“Don’t just give because you’ve been told to give. Give because it has the capacity to make change.”
There are two stories about why John Richards, C’12, chose to enroll at Sewanee, and one is slightly more suitable for admission brochures than the other. On the more widely shareable side, Richards appreciated the University’s small size and related opportunities to excel in Division III men’s swimming and diving. But there’s also an episode Richards witnessed outside of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house during a prospective students’ weekend.
“We were on the back porch, and I saw two guys arguing,” he says. “They were going back and forth about Kant’s philosophy on lying, and whether you could deem something a credible, forgivable, or passable lie. It turned into a fistfight.”
Richards says the brawl sold him on joining Sewanee’s community. “I thought, ‘If this is what the fraternity bros at this college fight about, this is where I want to be.’”
Though he reflects fondly on his involvement in Chi Psi, Richards says most of his free time on the Mountain was spent not at Greek parties, but in the Fowler Center Natatorium. He joined Sewanee’s men’s swimming and diving team as a freshman and participated through his senior year. Recently, he commemorated his student-athlete experience by providing significant funding for natatorium renovations. When all funding is in hand, this transformation will include moving the swimming pool’s starting blocks, updating PoolPak equipment that maintains healthy air quality, and replacing roofing, among other upgrades.
In determining the focus of his gift, Richards worked with Senior Advancement Officer John Whaling, C’07, who coordinates fundraising for multiple Sewanee Athletics projects. “Sewanee’s pool was built in 1994 and fit the standards of its time, but those benchmarks have evolved over the past 30 years,” Whaling says. “We’re deeply grateful to John and hope other University alumni and friends will pitch in to ensure a safe and rewarding swimming and diving experience for all of our student-athletes, as well as for the Sewanee TigerSharks and other community members.”
Thanks to Richards’ generosity, Whaling says, Sewanee is closing in on its $300,000 fundraising goal for the pool’s starting blocks. “It’s exciting to be so close to a big finish line, especially as we work on a project that will strengthen our athletics program in such a broad and significant way. With some additional support, we can raise the necessary funds to complete this work in the summer of 2026.”
Richards jokes his interest in swimming originated on a purely practical note. “I played soccer as a kid, and I broke my nose as a goalie—and, then, I played baseball, and I broke my nose catching a ball,” he says. “My family says I never broke my nose swimming, so I stuck with it.” As a Sewanee Tiger, he specialized in 200- and 400-meter individual medleys, but was often tapped as a “trash man,” which, he says, is swimming lingo for an athlete who fills in for a variety of events during competitions. “You just pick up whatever trash is left.”
Despite the somewhat unglamorous title, Richards says he found major fulfillment in his Sewanee swimming career. In particular, he says, he loved the “bookends to the season”—the first practice of the year and the Southern Athletic Association (SAA) Championship in the spring. “It’s such a quantifiable team joy when someone achieves a personal record at the conference [championship].” At those moments, even when Richards wasn’t involved in a matchup, he says he found himself “on the side of the pool clapping, cheering, going crazy—probably to the detriment of my own race!”
Richards praises former Sewanee head swimming and diving coach Max Obermiller, P’14, for helping team members balance coursework with a rigorous athletics schedule. “Max realized our futures probably depended on our academic success,” he says. “He was good about offering flexible practice times or letting us schedule make-up practices.” Nevertheless, Richards says, “One thing 90% of swimmers will reference when they talk about swimming is, you have to be good at time management.”
For his part, Richards was able to squeeze in a number of additional co-curricular activities, including serving as head proctor; holding leadership positions in the University’s student government; engaging in international outreach alongside legendary former Associate Director of Civic Engagement Dixon Myers, P’15, P’16; and chairing multiple Chi Psi committees.
As a student, Richards says, he appreciated the amount of autonomy granted to campus organizations by Sewanee’s administration. “I don’t like joining something if I don’t feel I have an avenue for impact.”
Though Richards’ childhood dream was to become a Supreme Court justice, at Sewanee he gravitated to courses that combined politics with international relations and economics. After graduating with a B.A. in politics, he landed a prestigious Princeton in Asia (PiA) fellowship, which sent him to Guangzhou, China, and further piqued his interest in international communications and data analytics.
Following his time in PiA, Richards moved to Singapore to work with former PiA Executive Director Anastasia Vrachnos in strategically expanding Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts institution that partnered Yale University with the National University of Singapore. “As a 22 year old, I was able to have a strong influence over giant sums of money, just by making a cohesive, data-driven narrative,” he says. “That was wild to me.” He went on to earn an international MBA and a master’s degree in data analytics from the University of South Carolina at Columbia.
Currently, Richards lives in Chicago and leads Psephos, a data management company he co-founded in 2022.
“The very quick elevator pitch is, we support state and county governments in reviewing their voting rosters to make them as accurate as possible.” Though data organization and cleanup is a day-to-day aim, he says the ultimate goal of his work is “to help increase confidence in the democratic process as a whole.”
Like the leadership positions he held as an undergraduate, Richards sees his Sewanee philanthropy as a pathway to positively influencing student life at the University. “I think it’s important to find [causes] you’re passionate about—that make a long-term impact,” he says. “Don’t just give because you’ve been told to give. Give because it has the capacity to make change.”
When it comes to transforming the natatorium, Richards says former Sewanee Tigers have the opportunity to look back on how University swimming and diving shaped their personal narratives—then look ahead to the program’s future. “This is their call to make sure it’s a beautiful story for people to come.”
