You’re Tom Brady. You’ve got three Super Bowl rings. You’ve got two Super Bowl MVPs. You’re widely regarded as the best pressure quarterback in the NFL today. You’re marching down a path previously trod by just one man, your boyhood idol, Joe Montana.
And you’re not even the best professional athlete from your high school.
That would be Barry Bonds, Serra High ’82, shortly to become the most prolific home run hitter of all-time.
You don’t even own the most Super Bowl rings collected by a Serra alum.
That would be Lynn Swann, Serra High ’70, four-time Super Bowl winner, arguably in the Top 10 of all-time NFL receivers.
In some backwards-looking eyes, you’re not even the most promising athlete to emerge from Serra in recent years.
That would be Gregg Jefferies, Serra High ’85, a baseball terror in high school, a phenom in the minor leagues, a disappointment in his first few cracks at the Show, true, but finally, a serviceable ballplayer for the Cardinals and Phillies.
In other, more forward-looking eyes, you might not even wind up as the best football player Serra has produced.
That would be Will Powers, Serra senior, all-world tight end, all-world defensive end, Bay Area player-of-the-year as rated by various publications, headed to the Farm to catch passes or make sacks for the Cardinal, or maybe both.
In other words, Tom Brady, you come from a high school with a habit of producing superior athletes that would make many four-year universities envious. How do the diocesan priests who run the Catholic boys’ school do it?
Who knows … must be something in the holy water.
Whatever it is, whatever lucky blend of geography, genetics and guidance produces a Hall of Famer at Serra every 10 years or so, the San Mateo school keeps churning them out.
Other schools just can’t compete, not that there’s any shame in that. Gilroy High is happy to have one Jeff Garcia to its credit, let alone three or four. Hollister makes do with a Cade McNown here, a Kyle Sharp there. Live Oak counts itself lucky to have produced a Jeff Ulbrich and a Rey Sanchez.
My own alma mater, St. Ignatius, is the oldest high school west of the Mississippi, founded during the Gold Rush. We’ve got Dan Fouts to our credit – a pretty good NFL quarterback, but no Tom Brady.
And that’s about it. Sure, there may have been some great ones from S.I. lost to our collective memory after the passage of so much time. A Lynn Swann of the medicine ball, a men amongst boys in the gymnasiums of the Gilded Age. A Barry Bonds with the croquet mallet, kicking grass and taking names from San Francisco to Old Sacramento in the 1850’s.
But if such athletes existed, they’re lost in the mists of time.
No, normal high schools don’t grind out Hall of Famers at the alarming rate the Padres have been doing since the school’s inception in 1944.
The odd thing, though, is that despite the great athletes who have passed through its halls, Serra isn’t a really an athletic powerhouse. The school certainly isn’t a De La Salle or a Mater Dei. Its baseball teams are usually pretty good – but not as good as you might think – while in football and basketball the Padres routinely finish well down in the West Catholic Athletic League standings.
Which just goes to show that individual stars – even stars as bright as Tom Brady and Barry Bonds – do not a successful athletic program make.
For that, we in the land of merely mortal high schools ought to take heart. Our athletes may never go on to become household names. But collectively, their successes as basketball squads, as field hockey teams, as swimmers, as wrestlers can make us just as proud as any fan of Serra High.
Tom Brady – to his credit – would probably agree.
Damon Poeter is the Sports Editor of the Gilroy Dispatch. E-mail him at dp*****@**********rs.com
