Not long after charging through the front door of the largest all-girls high school in the country, Mother McAuley students discover their uncanny ability to infuriate the competition.
One night last February, as then-senior Amy McCarthy prepared to enter the fourth quarter of an intense basketball game against St. Ignatius, she instinctively blocked out the screaming from the opposing crowd.
A golden-if hurtful-heckling opportunity had materialized for some of the students in the St. Ignatius section: In October of 1993, McCarthy’s older sister and McAuley alum, Jenny, was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month.
As if appearing in Playboy in a mock McAuley uniform weren’t heretical enough, press releases about her pictorial played up the “naughty Catholic girl” angle.
“Boy, those nuns are going to be shocked,” McCarthy was quoted as saying in a release. “Their habits are going to fly right off.”
McCarthy later said she regretted the statement. But it was enough to shake up Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, which usually makes news-and breeds all manner of intense jealousies-because of more refined achievements.
McAuley, a single-sex Catholic school of 1,984 students, boasts the most successful girls athletic program in the state. It sends 97 percent of its students to college and has twice won the Exemplary School Award from the U.S. Department of Education. Its ACT and SAT scores consistently exceed the national average.
In fact, so many students reach state competition level in sports, music and theater that pep assemblies were canceled this year.
“We couldn’t possibly have enough,” said McAuley Principal Sister Corinne Raven.
Instead, achievers are driven through the halls on a golf cart and wave to other students in classrooms. It’s their 15 minutes of fame; celebrations that preserve class time.
The Playboy spread had given the reputation of the Mighty Macs-as the McAuley students are known-a small smudge. So when Amy McCarthy trotted on to the court, gleeful references to her older sister and chants of “Playboy! Playboy!” bounced through the rafters.
Amy McCarthy, who has the same bright blue eyes and long blonde hair as her photogenic older sister, says she never heard the jeers. Yet when she was taken out of the game after a few minutes, she sat hunched over on the bench with tears trickling down her cheeks, which ignited the opposing crowd even more.
“Actually I didn’t hear what they were chanting until about two months later,” said McCarthy, now a freshman at Moraine Valley Junior College. “I was crying because my coach was making me mad.”
A rough year
It’s not surprising that McAuley’s opponents are searching mightily for cracks in the armor. McAuley has long been a touchstone, and until Miss October stretched herself across several colorful pages, the school had led a relatively quiet existence.
“I hate to think what they’re going to chant this year,” sighed McAuley junior varsity basketball coach Rick Mondo. “It’s like a Notre Dame thing-I bleed Notre Dame, but most of my friends hate them because they’re successful and on top of the hill.”
It was just the beginning of a strange year for the Mighty Macs.
Today, Jenny McCarthy, a 1990 Mother McAuley graduate who lives in California, is the reigning Playmate of the Year, surely not the sort of lifestyle the saintly Catherine McAuley envisioned for her students when she opened the House of Mercy in Dublin in 1827.
And right on the heels of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink Playboy incident, a serious matter occurred which school officials tried to keep from the public.
Late in March, Diane Darrah, the school’s longtime varsity basketball coach and athletic director, called a team meeting after the Mighty Macs finished fourth in the state basketball tournament, and announced she was pregnant.
She told the team she would be going on leave. She promised she’d be back.
Darrah, who is single, also told the players she became pregnant through artificial insemination.
In May, the school’s board of trustees mailed a letter to the parents of all Mother McAuley students. Darrah’s name was not mentioned, but the letter referred to a “difficult situation” involving a faculty member.
It also said the board would work with the school and the Archdiocese of Chicago to “resolve the situation in accordance with Catholic principles.”
The matter was resolved behind closed doors. Darrah, a vocal and demanding coach, quietly agreeed to resign on Aug. 12.
On Oct. 2, Matthew John Ryan-Darrah was born.
He weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. He was 20 1/2 inches long. He was also named for Mary Ryan, the woman who is raising the child with Darrah.
With characteristic politeness, Raven, who worked with Darrah over the last 15 years, repeatedly declined to comment on the firing.
Darrah, known by reporters as a “quote machine,” said she’d like to tell the whole story. But the matter was settled out of court, with both sides agreeing to remain silent.
“I just want to put this behind me and get on with my life,” Darrah said.
“It makes everything that happened over the summer somewhat easy to forget,” she added. “You can focus on the positive and loving part of it instead of the turmoil.”
A Southwest Side tradition
Inside the lively, well-kept halls of Mother McAuley, where the suggestion box is stuffed with pleas for Pearl Jam and Nirvana to be played on the intercom during third period lunch, most of the gossip about the Playmate and Darrah has died down.
“The most popular topic is Bob, Kevin or Joe,” said sophomore Jenny Ratajczak, while eating limp french fries at Wojo’s, a nearby fastfood hangout which has charbroiled hamburgers, hotdogs and 60 ice cream flavors on its menu.
“If you find a note on the floor, you can be sure it’s about a guy.”
Not surprisingly, it’s outside McAuley where rumors float. Two recent ones were that Darrah is coaching at Moraine Valley Junior College, and that Jenny McCarthy’s diploma was revoked. Both are untrue.
“People are just so pleased there was a mess there,” said a mother of a McAuley senior. “A lot of people don’t like the school and they were so thrilled when any dirt came out.”
Ater thumbing through McAuley’s recruiting guide, it’s easy to figure out why someone might cast green eyes towards the South Side school, a sprawling facility on 99th near Pulaski, between St. Xavier University and Brother Rice, the Catholic all-boys school.
For one, it’s big and hogs most of the attention. So big that freshmen are paired with “big sisters” and urged to join one of the 30 clubs and organizations; or the orchestra, which has more than 75 pieces; or one of three choruses, which total 220 girls.
About 100 elementary schools feed into Mother McAuley, mostly from the South Side and southern suburbs, and tradition and family ties play a large part in the selection process.
One hundred and thirty families have more than one girl at McAuley and 100 members of the 530 member freshman class have sisters who attended the school, which costs $3,100 per year, just below the average for Chicago-area Catholic high schools.
“Personally, freshman year was probably the most overwhelming experience of my life so far,” wrote school newspaper editor Erin Barton in last month’s issue of Inscape. “But being an active member in McAuley allows me to have an active part in making McAuley what it is.”
The Macs’ winning ways
What it is to most is an athletic powerhouse.
The volleyball team has won eight state championships and is the only Class AA (large school) team in Illinois to go to the state tournament 13 times. The basketball team went to state four times under Darrah, won the state title in 1991 and placed fourth in 1990 and 1994. Last year, McAuley won the Girls Catholic Athletic Confererence championships in basketball, cross country, tennis, and track and field, and was GCAC runner-up in soccer, softball and volleyball.
Beating McAuley in anything, then, has become a desperate mission for some. Former Oak Forest volleyball coach Mary Leach still regards wins over McAuley in 1978 and 1979 in front of crowds of 2,000 as highlights of her career, which included more than 400 victories.
When the Queen of Peace basketball team upset McAuley two years ago in the conference playoffs, it was their NBA championship. The next day in school, the players jogged through the hallways to the applause from other students.
And when people ask St. Ignatius girls basketball coach Tom McKenna how his team will fare this year, they often say, “So how will you do against McAuley?”
Queen of Peace soccer player Denise Brendal, whose own career highlight was a 3-2 win over McAuley last season, said: “Coming in as a freshman you know McAuley is the school to beat. It’s nothing personal against them, it’s just the image of the school and what they’re known for.”
Preparing girls for life
McAuley isn’t just the biggest of its type in the nation, it’s the oldest school in Chicago. Opened in 1846 as St. Francis Xavier Academy for Females and located on Wabash between Madison and Monroe, it moved twice before 1956 when it settled at its present location on the Southwest Side.
The new school was named for the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, Catherine McAuley, whose face currently graces the five-pound note in Ireland. It opened with 550 students. By 1960 enrollment more than doubled to 1,250.
“Women were expected to do well there and they had high standards,” said Nancy Drew Sheehan, the Democratic candidate for state treasurer who was in McAuley’s first graduation class in 1960 and captain of the volleyball team.
“Once a month academic honors would be awarded in front of the entire student body. We’d wear pins on our uniforms. It was complete recognition,” she said.
Today at McAuley, the hallways are still flooded with ponytailed girls wearing the traditional skirt-blouse-sweater-vest combination uniform.
More programs than ever are offered to prepare girls for careers in the business world, and over the last five years, support groups have sprung up for children struggling with their parents’ divorce or for children of alcoholics.
The one thing that has remained consistent has been McAuley administrators’ claim that single-sex schools provide better education for girls.
Just 1 percent of the nation’s grammar and high schools are single-sex institutions, and there are 84 women’s colleges out of 3,000, according to David and Myra Sadker, who recently published the book, “Failing at Fairness, How America Cheats Girls” (MacMillan, $22).
“In 6th grade I was the only girl in one of my classes,” said freshman Brooke Cainkar, who went to Morgan Park Academy before attending McAuley. “I’d sit in back. I was scared to say a word and if I did the boys would laugh and make fun of me. Now I’m getting more attention than ever.”
But in Illinois, all-girls high schools are slowly vanishing. This year 22 are members of the Illinois High School Association, down from 35 in 1980. The most recent casualty was Northfield’s Marillac, which merged with Loyola this fall. Ironically, David Sadker says the college level enrollments at all-girls schools has increased.
“Parents don’t know the research and think the single-sex school is a dinosaur,” said Sadker, who teaches at American University in Washington D.C. “They don’t realize what an effective option they’re losing for their daughters. Smarter women’s schools are marketing themselves in terms of research that shows their effectiveness.”
The real picture
At Wojo’s, where McAuley students mingle with the boys from Brother Rice, a table of swimmers describe how they think others perceive them.
“McAuley has many stereotypes,” said sophomore Katie Lira. “They think we all have money, that we’re snobs and that we won’t like boys when we get out. But most of the people are friendly and sincere. It’s the type of school where-and I know this is gross-if you don’t want to take a shower in the morning you don’t have to.”
It’s also a school that-parents, students and teachers will tell you-successfully educates, builds confidence and enhances self-esteem. And like all schools, it has had to face some of life’s curveballs.
Amy McCarthy learned a difficult lesson about human nature when the Playboy hit the stands with the pictures of her sister inside.
“I could hear people talking in the halls about it and they wouldn’t know I was there,” McCarthy recalled. “One of my good friends who was a teacher would tell me the bad things other teachers were saying. It did hurt to hear it, it really did. I think my memories of McAuley are just how long those days were.”
But not game day. Amid the “Playboy! Playboy!” chants, the Mighty Macs beat St. Ignatius 65-45 and in so doing silenced the hecklers.
For the time being.
