Kicking It
Athletics play a huge part in most kids’ lives. Nobody does it better than Cretin-Derham Hall.
You get your first hint of what makes Cretin-Derham Hall the top athletic school in Minnesota when you walk into the sports wing on an early summer morning. The trophy cases lining the walls are so crammed that some state championship trophies remain stacked haphazardly on an office table. The case nearest the door is reserved for memorabilia of alumni who have made it to the pros. The right side of the case belongs to Chris Weinke, who won the 2000 Heisman Trophy, and Joe Mauer, who was the first player picked last year in the Major League Baseball draft. There are six or seven autographed pictures of professional football players, including Tampa quarterback Steve Walsh and Vikings Corbin Lacina and Matt Birk. Baseball Hall of Fame certainty Paul Molitor has a little corner on the left.
But it is the noise that tells you how Cretin got all those full cases. Although school has been out for more than a week, there is a persistent din. Basketballs are pounding the floor of one gym, the clanking of weight stacks punctuates the loud music coming from the other gym, and the shouts of hundreds of soccer campers on the field across the parking lot compete with the construction hammers on the new field house.
Except for the four football players in the weight room, all the students working on sports for Cretin-Derham Hall this morning are not even high schoolers yet. “These are the kids who are going to be playing for us over the next six years,” says John Janke, CDH’s Athletic Director.
This off-season preparation is the result of the Cretin tradition of excellence, says Janke. “We have a history and a desire for continued success. Every class feels, ‘We can’t be the class to let the school down.’” Are CDH athletes required to attend the summer sessions? No, says Janke, “But everyone knows that they are competing for a place on the team. If they aren’t doing the work, someone else who wants their spot is.”
Tradition is what makes Cretin tick. Most of Cretin’s coaches went to Cretin. Most of CDH’s students have parents or older brothers or sisters who attended. Many CDH alumni who are college athletes help coach at CDH’s off-season camps and come back to coach and teach full-time after graduation. Games in all sports are well attended. And the loyal alumni and St. Paul “neighborhood” alumni provide the financial support that is building the new 2,500-seat field house and state-of-the-art weight room. “The administration does a great job of recognizing what is important, and what is important is providing opportunities for kids in all areas,” says Janke.
Although, as Janke points out, the majority of the addition to the school is for the fine arts department, clearly it is sports that distinguish CDH from other good private schools. CDH placed teams or individuals in the state tournament in eight sports last year, including five girls’ tournaments. It has been to the state football tournament 12 years in a row. Cretin has been to the state championship baseball game 10
times and has never lost. Nine 2002 graduates were offered full athletic scholarships to Division One colleges.
Cretin fields six baseball teams, including three made up entirely of ninth graders. They will have seven ninth-grade basketball teams next year. So does everyone make the team, at least at the ninth-grade level? No, Janke says. “We could have more teams, but we just don’t have the facilities.” As it is, he points out, Cretin rents other fields and gyms, uses the parking lot for base-running practice, and “we pound ground balls on any spare stretch of grass we can find.”
Janke is the rare outsider in the Cretin world. Before coming to CDH as athletic director two years ago, he’d never attended or worked at Cretin or any other private school. So, he says, while athletics play a big part of the CDH life, he’s even more impressed with the academic environment. “We believe in the student first. We only practice sports from 3 to 5 each day. The kid has to be comfortable in the school from 7 to 2:30. If he’s not, why come here?”
Indeed, those nine athletic scholarships accounted for only a small part of the $9.7 million in scholarships offered to last year’s 325 Cretin-Derham Hall graduates. “Obviously, the majority of those scholarships were academic or talent based,” Janke said. “Sports are only a piece of the puzzle here. Academics and sports drive and fuel each other.”
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A Separate Piece of the Action
At St. Paul Academy, everybody plays
Just down the street from Cretin-Derham Hall, St. Paul Academy has turned out its share of notable athletes too. T. J. Prunty from the class of 2000 played in the College World Series for the University of Miami last year and just signed with the Twins. Tony Sanneh from the class of 1990 played for the U.S. National soccer team and barely missed scoring the tying goal against World Cup finalist Germany.
But while the school sits just a few blocks from sports juggernaut Cretin-Derham Hall, its philosophy is from the other side of the athletic world. At SPA everyone makes the team. In fact, as recently as a few years ago, all students were required to play interscholastic sports. The interscholastic requirement, though, has been phased out recently in favor of organized physical education classes. Next year will be the first year that ninth graders will not have to play on an interscholastic team. Still, about 85 percent of all high school students play interscholastic sports.
Mike Brown, SPA’s athletic director and baseball coach, puts it this way: “The school wants to be successful in athletics, but to our administration, that means a little above .500. We shoot for the occasional excellent team, but usually we want to be competitive, not get beat 50 to 6 in football.” Usually, SPA’s “excellent” teams are their soccer teams. Their boys’ teams have been in the state championship game eight of the last 16 years and won four times over much larger schools such as Edina, Wayzata, and Burnsville. The girls have been to state four times in the last 13 years. But, Brown admits, “Kids come to SPA for the academic program first. They may also come for music or drama, but they know of the athletic program.”
SPA suffers from the same lack of facilities problem that most schools face, yet continues to provide the opportunities for students who want to participate. They currently field three volleyball teams, and “we’ll make another team if we have the participants,” says Brown. SPA added a JV hockey team two years ago and next year will have a JV football team for the first time. “We’ll always add or drop a team as needed…and if we have room,” he adds. Making room in the past has included renting time in gyms around St. Paul and busing kids to practice.
Are there plans for more athletic facilities? There has been some talk of a field house and a new hockey arena, says Brown, but he acknowledges that SPA has recently built a middle-school building and that that was the focus of fund raising in the recent past. “There is also talk of a new theater.”
“The school has an ongoing development campaign, and we know that there is a need for athletics, but we are not the priority now.” Nevertheless, SPA has something to sell athletically. “We can honestly say, you will have the opportunity to play here,” says Brown. “Kids walk away from here with a very good experience athletically.”
NEXT: GETTING INTO A GOOD PRIVATE SCHOOL