Ellison Wease is Florida State-bound after a high school career that saw her post a 4.747 GPA, earn valedictorian honors at Cypress Creek and pull off a rare sports accomplishment.
Here’s five things that made her stand out from the crowd.
She always had a plan — sort of
Ellison Wease didn’t stumble into the valedictorian title at Cypress Creek. It was always lurking somewhere in the back of her mind, even if she kept it there on purpose. “I didn’t really think it would be possible until about junior year,” she said, “when my class rank moved up to a point where I thought it would be achievable.” She started stacking AP and Honors classes her first two years, added dual enrollment junior and senior year, and kept pushing. That drive had some roots, however. Back in fourth grade at Wesley Chapel Elementary, a teacher wrote her a note saying she would be watching for Ellison’s name as valedictorian in eight years. Ellison kept the note. Then she made it reality.
She kept herself busy
Ellison took 12 AP classes and 15 dual enrollment classes. It was a grind at times. “It definitely depended on the class,” she said. AP Calculus was, of course, her toughest class, and her favorite was AP Psychology, one of two classes she took with her favorite teacher, Mr. Chestnut. “I got 5s on both of the exams and he was an excellent teacher who made learning the subjects fun,” she said. And if they offered an AP Balancing-A-Bunch-of-Stuff course, Ellison would have gotten a 5 on that too — she was in the National Honor Society, English Honor Society, Key Club, Future Business Leaders of America, Mu Alpha Theta, volunteered with Special Olympics and had two jobs her senior year. Whew!
Four sports. Two state runs. Zero regrets.
Being a high-achieving student is one thing. Doing it while playing four varsity sports is something else entirely. Wease suited up for varsity soccer and tennis for three years and also played a season each of golf and lacrosse. And while most kids would be thrilled to make to the state championships in just one sport, Ellison did it in two. A forward, she played on the 2024-25 soccer team that advanced to the state semifinals. As a tennis player, she helped lead the Coyotes to their first ever state tournament this past season, where they lost their only match of the season in the semifinals. Wease, who said she didn’t even pick up a racquet until her sophomore year, went 17-1 during the season, and tennis became her favorite sport. “Being my senior year, I got to spend my last (high school) games pretty much just hanging out with my whole team for a couple days straight, both on and off the court and at the hotel, so it was really just a great experience overall.”
Chop over chomp
If you get into the University of Florida, there seems to be an unwritten rule among high schoolers: you go. Ellison felt that pressure after being accepted. But when it came time to decide, she went where she wanted to go: Tallahassee. She said she chose Florida State over Florida, USF and UCF because of the energy on campus, the student life she could see herself fitting into and the fact eyeing a future in law. It was a long, stressful decision, but one that, in the end, felt right.
Room to grow
The Coyote valedictorian is not entirely sure what she wants to do with her life — and she’s perfectly fine with that and planned to tell her classmates the same thing. “The topic of my speech is that it’s pretty much okay to not know exactly what you’re going to be doing in the future, to not have everything perfectly figured out and mapped out,” she said. Not knowing did put a lot of pressure on Ellison, and she feel like she was falling behind at times. But she’s come to realize she’s not alone, and there’s time to figure it out. She ruled out medical and business careers in high school, and even flirted with psychology before settling, for the moment, on pre-law and finance. “I’m definitely open to changing what I want to do if I come across something that I see is a better fit for myself,” Ellison said.