LHHS high school sweethearts talk reunions, parenting together

2005. It was Haley Mason’s, neé Maturi,  freshman year at Lake Highlands High School, and she was on the third floor of the old Freshman Center for Ms. Chesal’s world geography class.

Sitting behind her was Brad Mason, a golf player. She’d gone to Northlake Elementary, he’d gone to Merriman Park. A Lake Highlands Junior High graduate and a former Forest Meadow Charger. He “just wasn’t very nice.”

Not a great start.

But 20 years later, the now-married Masons have chosen to stay in Lake Highlands — just like Ms. Chesal, who is currently serving as the school’s geography department chair.

It’s no surprise. The Maturis are through and through Lake Highlands.

Her parents both grew up in Lake Highlands. Her mother, Jana, grew up on Edgecove Drive, and her father, Paul Maturi, went to Forest Meadow before playing football at LHHS. He was close friends with Jana’s brother, and the two were roommates at Harding University in Arkansas.

“That’s how my dad met my mom is through his friend, Brett, who is my mom’s brother,” Mason says. “They knew each other in high school and people will say they dated, but I don’t think they dated in high school. Then they went to Harding and she cheered, and then they ended up dating. Both sides of my family live here, and we just never left.”

Paul coached football at LHHS for 14 years. Haley says she was a prototypical coach’s daughter on the sideline and “daddy’s girl.” Cheerleaders babysat her and football players would tug her ponytail on the bus ride home as she sat on a briefcase for headsets. She was “probably annoying” about her dad being a coach in elementary school, she admits.

Her Wildcat pride extended to the high school. She was a Highlandette and remained heavily invested in the football squad. Brad continued to golf for the school team. Grouped together for test-taking by their last names, the pair grew closer. After Haley’s junior year winter formal date left her at an after-party, a new suitor came into play.

“My boyfriend left me to pretty much go drink, because we were not at a house that was drinking, we just didn’t do that,” she says. “Brad kind of stepped in and was trying to be the cool guy. He was there with one of my best friends but kind of hit on me after my boyfriend left. Then it was the Highlandette review, and we kind of started talking around then, and I broke up with my boyfriend.”

In high school just before the advent of the iPhone, the pair passed notes in between classes in the hall. They hung out with friends, visited drive-in movie theaters and frequented the TC Shaved Ice on Garland Road.

Brad went to Mississippi State University in Starkville to play golf. Haley followed her parents footsteps to Harding University in Arkansas, leaving close to 300 miles between them. The mothers worried about the long-distance relationship, but the young couple found a way to make it work.

“It was definitely hard because we didn’t see each other a lot because of golf, and I didn’t have a car, so I borrowed my friend’s car one time to go visit him,” she says. “Sometimes he would drive and get me and then go back to Starkville. And then I think probably like sophomore year of college, was when we were like, ‘OK, this is it, we’re gonna get married.’”

After coming back to the neighborhood, he proposed in his parents’ backyard, the venue for many teenage hangouts. Haley and Brad tied the knot at Park Cities Baptist Church in June of 2015. His parents led the newlywed class, and the ceremony was filled with friends from the neighborhood, she says.

Now parents to a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old at Moss Haven Elementary, the couple lives less than a half-mile away from his parents. They enjoy spending time with other families, getting ice cream and taking part in Lake Highlands traditions like the 12 Days of Christmas on Timberhollow Circle. Football games are still a huge draw, albeit a little more complicated now that Haley’s dad coaches at Jesuit.

“(Her son Luke) says he’s going to be a Wildcat and a Jesuit Ranger, but he doesn’t understand that he can’t be both,” she says with a chuckle.

The Masons enjoy spots like Shinsei on Inwood Lane for date nights. Despite a poor first impression, Haley says she’s found a kind, considerate match in Brad.

“He’s 100% present, and he’s very involved, even with work, and he does a really good job being there for me. And we just know each other’s struggles, and we know what makes each other happy. So I think that can stem a little bit from knowing the person that you used to be and how far you’ve come to become the person you are.”

Husband and wife Madison Chapman and Priscilla Wasson met as sixth grade trumpeters at an RISD band meetup. Madison went to Lake Highlands Elementary and Priscilla went to White Rock Elementary before meeting up at the junior high. In high school, they dated each other’s friends, ran in the same circles and began a friendship that would eventually become much more. He was an athlete and a Bell Boy, while she managed the basketball team.

After graduation, they fell out of touch as Chapman dove headfirst into his artificial turf business and Wasson remained in a committed relationship. Following the end of Wasson’s previous relationship, the pair reconnected over Snapchat and text. The budding connection was eventually cemented at the Class of 2010 10 year reunion. After a few months of going back and forth between Lake Highlands and Austin, where Chapman lived at the time, things started to get serious.

Close to four years later, the couple is now married and living in Burnet in Central Texas with their son Boone, who will be joined this spring by a sibling.

You met in sixth grade. What do you remember from that meeting?

M: I was all nervous, so we were chairs next to each other in trumpet, and I was just really nervous. And I was like, ‘this girl’s tight.’ I just didn’t really know how to react or how to talk to her or anything like that.

How would you describe each other in high school?

M: So the way I remember her was like band T-shirts and jeans and converse and all that kind of stuff. Shy, but once you kind of crack into her, super outgoing, always good time, but always liked to hang around the guys.

P: I remember you being … OK I loved the flippy hair. He was very popular. Always a goofball, doing little stunts to make people laugh. He was a Bell Boy, too. You know how we all had our like little groups — he was everyone’s buddy, all the teachers loved him.

Did you fall out of contact after high school?

P: We didn’t fall out of contact, but I was in a serious relationship, so you don’t really talk to your old guy friends and stuff. I guess we would keep up little pictures on Snapchat or something like that, but we weren’t really talking on a regular basis by any means.

Tell me about reuniting at the reunion.

P: I remember I was talking to him at the reunion. I was at an after party, and I was talking to him about how he has always been there for me. So I told him,  ‘I think that means something, and I think it means that I like you.’ And he wouldn’t say anything to me for five minutes. We were just watching the party go on around us. And I was like, ‘Oh, man, maybe I just made a mistake.’ But I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure he likes me.’ I was so confused.

M: It was like everything I wanted came true that I’ve been looking for years, and it just fell in my lap.

How was dating?

P: He visited me every weekend. He would come in every Friday morning or whatever, and be there till Monday morning. And he’d leave at like 4 a.m. to go back to work to Austin. I went down there sometimes too, and I knew how devoted he was from the very beginning.

What do you all do for fun down there?

M: I’m usually gone by seven or eight in the morning, and don’t get back until five or six with my commute. They go to the park every other day. We’ve got four acres, so they go walk around and play with the dog. We’ve got a big German Shepherd, and they go throw the ball and stuff like that, kind of cruise around the neighborhood and everything. On the weekends, we really like to kind of hang out and lay low and kind of catch up on Saturday. But we’re still trying to find all the restaurants.

Looking back, how lucky do you feel to have found each other again?

M: Lucky as it gets. She kind of brought me down to a different level of life. I was so focused on business, and that’s what basically ran my life. Monday through Friday all I did was work. I would get up at five, six every morning. I would devote my whole entire day to growing my business and get home, eat something and go to bed at eight o’clock. I had no life on the weekends. I was never really interested, or even had a will to date anybody, simply because of the amount of time and effort that I was focused on my business. I just didn’t think it would really be right to bring somebody into that when I didn’t really have the care, the will to change. And when Priscilla came along, things flipped very quickly.