Says It’ll Be A Tough Challenge
It was already noon Saturday, Feb. 16, and in the midst of constant knocking heard from the blue door that leads to Elmhurst’s Cathedral Prep’s gym near the parking lot that holds less than 20 cars, the junior varsity basketball coaches continued practice.
While Cathedral Prep’s varsity basketball team struggled to another losing campaign, its junior varsity team finished the regular season with only two losses, hosted a playoff game for the first time in several years Tuesday and have a shot at the division championship Friday at Fordham Prep.
The team has a decent chance at winning, according to head coach Joe Crimi, but he also admitted that next year, in all likelihood, won’t be the same.
“We’ll have a lot of trouble,” said Crimi, who has been at the helm for nine seasons.
That’s because two schools with teams in the Catholic High School Athletics Association’s (CHSAA) B division have been forced to close by the end of the school year,-St. Agnes and the Bronx’s Blessed Sacrament-leaving the division with just three teams.
Cathedral Preparatory Seminary’s basketball program is part of the CHSAA’s B division. There are two other divisions in the league in which schools from Brooklyn and Queens can be placed in. There’s the A division, which is a landing spot for schools with more competitive programs, like Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School in East Elmhurst. And then there’s the AA division, home of athletic powerhouses like Christ the King Regional High School in Middle Village.
As a result of the two closings, a likely scenario, according to the school and a league source, will be to have Cathedral Prep, Sacred Heart and Scanlan join the league’s A division, where as one AA division head coach put it, “they would not be able to compete.”
“It will be a big challenge and a key will be for our kids not to get discouraged,” said John O’Brien, the school’s athletic director.
Cathedral Prep is an all-boys institution where young men attend school to seriously consider priesthood as an attractive possibility. Though the athletic teams are by all means supported by the school-the principal often sits on the team’s bench-a banner has not been raised in more than a decade.
“We take who walks through the door,” Crimi said.
Usually, the boys who do enter the school’s gym with a wish to be on the basketball team do so with little experience and even if they have played competitively before, they are not as polished as other players from other schools, according to the junior varsity coaches. Six years ago, the school decided to eliminate its freshmen basketball team, making things even more difficult for the upperclassmen coaches to develop the program.
This season, the junior varsity team carries seven freshmen on their roster of 12 players.
“There is a sense of frustration sometimes,” said Walter Stark, junior varsity assistant coach.
And there may be more aggravation on deck for next season; every school in the CHSAA A division fields a freshmen basketball team, which enables their junior varsity teams to load up rosters with experienced sophomores.
The league will not render a decision on whether or not to group Cathedral and the two other schools with the divisionAteams until after a meeting in either April or May, according to Kevin Pigott, chairman of the archdiocese of NY and head of the B division, there’s heavy concern that a level playing field will be nonexistent.
“The thing I’m afraid of is so many guys enjoy running up scores,” Crimi said. “Losing when it at least looks like a basketball game is not bad. But when guys try to win by 60 and 70 points to impress and take their starters out when there’s 30 seconds to go and say, ‘Gee, well I got everyone in,’hellip; stuff like that doesn’t help.”
There’s at least one other possible arrangement which O’Brien said the school would be open to.
The league may decide to encourage a couple of the schools whose basketball programs have not fared so well in the A division to join a division with the three remaining B division teams. There are seven schools in the CHSAA basketball A division.
But there’s one major problem, considering, for the most part, schools decide which division to place their basketball programs in.
“There probably won’t be many teams in the A division who would want to step down and take on some sort of B label,” O’Brien said.
The CHSAA is in favor of keeping a B division, according to Pigott, to have a representative in the state championship and have more competitive games. But he said there just may not be enough teams.
In a year where “the stars lined up,” according to the head coach, Cathedral’s junior varsity team defeated La Salle Academy, a NY-A team, on Dec. 4. But in perhaps an omen for things to come for Cathedral, they lost by 20 on Jan. 8 to St. Edmund’s, a Brooklyn-Queens A division junior varsity team.
“We had to hang our hats on a 20- point loss,” stated Crimi. “This is our best team in five years and we were able to compete somewhat with the lower end of the A league.”
And in the rare winning season, they did more than hold their own against their B division competitors.
“This year it’s been fun because we’ve been in almost every game,” Crimi said.
Next year, they can only hope to be.
