Andy Young

Columnist

They’ve been celebrating over on Ocean Avenue in Portland, and why not? The athletic teams at Cheverus High School have just concluded a terrific winter season.

The girls basketball squad went 13-6, a remarkable achievement for a school whose student body was all male until just over a decade ago. The undefeated girls hockey team was even better. They outscored the opposition 125-11 and won 21 straight games en route to their first-ever state title.

But the school’s athletic cake was iced Saturday night when the boys basketball team, which has gone 40-2 over the past two seasons, won the state Class A championship with a 55-50 win over Edward Little High School.

Add on last fall’s girls cross country championship and a surprising trip to the Western Maine Class A title game by the football team and it’s been quite a year athletically for a high school currently attended by just over 520 students. The enrollments of schools whose teams Cheverus’s regularly vanquish are often more than double that.

But despite their size the Stags are anything but underdogs. The school’s Web site proudly proclaims that Cheverus students come from 47 different towns, and that the student body also includes international students from five different nations. 

The star of Coach Bob Brown’s 2010 Class A State Champs is Australian. His teammates come from a variety of Maine cities and towns. Edward Little’s players are all from Auburn, just as every member of the squad Cheverus bested for the Western Maine title resides in Westbrook.

Public school coaches and administrators have long contended that parochial schools recruit talented athletes, Naturally those who run private institutions piously deny such allegations.

Accusations that Maine’s only Jesuit high school recruits elite athletes aren’t new. Thirty years ago there was much outrage and resentment expressed over a large and talented young fellow who mysteriously migrated to Maine from New Jersey to play center for the Cheverus basketball team. Among those protesting his presence at the time was the head basketball coach at South Portland High School, a fellow named Bob Brown.

Private schools have to attract students; they can’t stay open without tuition fees which allow them to attract quality teachers, maintain and heat their facilities, and purchase needed supplies. No parent pays $14,355 annually for their child’s education without some prompting, particularly when their offspring are entitled to attend perfectly good schools which are funded by tax dollars. And in contemporary America the sad reality is that when it comes to recruiting tools many more prospective students (and their parents) are attracted to institutions with elite athletic teams than they are to ones featuring nothing more than creative, dedicated, caring, and effective teachers and staff. 

A high school team capable of fielding athletes from all over southern Maine has a distinct and unfair advantage over those composed of students from just one town or school district. A more equitable way to run interscholastic sports in the Pine Tree State: Have a public school league and a private school league. Let Cheverus compete on a level field against Berwick Academy, St. Dominic’s, North Yarmouth Academy, Bridgton Academy, Thornton Academy, and similar private and parochial schools in New Hampshire. No bitter or resentful opponent would ever again angrily accuse them of recruiting athletes. In a league without public schools such practices would be equally legal, accepted, and necessary for all member institutions.

The Stags and their supporters would likely oppose that plan. Many private academies regularly recruit from out of state, and often enroll multiple 19 and 20 year old student-athletes who are doing a PG (post graduate) year of high school before moving on to college. The administration at Cheverus would justifiably claim such an arrangement would be unfair. However, considering that possibility might help remind them how people in places like Auburn and Westbrook are feeling these days. 

Ideally interscholastic sports programs should comprise a small but significant piece of what a school offers its students and its community. What student-athletes experience on the field, the floor, or the ice should be a valuable augmentation to their school’s academic offerings. Like classes in health, history, English, algebra, and biology, high school sports are supposed to help young people prepare for the lives they’ll lead once their formal education ends.

Sports can be a great way to learn the value of teamwork, cooperation, sportsmanship, and hard work, and the success of Cheverus High School’s athletic programs has most certainly helped their members learn these important traits.

It’s also helped drive home another important fact of life to student-athletes in other area high schools, which is that not everything in life is fair.