As Tiger Reimann ’26 completes his Pacific University career, his career goals are simple.
“I want to help kids not make the same mistakes that I did, so then they can have a happier and healthier [athletic] career,” he said.
A kinesiology major and sports management and leadership minor, Reimann’s studies have centered on the human body and on educating others on proper athletic training techniques to help prevent devastating injuries, like the torn hamstring that stunted his playing career.
Selected as Pacific’s undergraduate valedictorian, Reimann will share his experience and speak on the challenges that the Class of 2026 has faced as the keynote speaker during Pacific’s undergraduate commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 16, on Pacific’s Forest Grove Campus.
In his remarks, Reimann plans to recap his journey and the events that have shaped him and the rest of his class, who came of age during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I really want to hit on the point that we went through this together and that we grew quite a bit,” Reimann said. “We endured a lot coming into college and we really became the people who we are today. I want to give a recap of our journey, say some funny things and talk about the people we have become, the adults we’ve become through Pacific, and all of the accomplishments we have achieved.”
A three-sport athlete at Yamhill-Carlton High School, about 15 miles south of Forest Grove, Reimann and other student-athletes saw athletics come to an abrupt halt when the pandemic took hold in March 2020. With few other outlets during the prolonged isolation, Reimann spent hours working out and lifting weights with little guidance outside of what he found on the Internet.
That overtraining led to an injury, which Reimann largely ignored and powered through. The effects were compounded in 2021, when athletics returned in a hurried frenzy to make up for lost time. That year, Reimann played football in late winter, baseball in the spring, basketball in early summer, and then returned to football in the fall as sports returned to their normal places on the calendar.
Reimann, a 12-time letterwinner in high school, noticed that his improvement plateaued through those seasons. He assumed that his body had simply reached the limits of its potential.
“I didn’t know if [sports] were ever going to be back again, so I played through my injury,” Reimann said. “I just thought that I had trained incorrectly, so I was slow. But it was just that I was injured and I didn’t know.”
