That’s an odd story to begin with, but what makes it really strange to me is that it is my high school.
It’s quite a story. When I was in that school with my fellow early baby boomers, there were about 2,000 students and it was just a typical Catholic prep school. Today the average graduating class is between 50 and 60 kids, yet they have managed to survive and retain the immense old facility.
How could that happen? Well, they expanded to a “high and middle” school, with grades 6-12, and they charge a fortune to go there, but that still only got them to 315 total students, not enough to pay the bills. Then they had a brainstorm. They saw the high schools in Florida that are basically training programs for elite athletes and realized that there was nothing comparable for (of all things) women’s hockey. They converted some apartments, where the nuns and brothers used to live, into dorms, and created a hockey boarding school. (It’s still a regular high school as well. The hockey players attend regular classes with all the commuter kids.) It was really a radical idea, and not many people thought it would have broad enough appeal to succeed. I never would have thought of it. But it turned out to be genius. That high school is still in business, while our identical sister school, faced with an identical situation and lacking a creative solution, has been closed for decades, as have so many high schools in an era of declining birth rates and increased home schooling.
So, it turns out that I went to a hockey factory, and have never even skated in my life. As ol’ Casey Stengel used to say, “Amazin’!”
My mother used to teach at a small Catholic high school in the Bronx that had the #1-ranked basketball team in the country. St. Nicholas of Tolentine High School had fewer than 400 students but was a perennial basketball powerhouse. Their1987-1988 team, led by future NBA player Malik Sealy, was the national champion, at least according to some surveys. My Mom cared nothing about basketball before she started teaching there, but she never missed a game. She was extremely close to Sealy. She was both his teacher and faculty advisor. She was absolutely devastated when he was killed by a drunk driver, driving a pickup truck the wrong way on the highway. He was only 30 years old. I don’t think she ever watched another basketball game. By then, Tolentine High School had been shut for 9 years. There were only 68 students in its final graduating class.
How was such a tiny school able to consistently enroll so many top middle school prospects? Corruption, of course! That’s probably an exaggeration. However, there were (and probably still are) boosters who identify kids with talent on the playgrounds and arrange to get those kids into high schools that will develop their talent. Tolentine’s tuition was absurdly low compared to what NYC pays to educate public school students. It was even low for a Catholic school, since it was located in a pretty poor neighborhood. Boosters would pay kids’ tuition and perhaps pay for other things. They didn’t send all of their top players to Tolentine, but they sent enough that it could consistently field one of the best schools in NYC and in 1987-1988, the United States. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to keep the lights on. I guess they should have tried to add a dorm for hockey players.
I went to Catholic High School in St. Louis ’74. Even before big money came along, Catholic High Schools would dominate the state tournaments because they could recruit from anywhere, not just the school district. I’m sure there were some wealthy donor gifts but mostly the best athletes wanted to play together to increase their chances of state championship and college recruitment.
In my generation, Kareem Abdul Jabbar went to a Catholic High School, Power Memorial. (He and I had some of the same teachers in high school. My high school was new, and the Christian Brothers staffed it with many teachers who had been at Power Memorial. Frankly we were sick of hearing stories about “Lewis,” who was a junior at Power when my school opened.)
Power’s legendary 71-game winning streak was ended by another Catholic school!