The national spotlight is nothing new for the high school football team from Baltimore that will visit De La Salle on Friday night. St. Frances Academy’s rise to prominence has been featured by ESPN and HBO.
The inner-city program became so powerful that other teams in its Maryland private-school league refused to play St. Frances, citing safety concerns and competitive disadvantages.
With nobody to face locally, the team has played a national schedule since 2018.
The De La Salle game will be aired on ESPN2.
“It is numbing that we can’t play here,” Biff Poggi, a millionaire hedge-fund manager who coached and funded the St. Frances program, said in the four-part HBO documentary, “The Cost of Winning.”
“That we don’t have a league, it’s numbing,” Poggi added. “It’s a league. Didn’t break any rules. Get better. You do what we do and get better.”
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Poggi left St. Frances over the summer to rejoin Jim Harbaugh’s staff at Michigan as an associate head coach, a position he held in 2016 before returning to Baltimore to take over at St. Frances, the Baltimore Sun reported.
Prior to leaving for Michigan the first time, Poggi was a highly successful coach at another Baltimore high school, Gilman, his alma mater.
Gilman has a predominantly White student body. St. Frances’ is predominantly Black.
“There is nothing that we are doing at St. Frances that we didn’t do at Gilman,” Poggi, who is White, said in the HBO series. “Talk about recruiting. We did all that at Gilman. We won eight championships in a row. Thirteen out of 19. No one ever came to me and said, ‘We’re not going to play anymore.’”
Messay Hailemariam, who was on Poggi’s staff as the director of football operations at St. Frances, has taken over as the school’s head coach, a position he held for five years before Poggi arrived.
The program, which was started in 2008 at a school that was founded in 1828, remains a power.
In 247Sports’ Maryland recruiting rankings, St. Frances has 11 of the top 25 seniors in the state. The Panthers have seniors committed to Oklahoma, Penn State, Virginia Tech, Minnesota and West Virginia. Two have committed to Boston College.
The ones who aren’t committed have major offers.
“Physically they look a lot like Mater Dei and Bosco and those types of teams … St. Thomas Aquinas,” said De La Salle coach Justin Alumbaugh, whose program has played major heavyweights through the years. “They look like an elite national team.”
St. Frances is 2-1 this season, the team’s one defeat coming on the road against national power St. Thomas Aquinas of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., 38-23. St. Frances’ two wins have been blowouts.
Two years ago, St. Frances made a trip to Southern California to play Mater Dei-Santa Ana, which was ranked No. 1 in the country, one spot ahead of St. Frances.
HBO covered that trip.
In the build-up to the game, Poggi told HBO, “We’re going to Mater Dei. They’ve got a beautiful stadium, 2,100 students. Gorgeous campus. We’ve got zero stadium. We don’t have a gorgeous campus and then we have like 180 kids. It’s going to be a tough trip for us. They’re the best team I’ve seen since I’ve been coaching high school football.”
Mater Dei won 34-18.
St. Frances didn’t lose again that season, its eight-game winning streak highlighted by a 35-7 rout of renowned IMG Academy of Bradenton, Fla.
The quarterback for St. Frances that season, John Griffith, is now a senior.
The top-rated players on the roster, according to 247Sports, are linebacker Jaishawn Barham (6-3, 230, several Power 5 offers), defensive lineman Derrick Moore (6-4, 250, Oklahoma commit), defensive lineman Nasir Pearce (6-3, 300, Georgia, LSU offers) and cornerback Cam Johnson (6-0, 165, Virginia Tech commit).
All are four-star prospects.
“They have size everywhere,” Alumbaugh said. “They have speed everywhere. We have to, especially against a team that is so athletically gifted, do all the little things right. We have to be disciplined and physical. We can’t be fumbling the ball and making stupid penalties. We have to play our game.”
St. Frances is playing this fall with a heavy heart after Aaron Wilson, a four-star defensive lineman in the program’s current senior class who had numerous Power 5 offers, died in the spring from cancer.
A different St. Frances player is wearing Wilson’s No. 4 each game this season, which has been dedicated to the fallen teammate.
Griffith told Sports Stars of Tomorrow that he has a picture of himself with Wilson on his phone.
“I just look at that,” the quarterback said. “It gives me all the motivation to keep working because Aaron, when he was here, that’s all he did was work. He was just a great kid.”
.@SFAfootball_MD does not have the luxuries that you would expect most top football programs to have.Despite that, the Panthers are one of the nation’s best teams. In 2021, they will play for their late teammate, Aaron Wilson@johngriffith22 @big8dmoore @JaishawnBarham pic.twitter.com/KUnePsuAiE — Sports Stars of Tomorrow (@SportsStarsTV) September 13, 2021
De La Salle (3-1) had last weekend off after overcoming a two-touchdown deficit to beat Cathedral Catholic-San Diego 48-21, a bounce-back victory after the Spartans’ stunning 31-28 loss on the road to St. Francis of Mountain View.
Coincidentally, calpreps.com’s computer projects St. Frances with an “e” to beat De La Salle by that same score, 31-28.
The HBO series ended with St. Frances’ Class of 2020 celebrating college signing day. HBO noted that 26 of the 30 seniors on the fall 2019 team received college scholarships.
“We’re the school that’s always the underdog, where the perception is we can’t and won’t be able to develop young people to accomplish the ultimate dream — and that’s to attain a free education at the collegiate level,” Hailemariam told Sports Stars of Tomorrow. “We pride ourselves in making sure our students not only graduate but they get to their university and they excel.”