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Jeff Frizzell Honored with 2025 Esprit de Corp Award

Congratulations to Jeff Frizzell who was named the recipient of our 2025 Esprit de Corps award at Taste on Tunes on Friday, April 5.

Esprit de Corps means a common spirit of enthusiasm and devotion to a cause among the members of a group. The awards is present to a person who has exhibited a spirit of devotion and cooperation resulting in a positive and lasting impact upon Harding Academy.

Read the Script Honoring Jeff Frizzell

Tonight’s award recipient has been involved at Harding Academy for decades, but if you didn’t look carefully, you might miss it. 

Tonight’s award recipient was born in Jackson, Tennessee. His family moved around a lot as a child, with stops in Memphis and Birmingham. In fact, it might surprise some to know that he was even a Harding Academy student for a short time, where he received the book “If Jesus Came to My House,” which became a staple within his family.

After graduating from Freed Hardeman University, he found his way to Memphis for dental school and then he opened his own practice. As a longtime member and now elder at Highland Church of Christ, he and his wife raised 5 wonderful children (OR – 4 wonderful children, and 1 pretty good one). And while he’s often joked about the financial sacrifice of sending 5 children through Harding Academy, his support of the school has gone far beyond his children’s tuition. 

Of course he was not just a paying parent, but a serving one. He has coached nearly every sport Harding Academy has to offer – some better than others. He has served on a variety of parent committees, worked concession stands, set up and broken down events, and chaperoned field trips. 

And many people witnessed that involvement of a dedicated parent, but many might not have realized that his commitment to the school went far beyond his own children. Over his years as a paying parent, he also provided scholarships for numerous other students to attend Harding. He has funded a variety of projects over the years, from items in the Fine Arts, to classroom supplies for teachers, to first aid supplies. He also spent countless hours serving on Harding Academy’s Board of Trustees in the time between being a Harding parent and a parent of Harding employees. 

Now a grandparent to 14, six of whom are Harding students, he is still finding ways to serve at Harding. As a man who deeply believes in Christian education, you can find him supporting his grandchildren at all of their programs, coaching on the sidelines, and somehow, still doing the thing he’s done the most, building sets for the theatre department. 

It was a tradition of his that with each set he would build, he would hide images of teeth somewhere in the set. There might be a tooth hidden somewhere around here tonight… maybe. You might not have seen him build the set, but if you noticed the tooth, you knew he’d been there. And you might not have seen or known the many ways he has given of himself to help this school, and he probably wanted it that way. But the signs are all there, often hidden in plain sight. You just have to look closely. 

It is my pleasure to introduce the recipients of our 2025 Esprit de Corps Award, Jeff Frizzell.