Reunion of Champions

That first State win didn’t come out of thin air, of course, but was the result of decades of building a program. In St. Joe’s years at Fontbonne (1925-1955), students participated in hotly contested intramural competitions in a host of sports. In 1938 they began to play other schools in basketball. In the early Fifties softball, then volleyball teams, started interscholastic play.

When St. Joe moved to Frontenac in 1955, though, the growing interscholastic athletic program was brought to a temporary halt - from 1955 through 1961 – by the Archbishop of St. Louis, who thought that sports competition was unladylike. Not wishing to lose their momentum, Athletic Director Rosemary Ward Wellington, ’38, used the time to grow the physical education program and expand intramurals. Competition resumed in 1962 with league play, and field hockey launched its first season.

In 1972, Title IX of the Educational Amendments was signed into law by President Richard Nixon, with the final version signed by President Gerald Ford in 1975. The law forbids any kind of discrimination on the basis of sex by “schools, local and state educational agencies, and other institutions that receive federal financial assistance from the Department [of Education].”

Title IX had an immediate impact by helping to fuel the explosion of girls’ and women’s sports as schools at every level and of every kind scrambled to provide a level playing field for their female students by adding and funding sports and teams. As programs grew, the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA), the governing body that regulates most high school sports in the state, was obligated by Title IX to offer post season competitions for girls’ sports, provided the sport was played statewide and by a representative number of schools. St. Joe students also benefitted when they headed off to colleges that were now required to offer parity in athletic scholarships, programs, and funding. Many of my classmates and I in 1975 received offers of athletic scholarships as colleges hustled to comply with the new law. 

One of the new teams to form at St. Joe in the Seventies was tennis, in 1974, coached by Wellington, then Boles. Almost immediately, St. Joe was among the top teams in Missouri, winning team State in both 1976 and 1977 as well as singles and doubles titles. In the second half of the decade, soccer (1977), track (1978), and golf (1979) joined the program. While MSHSAA offered a girls State Championship in golf as early as 1975, it was not until 1985 that enough schools were playing to add a soccer championship.  A young swim team went undefeated in 1972 and in 1983 won State. 

In the Eighties, St. Joe added one team and seven individual State titles to its total, as well as medaled in two individual events in swimming, in what was the first full decade that State Championships were played in girls high school sports in Missouri. An Academy golfer took top honors in 1987 for the first title in that sport. And St. Joe Angel Kelly Mulvihill set a Missouri state record by being the first girl or boy to win three singles titles in a row. While her record was matched by a few others in subsequent years, it was not bested by another girl until fellow Angel Kiki Stastny won four through 2001. To date, only Kiki and one male player have this record.

The most celebrated athlete in St. Joe history is Kristin Folkl, ’94, who led the teams on which she played to an extraordinary eight State Championship titles – four each in volleyball and basketball from 1991-1994. The success of these teams brought unprecedented acclaim to St. Joe in both the local and national media, and people traveled from all over the state to watch the championship games. 

The four volleyball crowns were the first in that sport. The team played its way to a USA Today ranking of fourth in the country and a 38-0 record in its third season of winning State. Later in the Nineties, the volleyball program won two more State titles for a total of six in the decade, all under the leadership of Coach Karen Davis. In the next decade, Davis would lead her teams to two more State wins. The Angels won a ninth in 2017. The volleyball program ranks fourth in the State for its nine Championship titles, six second place finishes, and nineteen Final Four appearances.

The basketball team ended its third State season with a win streak of 71-0. The streak was snapped the next season by Shelbyville Central of Tennessee in the Coca Cola/KMOX Shootout at the Arena. The day after, St. Joe was the lead story in the sports section as well as the subject of Bernie Miklasz’s column:

Thursday evening, one of the most illustrious runs of dominance in the history of St. Louis sports – professional or amateur – was closed down…. An end to nearly three years of St. Joseph’s perfection…. The young women of St. Joseph’s Academy will leave a legacy of success that may never be bested by future generations of St. Louis athletes.

Disappointed but in no way deterred by the loss, the Angels went undefeated for the rest of the season and earned a fourth State title, ending the era with a record of 100-1!

Folkl was presented with the Dial Award her senior year, given to the top female and male high school athlete as selected by 500 sports writers across the country. The male athlete? Tiger Woods. Folkl headed to Stanford, where she played on National Championship volleyball and basketball team. She was a member of the U.S. Women’s Olympic Volleyball team in 1996, and following graduation, she played in the WNBA.

Not to be outdone by the volleyball and basketball teams, soccer, tennis, and golf all racked up multiple State titles in the Nineties. After the team won its first title in 1990, under Coach Maureen McVey the soccer team established itself as one of the premier programs in Missouri, winning three more State titles that decade. Golf won its first three team titles in addition to individual crowns. And the tennis team won an astonishing five in a row (a feat they repeated a decade later), and a wealth of singles and doubles titles. Boles retired at the end of the 1997 season after four in a row, replaced by Doug Smith, whose team won the next year for that fifth straight title. 

A cross country team was fielded in 1990, and by 1997, qualified for Sectionals and sent two runners to State. And the racquetball team, a non-MSHSAA sport coached by Phyllis Spillers, added four State titles to the one it had won in the Eighties. In all, during the Nineties, St. Joe won an incredible twenty-six team State Championships and a plethora of individuals. 

In May 2005, Sports Illustrated named its choice of top high school athletic program in each state in the country. Doing its own research, with no input from the schools, the magazine looked at the previous ten years of data and considered such things as all-around excellence, state titles won, and college athletes produced. St. Joe was that school in Missouri. In an interview with The St. Louis Review, Athletic Director Michaela Witcher said, “When you consider what we were up against – high schools all over the state, public, private, boys, co-ed, girls, schools with 1000, 2000 students – this is just such a great honor.” In the 2004-2005 school year, with an enrollment of 629, 310 students (forty-nine percent) participated in the athletic program. It had been exactly thirty years since St. Joe had won its first State Championship.

By the new century, the athletic program was well established, no longer experiencing the growth in the number of sports and teams of earlier decades. The challenge, then, was to continue to offer the opportunity for Academy athletes to compete at their best, and this it succeeded in doing. In 2000, the softball team made the move from spring to fall so that it could compete in the MSHSAA post season, even though this meant the Angels would be fielding teams in six sports in the fall. In 2009, the softball team won its first District title, and the next year, their Sectional and a trip to the Final Four. In 2012, they won Districts for the fourth year in a row. MSHSAA moved swimming to the winter season (from spring) in 2006-2007. In 2013, the team won its eleventh Conference title in twelve years with an undefeated season.

The early 2000s also meant some major facilities additions. In 2004, a beautiful, much larger, light-filled gym, named for Rosemary Ward Wellington, was dedicated as the center piece of the new Student Life Center. The old gym was converted into a state-of-the-art theater/auditorium. Outside, in time for the 2008 season, Missouri’s top tennis program got a new home with the completion of an eight-court complex, the effort spearheaded by a group of tennis parents. Prior to this, having only four courts, St. Joe was not able to host a match. Lastly, the softball field got a major makeover, new brick dugouts, and an electronic scoreboard.

While field hockey is one of St. Joe’s earliest competitive sports and one of its most beloved (even going back to PE classes and intramurals in the Fontbonne days), it is not a “MSHSAA sport” because it is not played throughout the state. The same is true of lacrosse, added to the St. Joe athletic program in 2002. Both sports are wildly popular in the St. Louis area (for girls and boys both in the case of lacrosse), and the area provides every bit of a high level of competition. As with racquetball, the sports’ own governing bodies regulate competition, including post season play. 

The field hockey team has won the Midwest Field Hockey Tournament – or State – three times, all in this century, in 2003, 2008, and 2016, and come in second ten times in twenty-one playoff appearances. The ’08 win was especially thrilling, in that St. Joe was seeded seventh and beat numbers one, two, and three on the way to the title, winning the Championship in strokes. The lacrosse team won its first State Championship in 2015. 

The soccer team garnered unprecedented acclaim in 2002 when it won State easily in four shut outs and was named the number one team in the country by the National Soccer Coaches of America in a unanimous vote. The previous year, Maureen McVey, who coached six of the seven State titled teams, was named the National Soccer Coach of the Year. The 2002 crown was the fourth in five years. With these wins and seventeen Final Four appearances, the St. Joe soccer program ranks second in Missouri among girls’ teams.

The tennis and golf teams have both emerged as the premier programs in their sport in the state, winning more State team titles in each sport than any other school in Missouri. The tennis team has won an incredible eighteen State titles (not including individual) - one under Wellington, five under Boles, and twelve under Smith, now in his twenty-seventh year as coach - and been in the Final Four thirty-one times. After Bud Stein led the Angels to their first two golf State titles in the mid-Nineties, Carol Fromuth, beginning in 1998, has coached her teams to ten more, including an amazing run of seven from 2016 through 2022. In its thirty Final Four appearances, it boasts nine second place finishes as well.

One of the longest serving coaches in St. Joe history, Julie Goessling Matheny, ’79, retired this past June. She joined the basketball staff as an assistant coach in 1993 before becoming head coach, leading her teams to the State title in 2004 and ten Final Four appearances. With six titles, five second place finishes, and eighteen Final Fours overall, the basketball program, now in its fiftieth year, ranks fifth in the state.

And not to be left out, the cross country team won its first State Championship in 2023!

What accounts for such success in so many sports and for so many years? In that May 2005 St. Louis Review article, Witcher suggests, “The St. Joseph’s Academy community is responsible for the success of our program. It is a great school community, a great faith community. Parents and students sacrifice to come here, and it is a commitment. And that level of commitment shows up in everything these students do.”

How does one measure success? The number of State titles, certainly, but also a commitment to excellence that spans many sports and many decades – both on and off the field.