Athletic powerhouse closes after nearly 55 years
Champagnat Catholic School started as the dream of a couple of Cuban exiles, borrowing chairs and desks from a nearby church, and building makeshift teachers’ desks out of broken doors and bricks.
It stayed a family-run business by the Alonsos for nearly 55 years, largely serving students from their heavily Cuban-American community in Hialeah, and along the way became an unlikely athletic powerhouse, winning state championships in football and boys’ basketball.
Earlier this month, Champagnat Catholic’s incredible, improbable story came to an end.
After 54 years, the tiny Catholic school is closing its doors because of health issues with the school’s director of operations.
“It was very, very tough. It was a very, very difficult decision,” said Isabel Alonso, whose parents opened the school in 1968. “The school’s been my family’s heart and soul. I was born and raised there.”
CHAMPAGNAT HUMBLE BEGINNINGS, FAMILY AFFAIR
Reinaldo and Maria Alonso were both Cuban immigrants, educators by trade and had a joint dream from the moment they first met: They wanted to open a school.
Reinaldo Alonso had been a teacher in Cuba and ran several Marist schools on the island. When he left his homeland, he also left the brotherhood, but he wanted to bring the same sensibilities he learned there to his new home in MiamiDade County.
In 1968, he and his wife opened Champagnat, a year before they actually got married.
“It was such a priority that they put everything they had into that before they even thought of having a wedding,” Alonso said.
At the start, the school had about 100 students, Alonso estimated. The Alonsos borrowed desks from a church, lugging them back and forth each weekend, and used bricks, cinder blocks and doors to build the larger teacher workstations they needed in the front of their five classrooms.
Pretty much her entire family, Alonso said, worked at the school at some point, and if they didn’t they were regular fixtures on campus.
“It was the lunch spot for my cousins who worked in the area,” Alonso said. “It was just where we created that bond, more than the diningroom table.”
The school grew as large as about 1,200 students, Alonso said, and had about 180 last year.
HOW CHAMPAGNAT BECAME ATHLETIC POWER
At 17, Alonso went to college and realized her high school experience was missing one very important element: There were no sports.
At some point during her freshman year, Alonso asked her mother what she thought about adding some sports teams.
“She said, ‘Well, if you figure out how to fund it yourself, go ahead’ ” Alonso recalled her mother saying.
At 18, Alonso was the youngest athletic director
in the state. The Lions began playing sports in 1995 with just baseball and boys’ basketball teams.
Sometimes, Champagnat played basketball with only four players, unable to find enough willing athletes around the school. At other times, Alonso had to fill in as coach when no one else was available. For most of the Lions’ first basketball season, she was just calling up friends to pick up games here and there.
By Year 3, Champagnat was in the state championship game. In just its fifth
season, the Lions won their first state title in any sport, winning the Class 2A championship in 2000.
Football, however, waited a decade.
“I always asked my mom to let us start a football program and she never agreed,” Alonso said. “She passed away in January of 2007 and May of 2007 we started a football program. I joke about it . ... She would always tell me, ‘Over my dead body,’ and I was like, OK, I’ll wait.”
For the past decade, football is perhaps what Champagnat has been best known for, producing
Buffalo Bills defensive lineman Gregory Rousseau and winning four state titles from 20132020.
The Lions’ four titles are tied for the 20th most in Florida High School Athletic Association history, are tied for 10th among South Florida schools and tied for fifth in Dade County. Champagnat is the only Miami-Dade private school with multiple FHSAA championships.