Sometime during the month of August, a scenario plays out on high school fields and locker rooms all over the country, as a group of young men, and occasionally young women, receive their football jerseys for the upcoming season.
That picture presented itself on a sun-splashed August morning in Druid Hill Park 14 years ago, as the St. Frances Academy football program came to life, amid the humblest of settings. That’s in keeping with the school itself, founded nearly 200 years ago by Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange and operated by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first permanent order of Roman Catholic nuns of African descent in the United States.
The program’s genesis came as school leaders, worried that their boys would be tempted to join gangs, created a team to keep the kids out of trouble.
Those players, roughly 40 in number, began a journey that would take them from a public school stadium in Northeast Washington to a reform school in Delaware where the field was surrounded by a fence to keep the players from escaping.
Throughout that first fall of St. Frances football, the players cobbled together a .500 season against a schedule that was thrown together at the last minute – sort of the way the team was, given that the program didn’t exist until that August.
They never played a game at their school, largely because there’s no room for a field at the Northeast Baltimore facility, which sits in the shadows of the city jail.
While there’s still no home stadium, things have certainly changed at St. Frances.
This current edition of Panthers play at the highest level of the game. They start the 2022 season ranked where they’ve been for the last few years, namely No. 1 in Baltimore.
The irony is that for their gaudy local ranking, St. Frances will only play one area team this year, Arundel, and that’s only because the Wildcats had a cancellation on their schedule and needed a game to fill it. Saying that the Panthers hit the road would be an understatement. According to the Baltimore Sun, St. Frances will travel 8,000 miles this year to play games, including stops in Texas, Florida and Hawaii.
That’s more than any team at the highest level of college football traveled last year and four times more miles than the University of Maryland will travel this year.
St. Frances has played at such a level in the last five years that local teams, including the private schools, stopped scheduling them.
Indeed, many, if not most St. Frances players – many of whom are from outside the Baltimore region and stay in a boarding house while attending school -- receive scholarship offers from those aforementioned big level colleges.
All of this may raise the question: What’s the point?
If the original purpose of forming the program 14 years ago was to keep young men safe, what’s the reason for having players face more teams from Canada than from Maryland now?
That’s a valid question, but only if you’re willing to ask the same question of any other high performing high school athletic team. After all, the Panthers can't play themselves.
And that’s how I see it for this week. You can reach us via email with your questions and comments at Sports at Large at gmail.com. And follow me on Twitter at Sports at Large.
Until next week, for all of us here, I’m Milton Kent. Thanks for listening and enjoy the games.
