Thoughts during the apocalypse, Part 21.

Coyle and Cassidy High School in Taunton is closing soon.

Another day on the long, long road back to normalcy, but I heard a story today that underscores how different the new normal will be after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coyle and Cassidy High School in Taunton, once the preeminent Catholic high school in southeastern Massachusetts, will be closing its doors once the current school year ends. According to the Taunton Daily Gazette, the Fall River Roman Catholic diocese made the decision because Coyle-Cassidy, already bleeding money because of dropping enrollment numbers, would have remained open only if it could have drawn funds from the diocesan treasury to cover its budget shortfalls.

The diocese said that dwindling revenues during the pandemic has made it impossible to keep Coyle-Cassidy and an elementary school in Buzzards Bay open. About 100 students from the Taunton area will transfer to Bishop Connolly High School in Fall River and be transported there free of charge.

That’s hard to believe, given that Coyle (as most people still refer to it) has been a part of the region for more than a century. The school can trace its roots back to 1911 when its founder, Msgr. James Coyle, added high school classes to the original St. Mary’s School. In 1931, after Msgr. Coyle’s passing, funds were allotted for a new high school named after him.

Predating other regional Catholic schools as it did, Coyle High drew a monopoly of students and athletes from all over southeastern Massachusetts. Indeed, my cousin David attended Coyle and played football there, and then went on to Holy Cross — where he had the misfortune of playing on the team that lost a season to a hepatitis outbreak.

Brenna Gonsavles of Norton,
Coyle-Cassidy’s top scorer.

By 1971, falling enrollment forced the diocese to merge the former St. Mary’s High School for girls (which became Bishop Cassidy High in the 1950s) with Coyle High, the newer Cassidy High building becoming the home for the merged school. The enrollment trend continued unabated over the decades as more successful and newer schools such as Bishop Feehan in Attleboro and Bishop Stang in Dartmouth siphoned away students.

Coyle-Cassidy was not one of my former newspaper’s core coverage schools, but its athletic teams played in the same league as Bishop Feehan, and a fairly strong rivalry developed between the schools. For a while, they even played their Thanksgiving football games against each other, which is a big deal in Massachusetts. Eventually, though, Coyle-Cassidy returned to playing crosstown rival Taunton despite the wide disparity of enrollment figures — in part because Coyle had rarely won on the holiday. The schools still played after the dissolution of the holiday rivalry, but Coyle hasn’t beaten Feehan since 1991.

An even better rivalry developed between the girls’ basketball teams of Feehan and Coyle-Cassidy. Although Feehan won most of the Eastern Athletic Conference championships over a 15-year period, Coyle-Cassidy always had outstanding talent — and would usually clean up in the smaller-enrollment divisions of the state basketball tournament, while Feehan had to do battle with the largest schools in the section.

Feehan and Stang have since departed the crumbling league that included Coyle-Cassidy, and those intense battles will forever be a thing of the past. Hard to believe ...

On to other thoughts:

** I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve been dealing with a really sore left knee over the past few days, almost to the point where I couldn’t walk without wrapping every Ace bandage I have around it just to get around the house. It only barely worked.

I’m not sure how I did this. I’ve had a troubled left knee since high school and I really messed it up playing intramural football when I was in college, but as it was in the days before arthroscopic surgery became widely used, I declined surgical repair and the accompanying full-leg cast it would have required, and I’ve been paying for that decision ever since.

I may have done it when I stumbled over a small frost heave while mowing my lawn for the first time this season last week. It’s gotten stiffer and stiffer and more painful, but with the huge wrap, I was able to get over to the local CVS in search of help.

I found it in the form of a Velcro-assisted knee brace. Most OTC knee braces I’ve found over the years have been very tight on my large and relatively muscular legs, but this one enables me to adjust the fit with Velcro straps. Now my knee has strong support that isn’t choking off the blood flow to my foot, my mobility is better, and I can feel the improvement every day.

At this rate, I may be able to mow the lawn on schedule next Monday.

** Is there a more stupid person in the White House (Donald Trump excluded) than presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway? In one of her recent TV appearances, she said that the World Health Organization should have been better prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic because there were 18 other COVID viruses before this one. Problem is, the 19 refers to 2019, the year the virus was first documented.

What a maroon.

** Also, I’ve never been happier to have direct deposit than now, as the printed coronavirus stimulus checks will have Trump’s chicken-scratches signature on them. I got mine this week and I never had to see Agent Orange’s signature on a single penny.

** Is there a guiltier pleasure of a movie than “Wild Things,” the trashy tale of sex, money and betrayal in south Florida starring Matt Dillon, Denise Richards and Neve Campbell? Add Kevin Bacon and Bill Murray to the mix, and this 1998 flick turns bad cliches into an art form. It’s been making the rounds on Showtime these past few weeks, and every time it comes on, I can’t help but watch it as if it’s the first time.

About the only other really bad movie that tops “Wild Things” as a guilty pleasure is “Showgirls.” Yes, this is what it’s come to during our happy little pandemic. And they wonder why we’d like to see sports back on the tube.

** OK, that’ll do it for tonight. Hopefully the knee will feel better tomorrow, because there are things that really need to be done around here and I need two legs to do them with. See you tomorrow.