Van Stefanou Back Home at St. Joseph’s Prep

A decade and more ago, Van Stefanou skated for St. Joseph’s Prep. For five seasons now, he’s been one of the Hawks’ assistant coaches. In a sense, he has returned home.

Even as a young boy, Stefanou, a Tabernacle, N.J. native, was virtually certain he would attend St. Joseph’s Prep. It was a family tradition.

“All the men on my mom’s side of the family went to the Prep” he said, “and my great uncle was president of the Prep for 21 years. So, pending the passing of my entrance exam, I was going to the Prep. Other than that, the thought of being part of such a prestigious school with a great history was so appealing to me that going to the Prep was my only option.”

When he arrived on the school’s campus in the fall of 2006, Stefanou found himself being challenged academically and athletically.

“The classes at the Prep were definitely challenging,” he said, “and students were held to a high standard but that was expected at the Prep. I remember a lot of long nights. I would come home from Prep and club hockey practices around 9 or 10 o’clock most nights and have to start homework then.

“I also had some really amazing teachers while at the Prep. To name a few, Mr. Hart, Mrs. (Kathleen) Sullivan, and Mr. (Andrew) Whelan were the teachers that left a longing impression after the Prep and instilled some of the qualities in me that I hold today.”

Today, Stefanou is appreciative of the support he received from the faculty during his high-school years, and the support he and his fellow students provided each other.

“While the Prep and extracurriculars were a challenge every day, my classmates and teammates were always there for each other,” he said. “I don’t keep in touch with them as much as I’d like to but we usually see each other at our alumni game every November and it’s great to catch up with them and hang out.”

During Stefanou’s years at the school, the St. Joseph’s Prep hockey program was still evolving into what it later became.

“It still felt like the program was in its early stages with a lot of potential for the future,” he said. “There were several coaches that put a lot into the program. You don’t really appreciate all that they do until you’re one of them.

“The program has definitely grown since I played. Winning a state championship like we did (in 2018) was almost unthinkable for us and now it feels like it’s attainable every year.

“That just goes to show how much the program has progressed in the last eleven years. I was proud to be part of the Prep hockey team then and am very lucky to coach now. I was part of a great group throughout the four years and I couldn’t have asked for a better class.”

After high school Stefanou played two years of junior hockey, a year in British Columbia and Washington in the Kootenay International Junior Hockey League and then a year in North Carolina in the EJHL South.

From there, he played four years at UMass Dartmouth; as a freshman he played for a team that won a conference championship and qualified for the NCAA Division III tournament.

Today, Stefanou is proud to be coaching at the school that shaped his life.

“My four years at the Prep built the foundation of my character today,” he said. I took many values from my time at the Prep including humility, integrity and perseverance. It’s what brought me back to coach five years ago. When I was given the opportunity to give back to the Prep, there was no question in my mind that I would do it.”

For more about St. Joseph’s Prep Click Here

LaSalle Strives to Make its Students the Best They Can Be

Ever since its founding in 1858 by the Brothers of Christian Schools, LaSalle College High School has been committed to developing young men spiritually and socially as well as academically. Situated in Springfield Township, Montgomery County, just outside Philadelphia, LaSalle boasts a student population of 1,050 boys in grades 9-12.

Wally Muehlbronner, the school’s hockey coach, is also the assistant admissions director.

“A LaSalle education is about really getting to know your students and touching the hearts of the students,” he said. “So, it’s much more than obviously developing them academically. Being the best student they can be is obviously very important, but really getting to know the students and helping them develop into the best versions of themselves would be the ultimate goal.”

There are over 500 applicants each year for 265-275 places in LaSalle’s freshman class. The pool of applicants includes students from over 100 different grade schools and middle schools. Muehlbronner offers an overview of what the school is seeking in prospective new students.

“First and foremost, we want good kids,” he said. “We want good character kids. We want students who are willing to work hard to be the best students that they can be academically, and students that are going to get involved outside of the classroom, So, we want certainly well rounded students, but first and foremost, we want good character kids who are going to help make the community here stronger.

“So academically, obviously, they need to be good students, and they need to perform well on the scholarship entrance exam but we also look very heavily on their recommendations and their prior performance academically at their grade schools.”
Muehlbronner says most prospective students start thinking seriously about LaSalle in the seventh grade, but adds this caveat.

“It’s gotten and earlier and earlier the longer I’ve done this,” he said. “The kids start exploring the options at an earlier age. We even offer sixth-grade practice test. So, we have sixth graders that will come in in March and take a practice test, as well as seventh graders that would take a practice test in March, and that gives them a good feel of what to expect at schools like LaSalle on the entrance exam for when it matters the most, in eighth grade.

“But most of the students attend an open house in the fall of their seventh-grade year. They take the practice test in March. Some of the students, as seventh graders, may choose to come and visit and spend a full day with us, and shadow a current student.”

Muehlbronner says the intensity of the application process picks up in a student’s eighth-grade year. “They come and they spend a full day with us in the fall,” he said. “They take the scholarship entrance exam, typically in early November or the end of October, and then decisions start getting made on admissions in December.”

The school takes steps to make the freshmen feel comfortable, even before they officially begin their careers at LaSalle.

“We have a Mass together to kick things off,” Muehlbronner says. “That’s done in March of every year. All the families will come in and we have a Mass the Class of 2023 will have their Mass coming up in March and then from there we do freshman orientation with them.
“There’s a lot of different icebreakers so the guys get to meet each other. A lot of times it’s homeroom competitions that they’ll have to create a little bit of camaraderie amongst the homerooms, but then get to meet all the other students.
“Then from there it’s really just staying with them. The freshman guidance counselor, the dean of students, all the different things that go in to helping to introduce them to LaSalle.”

Like the other three school in the Atlantic Prep Athletic Conference, LaSalle is a single-sex institution, a setting that Muehlbronner says some distinct advantages.

“The single-sex environment helps the guys I think really be themselves,” she said. “They’re not trying to do things to try to impress somebody.

“We hear from the guys when we talk to them. We do different panels here where our students will talk to prospective families about their experience at LaSalle, and oftentimes the parents will ask them ‘What’s it like to go to an all-boy school?’ And the first thing we here is that they love it; there’s a brotherhood, you can be yourself. Nobody’s putting on airs to try impress somebody, but it is a good competitive environment, where guys want to do the best they can in the classroom and outside the classroom. They’re very comfortable getting involved in many different things.

“We have kids that kids that are involved in the theatre program here, the music program here, that are also some of the best athletes in the school. So, there are an awful lot of things they can get into not feel like it’s not the cool thing to do. It’s cool to get involved and it’s cool to be yourself and make the most out of your experience here.”

Muehlbronner notes that students who are considering LaSalle are likely considering all-male schools as well, including the other members of the Atlantic Prep Athletic Conference.

“The competitiveness at all four of our schools is a healthy competiveness,” he said, “and I think there’s tremendous support here for the guys to help them along the way. They’re going to fail in things at times but that’s okay. That’s part of learning and growing.”

Muehlbronner has been LaSalle’s hockey coach for 21 seasons and the program has compiled has compiled a remarkable record in that time. His teams have won eight Flyers Cups four state titles and, this season, the APAC’s inaugural championship.

As successful as the program is however, it is but one of a number of outlets for LaSalle students to express themselves.

There’s a pretty clear understanding with the guys as far as what’s expected of them,” Muehlbronner said, “just like all the athletes here. But it’s no different from what’s expected from the kids that are on the robotics team or are heavily involved in the music program; it’s the same. Something that enhances their experience here and helps them grow as young men.”

For more information on LaSalle College High School CLICK HERE

Holy Ghost Prep Remains Committed to its Original Mission

The underlying philosophy at Holy Ghost Preparatory School has always been about the importance of service, to fellow students and the school community, and to the world at large.
Founded in 1897 by Fr. John Tuohill Murphy C.S.Sp,

the institution was originally a combination prep school and junior-college seminary.

In 1959, the school opened its doors to non-seminarians. The seminary was discontinued eight years later and Holy Ghost Prep was created in 1968.

While the structure of the institution has evolved over time, Ryan Abramson, the admissions director and a Holy Ghost Prep graduate himself, emphasizes that its underlying philosophy remains unchanged.

“The school was founded by the Spiritans,” he said, “which is essentially a missionary order. So, most of the people that join the religious order than runs Holy Ghost Prep end up leaving the U.S. and working in missions all over the planet that are in some of the poorest communities that you can go to.

“What we try to do here is try to put students in a situation where they have they have the ability to be successful but then to understand that their success is measured by the ability to help others, as opposed to whatever individual success they might have.
“So, whether it’s community service or the way they reach out and help their classmates, whether it’s how they participate in the community, the idea is that your greatness or your successes are always measured by your ability to lift other people up to that same level.”

The student body at Holy Ghost Prep numbers approximately 450 in grades 9-12. About 60 percent of the students come from Catholic grade schools, the other 40 percent from public schools throughout the area.

“We’re looking for students that are engaged,” Abramson says, “students that are focused. But primarily, students that are going to be interested in participating in an environment where the school becomes their life, where you challenge yourself more than you thought you would, students that willing to work really hard in school, more than maybe they ever have before, with the idea that the focus at the end of the day is to prepare them to have the skills to be successful in college and the skills to be successful after college.”

The school day is structured with those goals in mind.

“We have an enormous amount of free time,” Abramson said. “Our students are given tons and tons of opportunities to be in a situation where they have to make good decisions.

“And so, during a typical school day, a student might not have class for an hour, and hour and 20 minutes where he has to make decisions about how he’s going to use the time, whether it’s preparing for a test, whether its meeting with a teacher for extra help, whether it’s getting ahead because he plays a sport or is involved in an after-school activity and he’s going to miss time at home and so he gets those things done during the school day. But the idea is to learn those time management schools and the responsibility of being able to manage your time on your own, rather than have somebody that always tells you what to do.”

Abramson says that new students develop those skills in part from emulating the upperclassmen. He points out that the size of the student body encourages relationships between students of all grade levels.

“Those relationships that those freshmen have with seniors are not on the surface,” he said. “Those freshmen know those seniors and those seniors know those freshmen. They know their names, they know something about them. They know where they went to grade school, they know where they went to middle school, what sport they play, what activity they’ve been a part of, so that behavior is not being seen in a generic sense, but that behavior is being seen through a personal relationship. And so, that freshman acts a certain way because he sees a senior who he knows doing that. So, he wants to be like that individual as opposed just some kind of thing that you read on a piece of paper, or see in a really generic sense.”

In keeping with the school’s founding mission, students must fulfill a service requirement each year, 10 hours per academic year for underclassmen, 20 hours for upperclassmen.

“Again, it’s the idea of lifting others up,” Abramson said. “And so, we have students that do projects. We have students that go to the Dominican Republic, that will spend three weeks in Tanzania and East Africa. We have students that will do local things. We had a whole group of students that traveled Martin Luther King Day weekend for service projects at the Romero Center in Camden and in Philadelphia at St. John’s Hospice so we have students that do lots of different kinds of service with that idea; that service needs to be hands on for people in need.

There are lots of ways to do service where you’re making things at home and they’re certainly wonderful activities, but what we want is to see our students do hand-on (service) with people that are in need. So, that, again, you can lift people up.”

Students are encouraged to share their accounts of their community service experiences with their peers. “The experience of service for a student is not simply about what he learns,” Abramson said, “but what he is able to be taught by people that can be very different from him.

“We have a lot of students that have done really remarkable things with their community service. And more importantly, they come back and they share those experiences with their classmates, so that they can also benefit from the things that they learned.”

Like the other schools in the Atlantic Prep Athletic Conference, Holy Ghost Prep is committed to maintaining an athletic program that embraces the philosophy of the institution.

Abramson says it’s important to retain coaches that embrace that philosophy. “I think what’s amazing to me about the hiring of coaches is these coaches find you,” he said. “Just as much as you want to find those personalities, there are great, great individuals out there that want that as well.
“Just like a student that wants to come to Holy Ghost there are coaches that want to be in an environment that embraces all of those values as well.”

Click Here For more information about Holy Ghost Preparatory School

Flyers Cup Update

The fields for the various Flyers Cup tournaments have been cut in half, in the case of Class A more than that.

Here is what lies ahead. Note: All game times and sites are subject to change

Monday, March 11

Class AA Quarterfinals

Downingtown East 5 Parkland 0

Pennridge 4 North Penn 3 OT

Conestoga 4 Haverford 1

Downingtown West 3, Boyertown 1

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Tuesday, March 12

Class A Semifinal Upper Bracket

West Chester Rustin 7 West Chester East 2

Wednesday, March 13

Class AA Semifinal Lower Bracket

Downingtown West 8, Conestoga 5

Class A Semifinal Lower Bracket

Hershey 6 Strath Haven 3

Girls Semifinal

8:45 2 West Chester Rustin 4, West Chester East 3 OT

Thursday, March 14

Class AAA Semifinals

LaSalle 5 Holy Ghost Prep 4

St. Joseph’s Prep 6 Malvern Prep 2

Class AA Upper Bracket Semifinal

D-town East vs Pennridge 5:15 @ Ice Line

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Sunday, March 17

Finals @Wells Fargo Center

9:45 Girls: West Chester Rustin vs. Unionville

2:00 Class A Hershey vs. West Chester Rustin

4:30 Class AA Downtown West vs. Downingtown East

7:00 Class AAA LaSalle vs. St. Josephs Prep

From the pages of history:

West Chester Rustin is seeking its 6th straight Class A Flyers Cup title. No team has ever done that in any classification since the tournament started in 1980. Malvern Prep won 5 straight Class AAA titles from 2001-05.

Unionville is a four-time defending girls’ champion and will be seeking its fifth straight title this year.

Saturday, March 23

State Championship Games at Robert Morris University Game Times TBA

For more information on girls’ hockey go to: info@ladytpariots.org

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Malvern Prep—Helping Boys Become Men

Malvern Preparatory School was founded in 1842 when it was established by the Order of St. Augustine as a preparatory school for boys. It was attached to what was then called the Augustinian College of Villanova, which was founded at the same time and on the same site, the Belle Air Estate in Radnor Township.
Malvern Prep moved to its present location in 1922 where it remains committed to developing its approximately 625 students (in grades 6-12) intellectually and spiritually.

Today, approximately 70 percent of the student body is of the Catholic faith.

Kurt Ruch has been at Malvern Prep for 25 years and the school’s athletic director for 16. He oversees an athletic program that includes 18 varsity sports, and has coached several of them himself during his career including soccer, cross country, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, and water polo.

The school is a member of the InterAc League in sports other than hockey.

Ruch says the school’s philosophy is centered on the teachings of St. Augustine. “We try to teach the whole student,” he said. “And in there, we’re going to being in truth, unity, and love, which are three words we kind of center everything around.

“We’re going to try to have boy become a man. And how we do that is, we tie the parents, the school and the teachers who are part of the school, and the student, into that triangle and try to raise that young boy into a man as we do that.”

The vast majority of the student body resides within 20 miles of the campus. Ruch offered an overview of what the school is looking for from perspective students.

“The first thing is a willingness to want to be in this environment,” he said. “Let’s face it in 2019, single-sex schools, there are only a few of us left You go back 30 years ago, there were a lot more on the Philadelphia landscape. A lot of them have become co-ed, you look at everyone in the (InterAc League) Penn Charter, Chestnut Hill and GA were all single-sex schools at one point and now they are all now co-ed. Haverford School and Malvern are the only two left in our league, and if you look in the area, single-sex schools are kind of a small little niche.

And in that, we’re looking for young men that want to come in and be a part of our history, our tradition. They’re going to want to come in and make themselves a better person. And in that, it’s the academics, it’s sports, it’s the arts.”

Ruch says the school strongly encourages its students to involved themselves in a variety of activities as opposed to specializing.

The one thing I definitely think that makes us different than other schools is we want students to come in here and do multiple things,” he said. “We don’t just look at a student coming in in sixth grade, or eighth grade, or ninth grade, whatever the grade is and say ‘You’re just going to be this, you’re just going to be an athlete.’

“Look at our play last year; one of our top lacrosse players was the lead in the play. You look at our music department; we have football linemen that are in there playing the piano, the violin, and doing things, and if you came to our homecoming, we had a soccer player and football player sing our national anthem as part pf our choir and then they go out and play in those games after they get done singing.

“We’re looking for those kinds of kids that want to do multiple things, that want to try to explore and find themselves in this crazy world that we all live in.”

The school is committed to the concept of community service.

“Each year our students have to meet a certain set of numbers in terms of community service,” Ruch said, “but then, as they go into their senior year they go on a Christian service trip.
“Some of the groups go as far away as Peru, South Africa, over to Europe. New Orleans is probably the closest.

“We’re all about giving back and what we can do for our community and how we can help them. Currently, we have a group of kids 20 kids that are down in Houston, in Corpus Christi, working with people that have lost to floods, rebuilding homes and stuff. We have teachers that took off from their personal lives just to go down there because of our faith and what we believe. This is our way of helping, our way of our kids making that connection back to the communities.”

Ruch derives his greatest satisfaction as an educator when one of his former students returns to the Malvern Prep campus.

“It’s when I see an alum come back,” he said, “a kid that graduated come back and he’s talking about the memories he has and the memories that I was a part of and what this school has done for them and how they’ve developed. Those to me are the moments that you really can’t capture or those moments you wish you could.

“That’s why a family comes to a Malvern or a St. Joseph’s Prep or a LaSalle or a Holy Ghost. For we take that young boy, turn him into a man, and now that man is coming back and saying ‘Here’s my moment, here ‘s what I remember about this place. I want to give back. I want to help.’

That to me right now is what I cherish the most When I hire a coach, I’m looking for an alum.”

CLICK HERE to find out more about Malvern Preparatory School

Lady Patriots to Play for a Spot in National Tournament (Advertorial)

The Lady Patriots 16-Tier II team will compete in the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Hockey Association Challenge Weekend this coming Friday and Saturday. The three-team round robin at Ice Line near West Chester will determine the final qualifier for the USA Hockey national championship tournament. The Lady Patriots, who play out of Hatfield Ice, will face the New Jersey Colonials and the Junior Flyers in the round robin which begins Saturday morning and continue with games late Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon.

The winner of the round robin will advance to the Tier II national championships April 4-8 in Amherst, New York

The weekend schedule

Saturday 3-9 11:30 New Jersey Colonials vs. Lady Patriots

Saturday 3-9 5:15 Junior Flyers vs. Lady Patriots

Sunday 3-10 1:30 Junior Flyers vs. New Jersey Colonials

Paul Bardell, the president of the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Hockey Association, says spectators who attend the series this weekend will be impressed with the caliber of play.

“I think they would realize these girls are physical, strong, and fast,” he said. “I get a lot of people saying that with the speed they’re playing at, they look like any other 16-year old hockey player.”

Bardell coached several players who are now members of the U.S. national team. He points out that the MAWHA is working to get young girls started playing hockey.

“What we are seeing happen is that 5 and 6-year olds are starting out,” he said. “Parents are thinking ‘I think my daughter might like this.’

The MAWHA is launched an initiative to get girls age 8 and younger playing hockey, hosting monthly jamborees at various rinks in the area.

The three-hour sessions feature a series of four-on-four cross ice games. The format, which features eight or nine players on each team, insures the girls will send roughly two-and-half hours on the ice and considerable time actually touching the puck.

For more information on the Challenge Weekend, go to: www.mawah.com

For more information on girls’ hockey go to: info@ladytpariots.org

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