Cardinal Newman savors memories while gearing up for move to new campus

The intimacy of the Cardinal Newman School football and soccer stadium will be missed.

“It isn’t anything fancy. You just have to be down there on a game evening to feel the atmosphere,” Jacqualine Kasprowski said. “There’s just a real charm about it, and that would be really hard to capture anywhere else.”

But for Cardinal Newman principal Kasprowski, the stadium is one of the few things she’ll miss about the Catholic school’s outgrown, outdated 54-year old Forest Drive campus, soon to be exchanged for a sprawling lake-front campus in northeast Columbia, complete with an 800-seat football and soccer stadium.

Cardinal Newman students and staff had their last first day of school at 4701 Forest Drive last week, the first of many lasts they will experience over the next semester.

Come Jan. 19, they’ll start anew at a 50-acre campus on Alpine Road, where new memories will be made – though the old ones will never be forgotten.

“I’m not really going to miss the physical plant so much, because I’ve had so many good memories,” said Patrick Greenwood, a 1973 Cardinal Newman graduate and 37-year veteran teacher. “I’m always going to have those. And they’re going to go with me to the new school. But I want new.”

Greenwood was chosen by last year’s graduating class – the final class to graduate from the Forest Drive campus – to deliver their commencement address.

He and Bob Watson, another 1973 graduate and the school’s dean of facilities and operations, remember when the school’s first and only gym was built by Cardinal Newman families themselves some four decades ago.

It was Watson who scored the first basket in the first game in that gym, a layup in an 82-70 win over Lugoff-Elgin High School, he remembers.

At the time, the gym was a major improvement to the school, replacing a dirt parking lot where basketball goals were stuck in the ground. For the first time, Cardinal Newman could host its own basketball practices and home games.

But the school of some 500 students has long outgrown the gym and its in-town site, where Cardinal Newman first held classes in 1961.

On busy Forest Drive, students maneuver through cramped hallways, many attending classes in converted rooms, mobile units and even the library and cafeteria due to the school’s lack of space. Athletic teams travel to off-site facilities for practices and games, while performers in school plays change clothes in the teachers’ lounge.

“I already had an air conditioner not running, first day of school,” Watson said last Thursday, as Cardinal Newman students returned to classes. “People just have to be a little patient because the good things are coming.”

Construction is right on schedule at the new Alpine Road campus, which sits off I-20 near Polo Road Elementary School and Windsor Lake.

Instruction space will swell to 35 classrooms at the new campus, with room to grow in a cross-shaped building, a crucifix topping its red dome. The building also features a chapel capable of holding 200 people, a cafeteria, a performing arts center and two gyms.

Outside, athletic facilities including a football-soccer stadium, baseball and softball fields, tennis courts and a track overlooking Windsor Lake.

Kasprowski declined to reveal the cost of the new campus, much of which has been paid for by donations from the Cardinal Newman community. Plans for the new campus have been years in the making, Kasprowski said, starting around the time she became the school’s principal a decade ago. The long process included having to petition Pope Francis and his Vatican Council to build a new campus and sell the old one.

“I think there are a lot of people that, even though the campus is going up ... I think they still don’t believe it’s happening because it’s been such a long time coming,” Kasprowski said. “It’s a dream come true.”

To commemorate the school’s long history, a time capsule will be buried under a tile in the new school’s entryway, filled with memories from the original campus and the students and families who made it their home.

“When I gave (last year’s) commencement address, what I said to the seniors was that this place will always be their home, even if it’s at the new school,” Greenwood said. “And there’s no place like home.”

This story was originally published August 16, 2015 at 9:09 PM.