St. Joe’s Prep Dominates Pennsylvania Football. When Does Everyone Else Get a Shot?

St. Joe’s Prep head coach Tim Roken / Photo-illustration by Leticia R. Albano; photograph by Bill Avington

There is only one student working out in St. Joseph’s Prep’s nearly 4,000-square-foot weight room on a late-May afternoon. It’s not that the school’s athletes are lazy — finals are almost over, and the campus is relaxed. Students are even walking around in T-shirts and shorts, rather than the standard coats-and-ties wardrobe.

There are 20 squat racks — a huge number for a high school — along with dumbbells, free weights, kettlebells and plyometric equipment. Just under a year old, the room was part of a recent $24 million capital improvement project at the school, one that included the construction of a 30-yard indoor turf field and a resurfacing of the school’s indoor track along with academic-space improvements.

It’s a mammoth facility, bigger than some on college campuses. It allows the entire Prep football team to lift at one time, rather than in stages, as the previous facility required. Its sheer size and complement of equipment provide a one-of-a-kind advantage for a program that has no equal in the state.

The facility is a symbol of a commitment­ the Prep — an elite private Catholic school that for decades has produced a stream of influential graduates who have occupied some of the city’s most important positions — has made to athletics in general and specifically to a football program that has enjoyed remarkable success over the past decade-plus. Since the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) went from four enrollment-based classifications to six in 2016, the Prep has won six state championships in Class 6A (the largest­ division), including last year’s, and was runner-up the other two times. The school also won Class 4A titles in 2013 and ’14. The Prep has dominated the Philadelphia Catholic League, the 104-year-old athletic confederation of 16 city and suburban Catholic high schools, losing just one PCL game in the past 10 seasons.

In April, the Arizona Cardinals selected former Prep wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. with the fourth overall pick in the NFL Draft, while the Eagles selected Prep alum Jeremiah Trotter Jr., a linebacker, in the fifth round. They join former Prep standouts Jon Runyan Jr. (New York Giants), D’Andre Swift (Chicago Bears), and Olamide Zaccheaus (Washington Commanders) in the league. Three of those players (Runyan, Harrison and Trotter) are sons of former NFL Pro Bowlers. Last year, only eight high schools in the nation had five or more players on NFL rosters. And the college ranks at all levels are populated with Prep grads; head coach Tim Roken reports that 22 of 29 graduating seniors from last year’s state title team will play college ball.

“The biggest thing is how they challenge you, academically and athletically,” Trotter­ Jr. says. “You’ve got to be able to study your playbook. They’re not one of those teams that run a simple defense. … They really­ teach you how to prepare and act like a professional athlete and a college athlete.”

The Prep does it, somehow, without a practice field or stadium. The program holds its preseason camp on a field at 11th and Cecil B. Moore and in-season workouts at Temple’s complex. In 2023, the Prep played “home” games at Franklin Field, Conwell-Egan Catholic and Norristown Area High School.

The Prep more than compensates for the nomadic existence. The weight room helps. So does the wide geographic distribution of the student body. The school’s website boasts 172 zip codes and 220 feeder schools represented among the 2023-’24 enrollment of 937 boys. There are kids from New Jersey — like Trotter, Zaccheaus and Runyan were — and Delaware, along with Pennsylvania outposts like Barto, which sits between Reading and Allentown. (Meanwhile, PIAA rules prohibit Pennsylvania public schools from bringing in players from outside their boundaries.)

Because it never had a series of feeder parish schools, the Prep’s student body has always included students from all over. The rest of the Catholic League can draw from the entire region, true, but they lack the history and institutional resources to match the Prep’s geographic range.

Perhaps the most important factor in the school’s football dominance, though, is a rare alignment that exists from the administration offices to the locker room. School president John Marinacci; athletic director Dan DiBerardinis; and admissions, academic support and development leaders create an environment in which the team can attract top players and keep them succeeding in school so they can compete for championships.

Playing in the Pennsylvania football championship against a team that is not made up of Pennsylvania football players … it makes it tough to say, ‘Yeah, that was a fair matchup.’” — Art Walker, North Allegheny coach

“You need complete alignment for success,”­ says Gabe Infante, who coached at the Prep from 2010 through 2018 and is now an assistant head coach at Duke University.­ “There’s a natural push and pull that has to happen for the institution to maintain its soul, and it can get ugly. There is a constant series of checks and balances.”

It’s a rare circumstance among private and parochial schools. It’s difficult getting all parties to agree that success at any sport — but especially football, given its larger roster size — is a priority. If the admissions staff isn’t willing to take some chances on top players who may not have the most impressive academic records, the faculty doesn’t want to provide extra help for those students, and the president prefers to have people think first of something other than sports when the school’s name is mentioned, a football program won’t thrive. But for private schools like the Prep, it can mean increased alumni engagement, which often leads to bigger donations, and a larger pool of applicants eager to be part of the excitement brought by championships. (Prep officials claim they’ve not seen a correlation between athletic success and applications or donations.)

The Prep’s success has not come without a cost. It has angered public-school coaches and administrators around Pennsylvania, who are tired of losing to what they consider a tristate all-star team and want the PIAA to create two separate championship tracks, one for boundary (or public) schools and another for non-boundary schools, as in New Jersey and Maryland. North Allegheny coach Art Walker, whose team lost, 45-23, to the Prep in last year’s 6A title game, is one of them.

“Playing in the Pennsylvania football championship against a team that is not made up of Pennsylvania football players … there are multiple states represented on their roster, it makes it tough to say, ‘Yeah, that was a fair matchup,’” he says.

Just how good is the Prep? In 2021, a 14-0 Garnet Valley team averaging 48.9 points per game faced them in the state semifinals. Garnet Valley athletic director Seth Brunner, who has been a high school football coach and administrator for 23 years, thought his Jaguars were the best high school team he had seen in person. Brunner watched the Prep warm up and “knew our season was over.” The Prep won, 49-13.

Members of the Prep community insist the football success is merely a high-­profile manifestation of the school’s mission. Prep graduates have a rare spirit and devotion to the school that borders on arrogance and upsets many, especially other Catholic school alums. The football program’s success cranks up the disdain even more.

The Prep’s dominance, though singular, is a high-profile example of a statewide issue. Between 1988 (when the PIAA instituted football playoffs) and 2013, 22 of the 104 (21 percent) champions were non-boundary schools. In the past 10 years, the number has swelled to 22 of 56 (39 percent). In the 5A and 6A classifications, 10 of the 16 champions (63 percent) have been non-boundary schools, including Archbishop Wood and Imhotep.

It’s even more pronounced in basketball. Since 2014, 41 of the 54 boys champions (76 percent) and 32 of 54 girls winners (59 percent) have been non-boundary schools, including many from the Philadelphia region. Coaches and administrators are demanding a more equitable competitive environment. They want separate playoff systems, so they can compete against other schools that must draw from specific, unalterable boundaries, rather than teams like the Prep that can bring in students from anywhere.

“It makes it hard for boundary schools to be competitive,” says North Allegheny’s Walker. “We don’t want to lose our players to any of these [non-boundary schools]. … We’re at a point where we should have two playoffs.”

As the Prep continues its tear through the state, a battle is raging between those who want to maintain the current system and those who want a change. It will be waged on the field, for sure, but also in the state House of Representatives, in league meetings, and whenever coaches get together to talk about their sport. And St. Joe’s Prep will be in every part of that conflict.

The Prep wasn’t always this dominant.

In early 1992, when then-Prep athletic director Jim Murray called Gil Brooks to tell him he was the school’s new football coach, Brooks was nervously excited to tell his wife, Donna. The problem was, legendary Daily News writer Ted Silary had already called Brooks’s house, looking to interview­ him, and told Donna her husband had gotten­ the job.

“I got home, and she said, ‘What’s going on?’” Brooks says, laughing.

Others might have asked the same thing. In the two seasons before Brooks took over, the Prep went a combined 1-13 in Catholic League play. The Prep had won one league championship in the previous 50 seasons. The talent was there, Brooks says, it just wasn’t being developed. There was a tiny, makeshift weight room. The school wasn’t doing the things it needed to to build a successful program.

Brooks’s relentless drive to win and love of his alma mater (Class of ’75) created a powerhouse. He persuaded the administration to build a weight room, most of which he funded himself. He scoured grade-school games in southeastern Pennsylvania and his native New Jersey for players. It was clear that the Prep was tired of losing.

“When I took the job, [the administrators] were all in,” Brooks says. “Everybody wanted the program to be successful. They were looking for someone to give it guidance.”

In 1997, the Prep won the school’s first league crown in 20 years. Brooks sold prospects on the school’s strong culture and academics, and its influential alumni network. The Prep had no set feeder schools, which was viewed as a detriment because Catholic League rivals at the time had built-in parish pipelines. For instance, students from St. Dorothy, St. Bernadette and St. Andrew in Drexel Hill would go to Bonner and Prendergast (the schools used to be separate boys and girls institutions before merging in 2012) and rarely anywhere else. But Brooks used that as an opportunity to recruit all over. The school maintains that its reputation and open houses attract players­­ — along with some outreach, which the Prep maintains it does across the student body — and much of that is true, but it isn’t enough to fill a roster with standouts and fend off the advances of non-PIAA schools like those in the Inter-Ac League (a collection of independent schools that operate by their own rules and not the PIAA’s). Non-boundary schools must identify and engage kids who wouldn’t normally show up on the doorstep hoping to be admitted.

Brooks’s methods worked. The Prep posted a 162-57-2 record during his 18 seasons, and won five Catholic League titles.

But Brooks was a volatile presence. After the 2009 season, then-school president Father George Bur and Murray asked Brooks to resign. Parents had complained about his methods, and when he yelled at sophomore running back Desmon Peoples for fumbling­ a punt during the Catholic League title game, the outrage grew.

“When Father [Bruce] Bidinger left as president [in 2006], I didn’t have the same relationship [with the administration] I had for 18 years,” Brooks says. “It was a great run, but they went in a different direction.”

That “direction” was Gabe Infante, who turbocharged the program. In nine seasons, his teams won four PIAA state championships and five Catholic League titles. Infante, who had coached at North Jersey powerhouses Bergen Catholic and Paramus Catholic, had learned at those schools how a highly successful program operated and how to deal with in-house obstacles.

“He was a very tough, demanding coach,” says Jon Runyan Jr., who played for Infante from 2011 to 2014. “Everything he had us doing had a purpose, but being that age, it was tough to see that. He had everything down to a T. He had the right people with him, and he was tough on us. It was tough love, as he referred to it, but we bought in and got better and better every year.”

Infante made the Prep a popular destination for talented players. Runyan claims that, despite an early-2000’s PIAA ban on the practice, Infante “was recruiting heavily in the tristate area.” Jeremiah Trotter Jr. had not heard of the Prep while a student at South Jersey’s Hainesport Middle School. “It wasn’t one of the schools I was looking at,” he says. “They came to one of my games and talked to me. That piqued my interest.”

Every area private and parochial school, whether in the Catholic or the Inter-Ac League, sends coaches to CYO and township-team games in search of talent, according to several sources in the Catholic League. They compete for players against each other, as well as against local public­ schools hoping to keep talent in their districts. (When asked directly, Infante replied, “People talk about recruiting. I don’t recruit. I market. I need to create a product people want, and they will come.” A Prep spokesman also denied the practice.) As the Prep continued to win under Infante, more players embraced its sales pitch.

After the 2018 season, Infante left the Prep to coach at Temple. Roken, a former standout quarterback at Northeast Philly’s Archbishop Ryan who had assisted Infante during his entire tenure, became “the next caretaker” of the program and its high expectations.

The Prep was about to leave its PCL brethren behind and take control of the entire state.

Many parents of players at Bonner-Prendergast and Cardinal O’Hara were angry earlier this year when the Catholic League announced that the two schools would be moving from the Blue Division, composed of smaller schools, to the Red Division, home to larger enrollments — and the Prep.

On CBS3, one parent likened the move to being thrown “to the wolves.” Another referred to the Prep as a “pro team,” while a third worried for her son’s safety against the Prep’s bigger, faster players. “I know it is a concern, and I would be sitting there on the side of my seat nervous the entire game,” she said.

It is a big jump. Bonner-Prendie and O’Hara had about 330 boys enrolled in grades 9 to 11 last year, which is the metric­ the PIAA uses to classify its members. Meanwhile, the Prep had 719, and La Salle­ had 914. The larger enrollments mean larger­ rosters — the Prep had an astounding 160 players in its program last year — and fresher players who don’t have to play both offense and defense, something that happens often on teams with smaller rosters. That difference can lead to injuries for players who aren’t as fast or strong. It also creates a sense of fatalism among the others in the Catholic League.

“We’re going to go out there and be competitive [against them], but realistically we will be severe underdogs,” Bonner-Prendergast coach Jack Muldoon, who spent 12 seasons as an assistant at the Prep, says. And while nobody likes losing by 40 points, there is a grudging admiration.

A lot of schools in the city aren’t equipped to do what they do.” — Don Richardson, West Catholic coach

“Everyone’s on the same page there,” says Lansdale Catholic athletic director B.J. Hogan, who played at Bonner and was the head coach at O’Hara from 2015 to 2021. “Kids come in as freshmen and learn from juniors and seniors. When they’re juniors and seniors, they take over. Everything you see on the field, from a coaching perspective, is enjoyable to watch.”

The last time the Prep lost a Catholic League game was in 2021, to La Salle, and the school does not include area teams on its non-league schedule. This year, it will play St. Edward (Ohio) near Cleveland, Good Counsel in D.C., and Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn. Last year, the Prep took on national powerhouse IMG Academy. The high-profile games — last year’s matchup with IMG was on ESPNU — are attractive to prospects. They know they will be seen by a wide audience and garner the attention of college coaches. It all puts the Prep on a different level.

“There is a desire to win, and they want to play a national schedule,” says West Catholic coach Don Richardson. “A lot of schools in the city aren’t equipped to do what they do.”

Then there is the money. It’s true that the Prep has always cost more than parochial high schools. Next year’s sticker price is $27,350, plus books and fees, versus $10,600 for Bonner-Prendie. But 75 percent of Prep students receive aid, with an average grant of $11,500. The Howley Scholars Program, a national scholarship funded by 1970 graduate Nick Howley’s foundation, provides $20,000 in tuition coverage for 15 students each year at the Prep. According to Prep president Marinacci, the fundraising campaign that concluded in fall 2023 resulted in more than 90 new need-based scholarships. Not all recipients are athletes, but many benefit from aid packages that make the Prep less expensive than other area Catholic high schools.

“If they go to a parent and say, ‘It costs this much to go to Bonner, O’Hara and Roman, and we have the support to make it less expensive to come [to the Prep],’ that’s hard to turn down,” Muldoon says. “For us, it’s kind of a not fair fight, but I understand.”

Plenty of other schools throughout Pennsylvania aren’t so empathetic.

Scott Conklin’s football career ended when he hurt his knee in 11th grade. But for many Pennsylvania football coaches and administrators, the Democratic state rep from Centre County is an important booster.

Conklin has introduced Pennsylvania­ House Bill 1983, which would give the PIAA legislative authority to stage separate playoffs for boundary and non-boundary schools. It addresses a 1972 statute that required the PIAA to accept private schools as members. The PIAA interprets the law as mandating that public and non-public schools must compete against each other­ and uses it as the reason why it cannot­ sponsor dual championship tournaments.­ Its board doesn’t even use the terms “boundary” and “non-boundary” because it wants “to treat all schools in the membership equally.” (It prefers “public, parochial and private.”)

Conklin and many others argue that the 1972 law does not prevent the organization from making changes to the playoffs. They point to the PIAA’s decision in 2016 to add two more classifications (5A and 6A), along with its ability to move schools annually up a classification based on size and success on the field, as evidence that the PIAA has the authority to do what it wants in terms of membership and competition. For example, Archbishop Wood had 285 boys in grades 9 through 11 last year, which puts it in Class 3A football, according to size. But the Vikings’ on-field success led the PIAA to move them to 5A to improve competitive­ balance.

“The PIAA does things to change the playoffs, and every time, they do it without legislative approval,” Conklin says. “They’re going against their own argument.”

(PIAA executive director Robert Lombardi did not respond to multiple phone and email interview requests.)

It’s not a balanced field. Why do we support it?” — Leonard Rich, Laurel School District superintendent

“Dr. Lombardi hides behind the law,” says Leonard Rich, superintendent of Western Pennsylvania’s Laurel School District since 2016. In 2018, Rich helped organize a meeting of 151 state school administrators to protest the PIAA’s refusal to institute separate playoffs. Representatives from the group appealed to lawmakers in Harrisburg but were rebuffed. Rich is no longer agitating publicly for change but hasn’t altered his stance.

“It’s not a balanced field,” he says. “Why do we support it?”

Jim Cantafio was a head coach in Pennsylvania for 32 of his nearly 50 years on the sidelines. He’s a member of the Pennsylvania Football Coaches Hall of Fame and is a past president of the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association. He says Pennsylvania coaches are “overwhelmingly” in support of separate playoffs and decries the advantages schools like the Prep have. “They have no boundaries and no limits,” he says. He also accuses the PIAA of being afraid of being sued.

“If there were separate playoffs, the PIAA knows there would be a lawsuit coming from Catholic schools,” Cantafio says. “The PIAA is not willing to go to court and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight it.”

Last year, Central Bucks South was 13-1 and having the best season of its 20-year history when it faced the Prep in the 6A state semifinal. It lost, 49-0. Head coach Tom Hetrick doesn’t understand how the PIAA isn’t interested in competitive equality throughout the state.

“If you’re building a classification system in an effort to create fair opportunities for people to compete [according to school size], I don’t know how you can’t create a system where boundary and non-boundary schools can compete in separate playoffs,” he says.

Harrisburg head coach Calvin Everett­ echoes Hetrick’s statement. His team dropped state title matchups to the Prep in 2018 (40-20) and 2022 (42-7). He compliments the Prep for being “very disciplined and well-coached.” But he thinks the Prep should compete with similar schools.

Hetrick says he often hears of private schools recruiting young players in his district­ and has had parents ask him why he isn’t contacting middle-schoolers too. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be out there recruiting players in our [school] system,” he says. Garnet Valley’s Brunner reports that middle school students and their families in his district are being contacted by private school coaches, forcing GV’s varsity coaches to connect with them to persuade them to remain in the district’s schools. “Those are our students,” he says.

Muldoon has to fight the Prep and other private schools for talent in and around Drexel Hill, an area one college recruiter told him must be “recruiting hell,” thanks to the large number of schools — Catholic and independent — that look for talent there. He has a message for those who complain about the Prep’s success.

“I can understand where schools think [the Prep has] an unfair advantage,” he says. “If you think that, go work harder.”

Nobody at the Prep seems too concerned about what other coaches or administrators are saying. The school is convinced it is competing fairly, and if anything changed, the school would adapt. “I think we’d play within the rules and do the best that we can within them to have success each and every single year like we do,” Roken says.

While coaches across the state seethe, Conklin’s bill sits stalled in the House Education Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh), is unwilling to bring up for a vote. (He also refused requests to be interviewed for this article.) “I don’t think he has the time or cares to comment at this time,” a staffer said. One possible reason? He went to Allentown Central Catholic, a non-boundary school.

“Non-boundary schools have quite a bit of influence in the chamber, through donations and reps who send their children to private school,” Conklin says.

When senior running back Will Vokolos attended a Prep open house with his family, he was quickly hooked.

“Once I stepped on campus, I knew it was right for me,” he says.

The Prep’s North Philadelphia campus­ has no verdant fields and is contained within­ a city block. Still, students travel from all over the region to attend, often logging­ demanding 12-hour days between travel, practice and classes. When they get home at 7 or 8, homework looms. But most absolutely love it. “The joke was that they drank the Kool-Aid, right?” says DiBerardinis,­ the Prep athletic director who graduated from Roman Catholic and was its AD for six years. “It’s the culture. They instill from day one the brotherhood.”

It’s easy to be jaded about the brotherhood talk, but no other school in the region has as powerful an identity or as much influence in Philadelphia. That carries over into the professional world, where older Prep grads welcome young alums to their firms. “Every time I go out wearing a Prep shirt, I’m guaranteed to have a conversation with an alum about how much they enjoyed being at the Prep,” says senior Maxwell Roy, a defensive tackle who committed to Ohio State in July.

Roken and his staff carry that devotion to the practice field and into games. They demand excellence from players, who respond. “Going undefeated and winning a state championship is the goal every year,” says Kyle McCord, ’21, a quarterback at Syracuse. It’s a year-round commitment that prepares players for college ball. “It’s run basically like a college program,” says Josiah Trotter, ’23, a linebacker at West Virginia and Jeremiah Jr.’s younger brother. “The practices at St. Joe’s set me up really well for college.”

When Roken took over from Infante, a core group of assistant coaches on the staff remained and provides a continuity that is vital for success. Roken has improved on his predecessors’ results, winning four state titles and posting a 54-7 record in five seasons.

The Prep can’t guarantee that it will continue to dominate the PCL and PIAA. It’s possible that Roken could follow Infante into the college world. “There’s going to be a day when we don’t win a state championship or make a state championship [game],” DiBer­ardinis­­ says. “But we’ll learn from our losses and be better.” Still, the program Roken and his predecessors have built appears capable of withstanding any challenge, be it on the field or in a legislative chamber. Some envy it. Others revile it. But no one can deny that it is the state’s standard.

“I definitely feel like when we were playing­ other schools around the state, they came with a chip on their shoulders,” Jeremiah Trotter Jr. says.

Public schools have that same approach in other sports. They don’t enjoy competing against Imhotep and Roman Catholic in boys basketball. Or Archbishop Wood and Neumann-Goretti in girls hoops. The chorus of angry coaches and administrators isn’t just directed at the powerful Prep football program. It only seems that way because the Prep wins so much.

The school considers the football success a very public representation of its overall excellence, and it doesn’t care what people think or whether they keep grousing.

“As a program we need to continue to find ways to evolve and be better, however that is,” Roken says. “Whether it’s increasing­ our strength program, nutrition program, academic support, how we practice,­ if there’s ways we can evolve. … There hasn’t been much of a change in the values we live by and standards that we hold these young men to.”

And it all clearly works. Perhaps too well.

Published as “Unstoppable Force” in the August 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.