Play an important role at BFS - Friends Forever!

Read the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article 
"BFS Bests Calhoun for Volleyball Title"

Great moment last week at BFS: our Boys Varsity Volleyball team won the PSAA championship, an amazing feat for this first-year team. Our team's ranking, as of today at maxpreps.com: 120th in the U.S, 4th in New York State and 3rd in New York City. Congratulations to these student-athletes who will all return to boys volleyball next year, to our coaches and athletic department, and to BFS, our school which makes such moments possible for all of us. It is wonderful to have record of this achievement, so this historian once again wishes our school had a more complete record of all similar achievements at BFS, which brings us to the important role you can play.

1948 MAAPS League Baseball Championship
in which BFS defeated Fieldston at Fieldston.
Candid photo of Coach Wally Longley shaking the hand
of Leonard Von Heill '48 who pitched six consecutive
scoreless innings to seal the championship for BFS.
Photo courtesy of the late Patricia Doblin Bienfait '49

There have been many great athletes and teams at BFS, some won championships, invitational tournaments, and many alumni played with college and professional teams. Unfortunately, not all of our school's important athletic moments are noted anywhere in the records of BFS. Our Athletic Director David Gardella has been compiling his own list of BFS championships, our college and professional alumni-athletes, and other athletic milestones from 1996 to the present, but BFS needs your assistance in gaining a more complete record for all years earlier.

This historian is assisting by compiling a record of BFS athletic achievements for all years prior to 1996, that can be added to the record now kept by the Athletics Department. To do this, one can search the historic Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the hope that BFS made the paper. Alternatively, one can pore through our school's incomplete run of student newspapers, newsletters, or yearbooks, hoping that an important moment for our school got even the briefest mention in our own publications. Such time-consuming efforts yielded the knowledge that we had a Boys Varsity Softball team that won at least four back-to-back league championships in the late 1970s. We have photographs that now preserve some of our older banners, but they do not shed nearly enough light. BFS simply needs your memories to fill in the blanks in its own history.

Please take a moment to reflect on your BFS memories, to share your knowledge of BFS athletic history and to let us know of the post-BFS athletic careers of alumni, some of whom may be reading this themselves.

Friends Forever - Blue Pride!!! 

Great moments in BFS Basketball, 1925 and today

1925, BFS Boys Basketball Team,
with the Friends School League
Championship Trophy

It's a great basketball season for BFS teams, so today let's look back 89 years ago to February of 1925, when BFS won the Friends Schools national title in boys basketball by defeating Wilmington Friends. The BFS Digital Archives has this photo of our 1925 boys basketball team, with the Friends School trophy, which rests just outside our lower gym at Pearl Street today.

Finding BFS: Further Evidence

Some may remember that we published an article about the 1931 Football Team in 2006, honoring the 75th anniversary of their incredible feat, A Perfect Season - The Football Team of 1931. Ironically, while scanning new photos for the BFS Sampler album on the Photos page of the Digital Archives, I discovered that there had once been a plaque at BFS honoring the acclaimed football team of that 1931-1932 school year. The photos below illustrate how short institutional memory can be. And it's not just BFS, believe me, such memory lapses happen everywhere.

The first photo is of a wood shop class, taken in the late 1930s. What is on the shelf on the rear wall?

Blue Pride: State Champs! The BFS Varsity Basketball Team of 2003

BFS celebrates its remarkable athletic program and its athletes past, present and future this Saturday, February 23 with a 5 pm screening of the documentary Blue Pride State Champs, followed by a special reception. It's the 10th anniversary of the 2003 Boys Varsity Basketball Team's against-all-odds season that led to victory at Glen Falls for BFS and which is chronicled in the film. Read a little more about this exciting moment in BFS history at Blue Pride State Champs.