Pope Francis grad wins big on Wheel of FortuneDate: 4/7/2020 SPRINGFIELD – March 19 was quite a day for Pope Francis Preparatory School class of 2017 alum Tim Sears. He was the big winner on that night’s College Week Wheel of Fortune broadcast, netting more than $21,000 for his puzzle-solving skills.
The Providence College Junior, majoring in both finance and philosophy, recently spoke to Reminder Publishing about his whirlwind spin on the popular game show.
“I think it was just over $21,000; I left the documents back in my dorm room,” said Sears, who like so many college students is now finishing the end of the spring semester from the Springfield home he shares with his parents and four brothers. He’d just received word that Providence College was beginning to schedule times when students could come and clear out their dorm rooms when he spoke with Reminder Publishing. He was looking forward to that opportunity as he’s been limited to wearing just the clothes he’d brought home for spring break, and had been working from textbook pages uploaded by his professors to continue with classes for the past two weeks.
His experience appearing as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune was nearly as much of a surprise as the COVID-19 induced abrupt end to his junior year at Providence. Though neither he nor his family had ever been big Wheel of Fortune fans, Sears said he and a college friend decided to apply for a slot on the College Week show during the 2019 tryouts. “The real reason I ended up going was because a kid from Providence College was on it last year and I thought, ’If some other kid was on maybe I could be,’” Sears shared. “I signed up and got an audition last summer in New York and ended up going with my best friend Alex.” The two young men were “considered separately and as a pair,” Sears said, adding, “and they told us if we were going to make it [on the show] we would get a letter.”
Alex started the fall semester at Providence, while Sears spent his semester studying abroad in Australia. Neither of the two, Sears said, heard anything from the Wheel of Fortune people. About a week after the winter break ended, Sears said he “got an email that I had a taping date in L.A. and they wanted to know if [I was] going to accept it.
“I thought it must be fake,’ Sears said. “I called them and asked ‘Is this [email] actually real’ and ’Why didn’t I get a letter?’” The answer was yes, the request was real, but Sears said he really didn’t get a good answer about the missing letter, except that “it must have been overlooked.”
From there things really accelerated. “In a matter of two weeks I was out in L.A. taping [the show],” Sears said. That was in early February. Sears explained that he – and all the other College Week contestants – were required to keep the outcome of their appearance a secret until their air date, or risk losing any winnings they accrued.
“They take it really seriously,” Sears said. “It wouldn’t have gone anywhere past my friends, but one, I didn’t want to lose the money and two, I thought it would be a lot more fun to make it a surprise.”
And his win was a surprise for many, as COVID-19 scuttled plans for a Providence-based watch party with friends. “Because nobody had anything to do at that time, everybody watched [on their own],” he said, adding his social media lit up during the show, thanks to a post on his dad’s Instagram and another on Pope Francis Prep’s Facebook. “It was cool to get feedback from people I hadn’t heard from for years. It was really fun.”
Prepping to be on a show he didn’t regularly watch was nearly as last-minute as the announcement of his appearance, Sears admitted. “Prior to the audition [last summer] my friend and I were looking up strategy, and leading up to [the taping] I was just watching the College Week shows from the prior year and the shows that they told us to watch,” he said. “Just watching the shows I kind-of got the [format] and I knew the rhythm. I knew it would come down to luck and seeing if I was going to get the puzzles before the others, and it came down to luck being on my side.”
With his dad, Pat, and an aunt, uncle and cousin who lived in California in the audience, Sears said he took his turn in front of the lights and cameras to try his luck. All the shows, he said, were taped in one day.
“Honestly, I wasn’t that nervous,” said Sears, who did mis-count his brothers during his introduction, “I was trying to remember what I wanted to say. We had practiced a lot earlier that day but I was thinking to myself, ‘It was such a fun day, [this is] free money, just relax and have fun.’ But having the lights and camera on you - it’s not like anything I ever experienced.
“It was surprising, I would say,” he said, adding that his final puzzle as show champ was “the hardest part” of the whole experience “You get 10 seconds and you have to decide what letters you want to add in there, and 10 seconds was not a lot of time; my mind wasn’t complete there,” he admitted. He didn’t win the $337,000 he’d selected in the bonus, but “I was so happy with the money I won, so I couldn’t complain at all,” Sears said.
As far as plans for the money he did win, Sears said those aren’t set. He won’t receive it until July and “It depends on where things are at that time. My dad runs a nonprofit and there is nothing coming in [right now],” he said. ”I might use it to pay back student loans.” He added he might also use what he’s learned as a finance major and invest a portion of his winnings.
Sears also shared what every Wheel fan wants to know – what it was like to meet Pat Sajak and Vanna White in person.
“So Vanna came into our prep room before the show and she was very nice, saying ‘Hi’ to all of us and saying ‘Good Luck,’” Sears said, ”She told us she does actually wear a new dress every show, and she was telling us all to just have fun with it. We didn’t see Pat until the lights came on and the camera came on, and then [he and I] were going back and forth because of my slip-up over saying I had five brothers instead of four.”
Sears added he was "able to stand with [Pat and Vanna] and talk with them at the end while the credits were running, and that was fun.”
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