John Jay Jaguars Looks Towards The Future, Football

PARK SLOPE BROOKLYN — Park Slope's newest high school sports program is growing, and they're setting their sights on the future. A future that might bring football back to the neighborhood, years after the pigskin left town.

"John Jay used to have a powerhouse football team," said Brian Freidman, the co-director of John Jay's athletic program, of the programs under prior coaches like Robert Bramble and the late Vincent Carbonaro.

Subsequent cuts to school funding, and to John Jay specifically during the small schools movement, left the football team in the dust.

"There's a lot of people that live in the Prospect Park area that have fond memories of football at John Jay," Friedman said, "so I've been talking to a lot of football alumni, trying to get them back and actively involved in our fight to get the team back."

Kathryn Krase, parent of a student at Park Slope Collegiate , one of the four schools inside the John Jay complex, thinks the potential of the Jaguars is huge — for the school and for Brooklyn.

She's also trying to get alumni, and the community surrounding the school, involved with its sports program by forming the Friends of John Jay Jaguars, which Krase hopes will also help centralize support for the growing program.

Krase said she comes from a long line of Brooklyn athletes. Her father played football for Brooklyn Tech and her aunts and uncles actually played at John Jay — back when it was called Manual Training High School.

Brooklyn high school sports, Krase said, can thrive in Park Slope.

"My son, when he was little kid up the block, would have loved to watch some games," Krase said.

While John Jay has a lot of space for sports, including a pool, one of its larger gymnasiums lacks bleachers, which limits how it can be used. Kruse says fundraising can help change that.

"The bleachers wouldn't just be for our students — it would be great for our volleyball and basketball players — but it would also mean that the community could have another resource for events that would have increased capacity," she told Patch.

Friedman says that while capital needs exist, and applauds the efforts that parent groups are making, his main focus as co-athletic director is to make sure the schools are attracting young athletes from around the city.

"I would say the biggest need right now is to continue to attract young players into all of the schools on campus, not just PSC or Millennium, and try to get people from all different middle schools and try to get kids who may otherwise not have known about the programs to know about the program," he said.

Friedman says one key component of getting the Jaguars on the minds of Brooklynites is football.

"Football is really going to be that cornerstone that would give John Jay that visibility and presence in the community," Friedman said.

The John Jay Jaguars, a consortium athletic program that includes four high schools — John Jay School for Law, Cyberarts Studio Academy, Park Slope Collegiate and Millennium Brooklyn High School — inside the sprawling John Jay Educational Campus.

After years of discussion, the project finally initiated during the pandemic lockdowns in an attempt to integrate newcomer school, highly-selective Millennium Brooklyn, with the other three schools which served mostly Black and Latino students.

Millennium came to John Jay about a decade ago, bringing with it an influx of white and Asian students, but declined to join the sports program the other three schools participated in, creating what many said were two segregated sports programs competing for resources — and sometimes with each other athletically — under one roof.

"Millennium teams had more resources, they had more teams, even though those schools had significantly fewer students," Krase said, "and so there were lots of concerns for equity."

A podcast produced by WNYC, Keeping Score, chronicled the story and the challenges facing the effort to integrate the competing athletic programs, including the story of the first team to play as the John Jay Jaguars, the women's volleyball team.

27 teams now compete as the John Jay Jaguars, and many of them have already found success, Friedman said.

"You would think that maybe a new program that we might be trying to find the right people or trying to get ourselves started," Friedman said, but the Jaguars merger meant that they could take advantage of "the best of what each program had to offer."

"We kind of got going right out the gate and found a lot of success in a lot of sports," he said.

And the women's volleyball team? Krase said they have continued to build on the lessons learned in their first year, and had doubled down on their commitment to "anti-racist integration and equity on the team."

Just three days before Thanksgiving, the Jaguars beat Midwood High School to win the women's volleyball citywide championship.