7— Trinity High School

Now here’s a truism for you. It's impossible to write about Harry DeFrank and his Lady Shamrock basketball program without writing about Trinity High School itself. Why? Well, because…


…Because the story of the coach, the program and the school are essentially one and the same.


"Parallel tracks, parallel tracks" is the way Mary Buckley, the retired Trinity librarian and longtime Lady Shamrock fan, characterizes it. She’s right on the mark. The success of the Lady Shamrocks on the basketball court through the years is self-evident by their record. And by however you measure academic success, Trinity High School does seem to work…work for the student body, work for the faculty, and work for the parents who choose to send their children there.


Ask why, and the reasons are as varied as the people to whom the question is posed. Start with Dr. Nancy Burke (Ed.D). She had been the vice principal / director of studies at Trinity since 1999 when, in the 2004-05 school year, she served as the school's "interim administrator" (ed speak for acting principal). A year later, she was named principal. She attributes whatever success Trinity has had in fulfilling its mission to two factors: The high expectations of the students who enroll there and the commitment of the faculty who teach there.


Faculty members Frank Cackovic and Jim McGovern, with a combined 70 years of teaching and coaching at Trinity, had another take on the proposition. They point to the religious underpinning of the school. "We are not embarrassed by our Catholicism," they say. "We don't hesitate to talk about values. There are lessons to be learned here."



John C. Oszustowicz, a Carlisle, Pa. attorney and an assistant Shamrock track coach, is the father of one daughter who was graduated from Trinity in June of 2004 and a second daughter who enrolled as a freshman the following Fall. He responds in still another way: "There’s an element of organization and discipline that you don't see in other schools," he says. "Not in the corporal punishment sense, but rather…it's probably fair to say it’s a form of organizational discipline. Their academic preparation is exceptional. I think it goes back to the fact that they focus on fundamentals. That's very healthy, in my view."


Ask Trinity graduates and you hear essentially the same thing, just in different words. When I posed the question to our daughter, Patty, Class of ‘86, (the first of four Trinity graduates in our household) she answered: "Good size, caring faculty, strong curriculum, extra curricular activities if you wanted it." Brian Cawley, a 1999 graduate, offered this terse assessment: "You know the rules and what the limits are." And this from Patrick A. Hewitt, ’76, a Pittsburgh attorney, who wrote in the December, 2004 edition of The Trinity Triangle: "The truth is that I didn't really enjoy my time at Trinity while I was there. It seemed like a lot of work and I just wasn't that interested. Imagine my surprise at how well-prepared I was for college." Almost 30 years later, Hewitt looked back at his time at Trinity and concluded: "The foundation laid at Trinity became the keystone for building the life that my family and I now enjoy."



What empirical evidence exists beyond the testimonials of the principals leads you to the conclusion that Trinity is very much on target with its mission. In 2004, for example, 100 per cent of the school’s graduating seniors took the Standard Aptitude Test for college admission; 80 per cent of its graduates go on to colleges ranging from Notre Dame to Duke, from the U.S. Naval and Military Academies to the U. S. Coast Guard Academy; from American University to Harcum and from Indiana University of Pennsylvania to Kutztown and West Chester. Another 15 percent chose two-year technical schools or community colleges.


By mid-year 2004-05, Trinity’s guidance office had processed over 800 college applications for the June graduating class. Additionally, in each of the four most recent years for which SAT average scores were available at the time (2001-2004), Trinity beat the state average for verbal, math and combined by noticeable margins—50-to-60 points higher in verbal; 30-to-60 in math; and 80-to-100 in combined scores. The school also had 13 students finish as either a semifinalist or finalist in the National Merit Scholarship Program between 2001 and 2005, and another 30 designated “Commended Students.”


More prominently, perhaps, Trinity twice was designated in the 1990’s by the U.S. Department of Education as one of the nation’s select "Blue Ribbon" schools. “Blue Ribbon” schools are those which have proven themselves to be “unusually effective in meeting local, state and national goals…in educating all of their students." It’s a coveted award, an award based primarily on “student achievement.”…academic code for results rather than process. “Blue Ribbon” schools are recognized as “national models of excellence that others can learn from.” And Trinity was so acclaimed in the 1992-93 and 1999-2000 school years, further reaffirming its reputation as a first-class institution of learning.



Trinity High School is a split-level brick and window building which sits on a knoll on the outskirts of Camp Hill Borough about a 20-minute drive from the Pennsylvania State Capitol. It was founded in 1963 by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg to relieve enrollment overload at Bishop McDevitt on the city's East Shore. The Brothers of Christian Schools were the first administrators and teachers and remained so for 10 years.


Brother Andrew Bartley, F.S.C., the first principal, returned from LaSalle University in Philadelphia to join with the Trinity community for the school’s 25th anniversary celebration in 1988. “Dedication, loyalty and goodness are the Trinity story,” he wrote in an open letter published in the celebration’s commemorative program. “They are present here and are the forces which give life and purpose to steel and stone.”



Trinity always has been a lean, no-frills institution. It had a cafeteria, an auditorium and a gymnasium from its inception. It wasn't until the late 1990s, some 30 years after its founding, that a home football/soccer field with an all-purpose running track and adjacent tennis courts were added to the complex. Administratively, Trinity is distinctly bare bones--a principal, a vice principal/director of studies and a director of student affairs. A part time director of development was added to the staff in the early 1980’s and was converted to a full time position in 1989.


Trinity’s enrollment target is in the mid-600s (620 in 2004), averaging 150 or just slightly more for each academic class, freshman through senior. The school was built to accommodate 1,200 students. In its early years, after juniors and seniors were added to the student body mix, enrollment in fact reached 1,000 or more…It's now stabilized at the targeted level, which is where the current administration and board of directors believe it ought to remain. "If we go higher, we do have questions about sufficient classrooms and having to increase the number of students per class," Dr. Burke confides. "Our target is 25 students per class. A big group around here is 30."


Trinity is, above all else, a college preparatory high school…Its curriculum covers the full range from English to computer applications, from social studies to science, from math to art appreciation. There are advanced placement classes in English, American History, U.S. Government, world history, calculus, biology, chemistry, French and Spanish. (Approximately 100 students took 173 advance placement tests in 2004-05). And in a partnership with Alvernia College in Reading, there were dual credit opportunities in calculus, Spanish and French, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, statistics and environmental science. A 20-hour community service requirement was added to the curriculum mandate in 1992. Original tuition at Trinity was $25 per student. In the 2004-05 academic year, it had risen to $3,800 for a single student, $2,100 for a second student and $450 for a third or more. A student who was not a member of a supporting Roman Catholic parish paid $4,750 per year.



…Noble goals alone do not protect Trinity from the contemporary challenges teen life pose for the young people who learn there. Not in the least. Security cameras monitor the halls, while the staff monitors the security cameras from a centrally located television set high on a wall in the administrative offices. Visitors must buzz at the entrance, identify themselves over an intercom and state their purpose before they gain entry to the building. And the school is subject to the same peer pressures among its student body and the same tensions between faculty and administration as other sister institutions, private and public, in the region.


Senior faculty member McGovern has seen it all from every direction. He's been an administrator (dean of students); a teacher (English/social studies); and a coach (freshman and junior varsity football, track, tennis and golf). He is straightforward in acknowledging that Trinity is not problem free. But he also is quick to point out that Trinity is not without important and powerful tools and resources to address those problems. Principal among them, he says, is a motivated student body and the engaged environment in which the students function. Both can make the difference. On the first point, he says: "Their parents usually make a calculated decision to send our students here, so there's some motivation for them to do well." On the second, he adds: "And being a private school gives us some liberties with discipline."


Nancy Burke picks up quickly on the theme. "Students here have as many problems as other schools have," she concedes. But, she says, Trinity can and does set "parameters on what's permissible…We set guidelines for when they're in the building on the kinds of behavior that is not tolerated, not accepted. And we certainly draw on our Catholicity…we talk about values--what's appropriate, and we talk about that particularly in religion classes. We're not afraid about what we can say and can't say to kids. We just come out and tell them something's not right. I'm not sure they can do that in other schools."


Small things count, too, often in subtle ways. The school dress code (read that, uniforms), for example. It tends to minimize the potential for any caste system among the student body. "While you still knew who was rich and who wasn't, it wasn't as obvious as it could have been if there were no uniforms," Patty Carocci remembers. "I liked the uniforms."



Prayer…that's another tool at Trinity's command. It's inherent in the school's Roman Catholic origin. But it serves another, almost silent purpose. "We pray at the beginning of each day and, briefly, before each class begins, ” Dr. Burke offers. “The students come in to each class, sit down and say a short prayer. It’s short and to the point. That sets the class in motion. It sets the tone, it means we introduce quiet and get (the students) ready to learn. When you don't have that hook, I imagine it can be hard to get everyone settled down."



“COBO”--if anyone personifies what's right about Trinity High School, that person would be Frank Cackovic. "COBO," he is, “COBO,” he's been, “COBO,” he’ll always be to the student body, faculty and administration, past and present. Talk to kids who knew him when they attended Trinity, and they smile when they talk about "COBO." Visit with him at the high school, and you hear one of his faculty colleagues call out, "’COBO,’ someone's here to see you!" It is most definitely a term of endearment.


Except for one six-month period in 1964 when he was an assistant football coach at Susquehanna University some 60 miles north of the capital region in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, Frank Cackovic has been a member of the Trinity faculty since the school opened its doors 40-plus years ago. An all-sport athlete and all-star football selection from Steelton High School (1950-54), he earned a gridiron scholarship to North Carolina State University, where he played quarterback for four years under Coach Earl Edwards. He graduated NC State in 1960 with a B.S. in education; he married his hometown sweetheart, Pat, (a local Harrisburg girl) in 1962, and he taught for a year at Levittown Memorial High School in Levittown, New York, on Long Island.


When a teaching position opened at Trinity in 1963, he applied for it. When it was offered, he immediately accepted. "I'm a local boy…Steelton," he says proudly. "There was no way I was going to stay down in North Carolina." Or up in New York state, for that matter. Central Pennsylvania was Frank Cackovic's home and home was where Frank Cackovic wanted he and his family to be.


Cackovic's career at Trinity had him in several teaching positions--physical education, health, English and social studies, among them. "Those were the days," he remembered, "when you ran down (from phys ed class), put a suit and tie on, ran back to the classroom, then ran back down, put your sweat suit on again to teach phys ed." Given his athletic background, it's not surprising that he helped coach Trinity football for 17 years and was the head golf coach until he gave it up in 2002. (He was succeeded, incidentally, by Jim McGovern.)


But what truly establishes Frank Cackovic’s rightful place in Trinity lore is the intramural basketball program he started at the school in the early 1970's. He called the program the "Challenge of Brotherly Opposition," "COBO" for short. He explained: "In the early years, we only had football and basketball here as organized sports. We didn't have an intramural program in those days--only pick up games where the guys would beat the heck out of each other. We didn't want them to maim each other, and phys ed wasn't an adequate replacement for those who wanted to play but didn't or couldn't make the varsity. So the one sport we could offer as an intramural replacement was basketball."


How did he come to name it the "Challenge of Brotherly Opposition?" he was asked. "The COBO arena opened up in Detroit and I liked the name," he responded. "So I put COBO, the 'Challenge of Brotherly Opposition' to our program." From 7-to-7:45 in the morning during basketball season, five days a week in the early years, twice a week now, the boys gather at the Trinity gym to play basketball for fun and physical activity. "The competition was unbelievable," Cackovic recalled. "These boys just loved to play. They still do. I just got so much pleasure out of watching and working with them." Thus was a Trinity institution born, and its founder took on a moniker for himself that firmly established his place in Trinity lore.


Cackovic made it his practice to greet the student body as they entered the building each morning with his ready smile and upbeat personality. "I still have the enthusiasm," he said at the time. "As long as I have that, I'll still be here. The kids are the primary reason we're all here. It's just a great feeling…I just love the place. Most of the teachers do. And the kids, well most of them seem happy to come here (and) we want to help them find his or her niche…”


Frank Cackovic resigned his teaching position in the Fall of 2006. His wife’s health was giving her some problems and he believed his place was at home with her. But that didn’t change the fact that Frank Cackovic found his niche, too. He found it over 40 years ago, and spent most of his professional life thereafter helping teenagers much younger than he find theirs. Trinity was a much better place and the student body, past and present, were much better youngsters for his presence.



While the "COBO" program has become ingrained in student life at Trinity, it has plenty of company in that regard. "We have more students involved in extra curricular activities per capita than most schools in this area, if not the state," Cackovic said. Extra curricular activities aside from athletics… extra curricular activities like theatre and music, science and debate. Extra curricular activities play an important part in the total Trinity environment. And each extra curricular activity--be it forensics, one-act play competition, or, yes, even athletics--is considered important in its own right, certainly as important as any other. When the quarterly Trinity alumni newsletter was published in the Winter of 2005, it hailed the first place finish of the speech team in a local tournament, and the fact that the Trinity girls soccer team raised $1,700 for the American Cancer Society in the off-season before it went on to note that the boys’ soccer team played in the Pennsylvania state tournament for the first time in school history, and two women athletes signed letters of intent to continue their athletic careers at Division I colleges. "Internal PR," Nancy Burke calls it, and it is parceled out in equal portions.



Athletics are the most visible extra curricular activities at Trinity, to be sure. And parents such as newspaper columnist John Baer--the father of one son who played basketball and a second who played basketball and football at Trinity—is pleased that the school is not at all reluctant to "support and promote" the success of its athletic teams. But to Dr. Burke and others on the faculty, "sports are just another outlet for students as far as our extra curricular activities go. Students come with so many talents; we need to let them find themselves. We're proud of our athletic successes," she goes on. "But we're even more proud of our status as a Blue Ribbon school, of the fact that so many of our kids go to college and do well, than we are of any PIAA championship."


It's up to the Trinity coaches to keep the role of sports in perspective and to meet the Trinity standards for acceptable conduct. When they don't, there are consequences. The Trinity boys basketball state championship in 2003 was badly tainted by a brawl (exact cause unknown) that broke out in front of the Trinity bench and threatened to cancel the title contest on the spot. Both teams—Sto Rox of Western Pennsylvania was the opposition--and their head coaches were placed on one-year probation by the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Association


Nancy Burke puts the issue this way. "We have the same expectations of coaches as we have of our teachers," she says. "We expect them to model for their athletes, to treat their athletes with respect, and we expect that they and their athletes conduct themselves appropriately. And if they do well, great." Trinity, she continues, expects the same of their student athletes. "We expect that they learn from their coaches about good sportsmanship and fair play…to be representatives, reflections of Trinity High School on and off the field."


It is in this picture that Harry DeFrank and his Lady Shamrock basketball team have found their standing through the years. And that has more to do with the high standards of the program he runs than it has with any won and lost record. "He's a gentleman," Dr. Burke says of Coach DeFrank. As interim administrator at the time of this conversation, she didn’t pretend to know him in more than a passing way, one professional associate to another. But she clearly saw character traits about him that she liked. “He cares about the students,” she says, “and his players know he cares about them, that he has their best interest at heart. He runs a successful program in the right way." And that, Dr. Burke explains, is what Trinity seeks and expects…in academics, intramurals, extra curricular activities and in sports…"that students come out (of the activity) better for the experience.”



   
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