Meet Emery Hagan, The 2025 Taylor Haugen Trophy Winner!

In Brief:

•👩‍🎓 Who: Emery Hagan, a senior at Paxton School

•🏆 What: Winner of the 2024 Taylor Haugen Trophy

•📅 When: Award to be presented on February 21, 2024

•📍 Where: Paxton School, with nominations from Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton counties

•💡 Why: Honoring student-athletes who demonstrate leadership, compassion, and the legacy of Taylor Haugen, who died in 2008 from a sports injury.

Raucous cheers broke out from the bleachers of the Paxton School’s Basketball Arena as Senior Emery Hagan walked in with a surprised smile.

Hagan isn’t a member of the team’s elite basketball team – instead, she’s the latest in a line of young people who’ve won the Taylor Haugen Trophy.

The Taylor Haugen Foundation annually gives the trophy to recognize the student-athlete who best exemplifies Niceville High School Football player Taylor Haugen’s legacy. Last year’s winner was Niceville High School Lacrosse Player Garrison Lemire.

Haugen died after a tackle in a football game between Niceville and Fort Walton Beach in 2008. His parents started The Taylor Haugen Foundation to help provide protective equipment that reduces the chance of abdominal injuries like the one Haugen suffers.

Hagan, a golfer and cheerleader at Paxton, is the first-ever winner from the school and believes that her triumph is a testament to the power of schools like hers. She’s ranked second in a graduating class of 40. “I hope more people realize that they have the opportunity to do something like this,” said Hagan. “and just because we have 40 kids in our graduating class doesn’t limit us as individuals.”

Hagan had to be nominated by her team coach to earn the trophy, which became her school’s nomination. She then had to be chosen from among a total of 40 local high schools’ nominated candidates from Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Walton County.

Hagan will receive her Taylor Haugen Trophy on Feb. 21.

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More About Emery Hagan

Emery Hagan has plenty of accolades: She’s the class vice president, a two-sport athlete, and she’s put in more than 200 volunteer hours.

But in her own words – the most compelling case for her candidacy for the Taylor Haugen Trophy comes from the bottom of the fifth page of her application. Under her dad’s name, she leaves the field for a second parent blank.

Hagan was born to a family of all boys. “My mom had always wanted a little girl. She tragically lost her mother when she was a few years old, causing her to forever yearn for a baby girl of her own to heal from her childhood lacking a mother figure,” she wrote in her application.

Her mother was a teacher who she credits with teaching her how to treat everyone with “the utmost kindness – as I may never know what they go home to each day.”

Hagan had to lean on those lessons being taught to others when she was in fith grade and unexpectedly lost her mother. Hours after learning of her mother’s death, she says her fifth grade teacher showed up to her house to console her – letting Hagan see firsthand how important her mom’s credo could be when others did it for her in her life.

Because of role models like Mrs. Moore, Hagan learned to use the tools her mother had to help others and her own experiences to be a light to others.

“Almost half of my childhood has been spent lacking a mother figure, but I am forever grateful to have shared the time we did,” Hagan concluded in her application, “I pray that I never stray from what she has instilled in me. As she always said, you may never know what a person may be going through. Always be the good in their day. Sometimes their life, their sanity, their safety depends on it. May her love and kindness forever live through me.”