COOK- As a two-time national finalist for the annual GRAMMY Music Educator Award, Cook native Trevor Nicholas is acquainted with soaring in rarefied air, but even he didn’t know what was in store for him when his phone rang one day this past March.
Nicholas has been the choral director at Senn High School in the Chicago metro area since 2016, and among the many connections he’s forged for his students is one with the Chicago Cubs major league baseball team. The choir has been a frequent participant in the club’s Wrigleyville Tree Lighting Ceremony for the past eight years, and in 2018 was on Wrigley Field to perform the national anthem before a Cubs’ win.
When he ran into the club owner last year, he was told the Cubs would like the choir to come back again, and in February, at the same time Nicholas was named a finalist for the 2025 Golden Apple Excellence in Teaching Award, he submitted the necessary paperwork to the Cubs’ field entertainment office.
So, when the Cubs called in March, Nicholas expected to be getting an invitation for his choir to sing, but he was in for a different surprise.
“They said, ‘We’re calling to congratulate you on being a finalist for the Golden Apple award,’” Nicholas said. “We have our annual Teacher Appreciation Night on May 5, and we would like to honor you by having you throw the first pitch.’”
Nicholas was flattered but felt somewhat unprepared to be the center of attention on the pitching mound at Wrigley Field, as he’d only played tee-ball as a youngster.
“I thought I was going to go on the field and use my master’s degree to lead a very public performance of the anthem, and instead, I was using my zero experience to do a very public thing for which I was not qualified, which is in the world of baseball,” Nicholas said.
For a crash course in pitching, he turned to the members of the Senn High baseball team.
“They graciously let me sit in on practice, and kind of built it around helping me build my throw,” Nicholas said. “They were super encouraging, and it was really fun. They kind of surrounded me and joyfully booed me, tossing creative insults lovingly at me to try and distract me to mimic the distractions of the stadium.”
And it turned out, the kids knew what they were doing.
“When I got (on the field at Wrigley) another guy threw a first pitch as well, and he threw it in the dirt, and the whole stadium booed,” Nicholas said. “I definitely didn’t want to do that and be booed by tens of thousands of people.”
And while he wasn’t given any chance to warm up, his practice time had him well prepared for the occasion.
“From the audiences’ view, it looks like I threw a strike,” Nicholas said. “I’d say it might have been a little far to the right, but it was above the knees and below the shoulders. I just wanted it to be in the air and catchable.”
Cheering from the stands were about 90 family and friends, including his parents, Shirley and Chuck Nicholas, who came down from Cook for the special event. After joining a friend’s high school choir to sing the National Anthem for the crowd, Nicholas said he spent most of the game going around thanking each person for coming to support him.
That pitch represents a transition of sorts for Nicholas, one of his last acts as choral director at Senn High School. He’s leaving the position at the end of the school year to embark upon a new direction, a five-year doctoral program at Northwestern University, where he’ll be researching and teaching a passion that’s infused his entire career— the interface between music and wellness.
“The last several years, I’ve had this deep desire to go deeper in the research on healing and the arts and music,” Nicholas said. I don’t have the time to be a full-time high school teacher and make the larger impact that I feel is my next step. It feels like the timing is right. It’s five years full time at Northwestern,” Nicholas said. “In that time, I will have lots of opportunities to help mentor the student teachers at Northwestern. North Park University has reached out to me and asked me if I would teach some classes there, as time allows. By years three and four of the PhD program, I will be deciding my own courses to run in the music department and education department at Northwestern. So, while I’m stepping away from this particular classroom and set up, I will be consistently still teaching, just on a different level, in a different place.”
Nicholas’s passion for music and wellness comes from his own personal experience as a member of the Cook community. It was music that helped him cope with the trials of rheumatoid arthritis as a youth in Cook, and he discovered that his music was also therapeutic for others. Music became even more essential for his own healing in  2004 when his Cook High School classmate Patrick Wilenius died in a car accident and was amplified to a greater extent in 2005 when another car accident claimed the lives of Cook High classmates and friends Dan Swanson and Lindi Fogelberg, Lindi’s mother Nancy, and Paige Bergman. Since then, those people have never been far from Nicholas’s mind as he has worked to use music to help heal the trauma others experience in their lives.
And, in fact, they were all with him in spirit on the mound at Wrigley Field. The Cubs gave Nicholas a jersey to wear, and Nicholas didn’t have to think much at all about the number he wanted on the back.
“I did play some basketball (in school), and Dan Swanson, I believe he was like 45 and I was 43 – I forget over time, but I wanted to pick a number in the 40s,” Nicholas said. “And one of my favorite Bible verses is Philippians 4:6. And so I picked the number 46 both to honor Dan and the other classmates that we lost, and then also to represent gratitude, because I’m in a season in life of just gratitude for so many things. I wanted to walk on that field just exuding gratefulness. And so, Philippians 4:6, in all things with thankfulness, presenting requests to God. So awesome. That’s why I picked the number 46.”
And Nicholas wonders if it might have been people in the Cubs’ organization recognizing the qualities he’s carried with him from his youth in Cook that caused them to pick him instead of someone else to throw out the first pitch.
“I learned through my upbringing up north to treat everybody well and to constantly look for creative solutions to problems, whether it be wilderness survival or putting on a community show,” Nicholas said. “Always being a helper, not just taking but contributing, leaving things better than you found them. I would like to think that those qualities that were instilled in me, and at my best I live by, is probably why they chose me, because they had a deep trust in me that I wouldn’t abuse the opportunity and that I would be grateful and add some value. I wanted in this moment on that ballfield to never forget where I came from and why I have been allowed to do all these amazing things.”