: You earned a B.A. in political science from ECU and a master’s in political science and international affairs from the University of Georgia. What — or whom — steered you toward healthcare?

Wilson ’10: “I am a third-generation Duke employee. My grandmother — my mother’s mother — worked at Duke for 44 years as a health unit coordinator on a hospital floor. My mother has been at Duke for 46 years in a variety of roles, including health unit coordinator, patient transport, front desk administrator and staff assistant, and she’s currently a financial care counselor.”

DA: So you come from a Duke dynasty. We were also fascinated to learn that you worked at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from 2017 to 2020. What was that like?

Wilson ’10: “I was on call, but I never got called to a disaster. I did have to go to training in Alabama and learn a lot about what needs to be done and the ins and outs of all of the logistics that go into how FEMA responds to a disaster. It gave me a lot of insight into what FEMA does and just how much goes into responding to a disaster. It's not just people who work at FEMA day to day. There are people who get called in from all over the country, and those people drop everything and keep it going for months. It’s not like they’re staying in the Ritz-Carlton or the Hilton. They are staying in makeshift tents and things like that. It just showed me the goodness of people and how they show up for others in their time of need.”

DA: There definitely seems to be a throughline from what you learned at FEMA to your current role with Duke Health.

Wilson ’10: “A lot of my FEMA training involved how to speak with people who easily could have just lost everything. My job would be a lot of paperwork and talking with people and getting them signed up for benefits. In healthcare, financial care counselors have to speak about insurance and money. It's not a comfortable subject, and no one wants to pay, but we have to learn how to unfortunately address the patient’s concern while also realizing that these services do cost money. I've had patients who are experiencing some of the worst things in their life, some new diagnosis, and they are just trying to handle everything. Learning how to speak with people in these tough times is a great part of the job I have now.”

DA: What was it about your classes, your teachers and your experiences at DA that eventually informed your professional path?

Wilson ’10: “My mother will say this: When I started DA in sixth grade, it was the best decision she ever made. Steve and Teresa Engebretsen [former athletic director and Middle School French teacher] were the reason I went to DA. I met them when their oldest son, Jake, and my older brother, TJ, played sports together. That’s how I met them when I was 4 years old, and eventually I got over to DA in sixth grade. What inspired me is the challenges. Every teacher challenged me every single day I was there. They inspired me to seek challenges, to go outside of my comfort zone. The best part about DA was the teachers. And I eventually took French with Madame Engebretsen. Four of my best friends to this day, I made at DA.

“DA is going to challenge you to be a better person, both personally and intellectually. I remember walking into college for certain classes, like English — and it was a piece of cake because I took English at DA with Jordan Adair.

“The biggest thing is the community. I see people from DA all the time, whether it be students, former teammates, parents. In my cardiology world, I work with two doctors who were parents of classmates. One doctor I work with now, his son is on the tennis team at DA. That’s one of the greatest things I love about DA: The community is small enough that you felt like you knew everyone. I agree with my mother: Going to DA was one of the best decisions I could have made.”

DA: You were the fourth and final child in your family to graduate from DA. What did your time at the school mean to you?

Bassil ’15: “It was fantastic. Some of my friends I made there are still my best friends today. Some of the teachers are ones I’ll never forget. Mr. [Dennis] Cullen wrote one of my recommendation letters for college, and when I returned this spring to serve as an assistant on the DA boys lacrosse team, I saw Mr. Cullen all the time, still coming out and helping out with the track team, and it was really cool to just see how long he’s been there and the impact that he still has. DA was a place where I felt I was always really nurtured to be the best version of myself and also pushed to be better than I thought I could be.

“Mr. [Gib] Fitzpatrick was also great. He's also someone who pushed me, even at a young age, to kind of take the next step and be a better version of myself. For our math homework, he would give you the option every single day to do an additional however many problems, 10 or 15 or 20, and get extra credit for it. It seems like such a simple thing, but I always thought, ‘Well, why wouldn't I do extra homework to get extra points and go on my report card?’ I think that kind of instilled in me that desire to go the extra mile, even in something that's so simple like a math homework problem set.

“Going back to Lower School, I have so many fond memories. I would probably say Mrs. [Debbie] Suggs is the classic answer for teachers you’ll always remember, and she's still here. Ms. Cornwall was great. In Upper School, I loved Mr. [Lanis] Wilson’s Advanced Placement English Shakespeare class. That was a lot of fun and a class I look back on. I also loved doing the Peer Educator program. I just think that model of freshmen coming and being unsure of how things work, and all the anxiety that comes around and having role models to look up to is a really unique experience. I remember as a freshman, I loved that, and I felt really lucky as a senior to be selected to do that. That was a really cool experience.”

DA: Lacrosse has also been an inextricable part of your journey: You played at DA and in college at UNC as a goalie, and you mentioned that you returned to DA this spring as an assistant coach with the boys lacrosse team. What has the sport meant to you?

Bassil ’15: “When I was younger, I loved watching lacrosse. But I actually wasn’t very good in Lower School when I first started playing, so I kind of trialed all the different positions. I wasn't great at midfield. I wasn't great at attack. I didn't know what I was doing with a long pole, and so I figured no one else was playing goalie. And I kind of picked it up naturally in the beginning. I figured I'd stick with it, just liking the sport and wanting to be a contributor on the team. It is kind of a crazy position. You get hit with a lot of balls. And when people ask me if I miss lacrosse now, I say I do. I miss the camaraderie. I miss the locker room. I miss all that. I don't miss getting hit by balls, necessarily. (Laughs)

“If I went back in time, I think I would do it again. Being a goalie, I think, is also fundamental to my development. You fail so much as a goalie. Your save percentage is around 60% in high school, but in college, it’s hovering around 50% — so you have to learn how to kind of deal with failure on the fly. It’s something I talked a lot about in my residency interviews. With obviously the connection between orthopaedics and sports, we were talking a lot about being able to be cool and calm, collected under pressure; if adversity hits, taking a deep breath, and being able to turn the page and not get too flustered or get too caught up on something that might have gone wrong — and trying to make the best out of whatever cards you're dealt. I talked about that basically in every single one of my residency interviews, because obviously, as an orthopedic surgeon and in training, it's important to be able to keep a cool, calm and collected head, even if there's chaos going on around you.”

DA: Speaking of staying cool and calm: You’ve had some extensive laboratory experience, including as an undergraduate student researcher in an orthopaedic lab at UNC-Chapel Hill and as a research technician at a Duke radiation oncology lab. What did you learn about yourself during both of those experiences?

Bassil ’15: “I learned a lot of humility. It’s a steep learning curve with a lot of the techniques you do, whether it's directly working with mice themselves, or doing Western blotting, or all these different techniques that you do in a lab that you only get good at by basically trialing and erroring them. A lot of it was not being afraid to ask questions. But also, if I had asked every question I had, I probably would be there all day asking a million questions. And so what I learned is to do reading on your own, give something a good faith effort, and then after you do that, I think it's good to ask questions then — but the questions you'll ask at that point are more informed, and you might have fewer of them than if you just start firing out questions at the beginning. I think it's a good way of trying to be more independent.”

DA: How did you eventually settle on orthopaedics over any other field of study?

Bassil ’15: “I definitely kept an open mind when I was in medical school, just because there are so many other amazing fields that I could have seen myself going into. But I kept feeling a pullback to orthopaedics. I think it’s because so much of my life and identity has been wrapped up in sports. But when you start to go into orthopaedic clinics, and you're in the operating rooms, you see how much people's movement and physical ability affects their lives — people who are just debilitated by pain and want to be able to just play pickleball or walk their daughter down the aisle, and then you're able to do a surgery, and then a few days later they're back walking and in much less pain than they had when they came in.

“It's been such a central part of my identity, my physicality and my movement. You take it for granted. I never had a major injury, but I had a lot of friends who did, and I saw how much that hurt them. It’s really a part of people's identity, and I think with orthopaedics, you're able to restore that identity to them. I find so much meaning in orthopaedics. You see patients in the clinic who are just debilitated, and they come back after surgery and they'll say, ‘You gave me my life back.’ I think that's so cool.”

DA: You’re a few months into your residency, which started in June. What does your day-to-day look like right now?

Bassil ’15: “Right now, I'm in our intern year, which is our first year of residency. We do six months on orthopaedic services and six months off service, so either general surgery, plastic surgery or in the ICU. But so far, I've been on my orthopaedic rotations, and I've been in the emergency department. Mostly I'm a consult resident, so I see consults, and then I also have been managing our floor patients at night. I’m first call for all of our orthopaedic primary patients at night. So it's been great. During the day in my first six or seven weeks, I’ve done field consults with our chief resident, and I’ve learned so much. I think you come in and you don't even realize what you don't know until you start fielding consults. It's so nice having a chief resident there with you to kind of walk you through it and help you.

“Just treating patients in the place where I'm from — Durham — is the biggest joy, and getting to know them and round on them in the mornings, getting to know their stories and kind of being their primary provider for the evening, has been really cool. It's been a joy, and I've learned a ton. I feel really lucky to be doing it.”

DA: You’re on the precipice of starting your professional life. When you look back at your 13 years here on campus, to what extent do you feel like this place and this community shaped your trajectory as a young person?

Bassil ’15: “I think it was instrumental. I think if you told me back then that I would have done these things, I would have said, ‘You're crazy.’ When I was at DA, you're around so many fantastic people that sometimes you think, ‘Oh, there are actually so many people who are better than I am.’ But I think that's a good perspective because that's true of anything you do in life. There's always going to be someone who's probably smarter, better. And I think DA is a place where that's true, sure, but it's not in a malignant context where you're saying, ‘Oh, these people are putting me down because they're so much better than I am.’ No: It's that they actually bring you up. And so I think that's been a good lesson for me, to have the humility to say, ‘You know, I'm probably not the person here who's the best at physics. There's someone who's better than I am at it, but I can be friends with them, and I can learn from them, and I'll be better for it.’

“I think the kind of mentality of ‘iron sharpening iron’ is definitely true at DA. You're uplifted, and everyone learns from one another. And that extends to the DA network. Dr. Dean Taylor is a sports medicine orthopaedic surgeon at Duke who's since retired from clinical practice, but I played lacrosse with his son, Ben, and he's been one of my mentors. Just from playing lacrosse and knowing his son, being able to work with him in the clinic and in the ORs and whatnot has been huge. Who knows if that would have happened if I hadn't gone to DA? There’s something to be said about how robust the network is, and how everyone wants to help one another.”