A Season Unlike Any Other

Teamwork Earns Cross Country Second Place at State

BY JOE PORTER CROSS COUNTRY AND TRACK/FIELD COACH, SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHER

In the words of Coach Brian Gilmore, our season can be summed up as “relentless.”

For us, the season started back in March when track was cancelled. The distance runners kept training, but on their own using Google Sheets to connect with one another with their training logs. They commented on each other’s training logs to create a sense of community. We were also able to bring in alumni like John Clohisy ‘09, Caleb Ford ‘10 and Ben Rosario ‘98 to keep them motivated to train, especially when we were unsure whether or not we would be able to compete. Ben Rosario’s challenge to the team was “let’s see how good we can be.” Regardless of circumstances that were beyond our control, this became the goal of the season.

Throughout the season, we found our strength to be pack running. While we may not always have the individual champion in a given race, the gap between our top runners went from 1:05 to a scant 20 seconds by the district meet. At the state meet, our pack was running together the whole race, but we were back in 7th place at the 1K. The group moved up throughout the race to finish second overall as a team with a 15-second gap between our first and fifth runners.

Not one of our runners finished in an All-State position (top 25 individuals). In my 16 years of coaching, I have never seen a team leave the state meet with a trophy without having at least one All-State runner. Our pack persevered and it was because we did it together with the focus of seeing how good we could be.

SLUH Remastered

When artists remaster their music, they take what was already good and improve it – making it more vivid, closer to the music’s fullest potential. In the face of a global pandemic, SLUH did its own remastering. Under the careful guidance of many dedicated faculty and staff, life at Backer Memorial underwent a significant re-engineering, being crafted into a more refined and relevant version of what it has always been.

Assistant Principal for Mission Jim Linhares helps tell the story of how it happened in the latest episode of the INSIGNIS podcast: SLUH Remastered. Following are brief excerpts of three interviews from this episode.

Listen to Sisyphus

MARÍA-PAZ CAMPOS María-Paz Campos teaches Spanish and is Assistant Director of Global Education at SLUH. Last summer, she helped design some of the professional development for the faculty in preparation for this school year. She spoke about adjusting to the realities of teaching in a pandemic.

“It was definitely a challenge. I went through that process with a lot of sadness because I had such a great group of students and great classes, and we had this really good environment and dynamic and I just missed having them with me. So that was definitely something I missed. And now trying to figure how to teach a language – Spanish in my case – most of the time in an immersion setting and provide that through an asynchronous type of learning, that was a challenge, too. So we had to work together as a team, all the teachers, and be creative on how to give that input to students that they need in a language.

“I think one of the most important things that I've come to realize and that virtual learning has emphasized is the importance of helping the students become self-regulated and become students who can learn by themselves, autonomously and efficiently. I've been trying to work on that because I don't see them as often as I used to, so I need to make sure they are working on their areas of growth or weaknesses – to improve and be better.” ANN MURPHY Ann Murphy is Director of Admissions. Her son Andrew is a graduate of the Class of 2016. She spoke about the creative solutions her office has implemented to accommodate families despite the current circumstances.

“We were supposed to begin welcoming 7th grade families to campus for Inside SLUH visits. They can come to campus on a school day, and that group of five that we've traditionally hosted – we couldn't have them here. So we pivoted to a virtual Inside SLUH visit with a narrated view of campus. I put a slide deck together of about sixty or so slides of what the tour sort of looked like, and then narrated over that to help them imagine what they were seeing and how they would be a student in that particular photo. I sat in my dining room at home and made it up. It wasn't Hollywood, but it worked. After that, Jennifer Thomas was really good about getting us to a place where we started to hone in on kids' interests and do feature Zoom presentations about STEM, fine arts, athletics, student life. We're continuing to provide virtual experiences, and as many on-campus experiences as we can.

“I think the theme for us this year is flexibility. And what I'm trying to impress upon parents is we are going to be flexible. I tell them: 'If you even think you're interested in St. Louis U. High, apply. Just do it. Because we can always worry about the visit or the

information you might need later. And if you change your mind, I'm not going to be upset. I don't take it personally. I want what's best for your son.'

“What we do here, the way we form them as whole kids – beyond the academics, their faith formation, their looking beyond themselves for the greater glory – it's just so vital. I can't talk about it enough, and I can't talk enough about all of the purposeful meaning that is behind everything we do here at SLUH that your son will benefit from. And we have fun here, too.”

JEFF POTTINGER Mr. Jeff Pottinger teaches band. In the spring semester of 2020, his classes recorded several songs, despite working entirely remotely. He spoke about what it was like to teach music in a virtual environment and to produce the recordings.

“A lot of what we do is we listen and respond. We listen and adjust. In the middle of class, I can listen to 65 students play in Symphonic Band and in a matter of five minutes, I can make them all sound pretty darn good together. But if I listen to those eight measures of 65 students playing individually, it takes hours. There's just so much feedback that comes from playing live within a group. Teaching-wise, I learned, obviously, very quickly that I had to adapt and adjust a little bit, and some of that came from modeling in the Zoom classroom. So it might be calling on five people to play for the group and hoping, honestly, that someone would play it wrong so you could say, “OK, now that's what you don't want to do.” “I think somebody mentioned it here: You're building the plane as you're flying. You're in the air thinking, oh, we really need something to keep the right side up. And I think I was really most proud of the boys, because they just did it. I asked them to do it, and they did it. This is really bizarre, but there are lots of blessings from this pandemic, strangely enough, and one of them is that a lot of them gained this really incredible awareness of their playing. Recordings don't lie, so as they start to listen to it and they do sound checks, they're starting to realize, I don't sound as good as I want to. So there was actually a lot of growth.”

Band teacher Jeff Pottinger conducts class in the spacious Danis Lobby. On January 11, SLUH welcomed the entire student body back to campus. Several classes, such as Band, have made creative use of space in the building to ensure a safe environment with proper distancing.

The INSIGNIS podcast features lively interviews with members of the SLUH community engaged in a variety of roles and fascinating projects "down the hall, across the metro area and around the world" in support of the school’s mission. INSIGNIS is available on iTunes and Spotify, as well as the SLUH website where you can find additional material for each episode. www.sluh.org/insignis COMING SOON: NEW CENTER FOR ACADEMIC SUCCESS

The Go Forth campaign aims to make SLUH a model of academic achievement and faith formation for the nation and for the world.

In 2020, the school began preparatory construction to renovate the “old cafeteria” into The J. Anthony ‘57 and Donna M. Dill Center for Academic Success, in recognition of the generous $3 million gift the Dills have committed to SLUH through their estate plan. SLUH is seeking $1.8M to continue construction and establish an academic hub that will drive excellence at the school for decades.

Learn more at www.sluh.org/dillcenter