From Principal Champions On and Off the Court

Dear Alumni, Parents, & Friends of Delone Catholic High School,

Shortly before New Year’s Day, I received an email from the front desk manager at the Holiday Inn Express in Reedsville, Pa. The girls’ varsity basketball team had been staying there while the girls were participating in a holiday tournament hosted by Mifflin County High School. The team would go on to win each of its contests and return home with the tournament’s laurels. The front desk manager, however, did not email me a congratulatory note on the girls’ winning performance. Instead, out of a sense of gratitude, she wrote to me “that, to a girl, [the team was] polite, friendly, and appreciative.” She went on to say that the hotel hosts “school teams all year long and from all states. I only wish they were all as well-behaved as these girls were.”

My reaction, upon reading this email, can be best described as a swollen heart. I was proud of the girls and grateful for the gracious witness that they provided to someone in the service industry, whose work is probably often thankless. And while their deportment at the hotel is invariably a reflection of the strong influence of their parents, coaches, and other mentors, I believe that Delone Catholic also had an important role in forming them in the virtues they demonstrated to that front desk manager that day.

When school resumed in January, I shared with the girls the contents of the email just before afternoon basketball practice. They were both humbled and, as is often characteristic of adolescence, a bit sheepish about the attention given to their behavior in Reedsville. In other words, their response was itself an expression of the same virtue they demonstrated that day at the Holiday Inn Express, the habit of being respectful and unassuming: they simply thanked me for sharing the email.

The varsity girls’ basketball team went on to enjoy a winning regular season. And while their goals of district and state titles did not materialize as they had hoped, the girls demonstrated that they are already champions in the infinitely more important contest of life. Walking as “Doers of the Word” (James 1:22) that late December day, their behavior gave evidence to their unspoken recognition that everyone, regardless of station in life, is worthy of respect and that the success of our society’s common life requires the appreciation of each person’s contribution to it, including that of the front desk manager at the Holiday Inn Express in Reedsville.

A virtue of this sort occurs regularly amongst our students, but it is often hidden or simply goes unobserved. It speaks to the cumulative, formative influence exerted in their lives by, amongst others, Delone Catholic High School and those who, like you, have, throughout the years, faithfully supported the School through your prayers. May God bless you and our students in the common effort of being Doers of the Word.

With every good wish for a Blessed Eastertide,

William Lippe P ‘25, EdM Principal