Phil Anastasia: Putting an old school into a new wrapper

Something's lost and something's gained in every transaction, and the accounting will be complicated on the new Gloucester Catholic High School in Mullica Hill.

Much of South Jersey will be somewhere on the ledger, too.

Unless you went there, work there, sent a child there or coached a team that walked in there every winter - into that little gymnasium on Cumberland Street two blocks off the Delaware River in the rowhoused heart of Gloucester City - you can't fully appreciate the old place.

Just know this: Where it is, is part of what it is.

That intangible but undeniable something will be lost forever when the Diocese of Camden closes the doors of the main building and the annex around the corner and opens the new high school off Route 77, likely in the fall of 2010.

No more changing buildings between classes, with students walking down one city block and up another, past homes and alleys and a corner store. No more parallel parking on narrow, crowded streets. No more assemblies and school plays and basketball games in the gymnasium with the stage at one end and the student bleachers at the other.

No more home football games at Gloucester High. No more home baseball games in Brooklawn, home soccer games in Washington Township, home softball games on the same field across town as Gloucester's Pony-Tail League.

In figurative place of a small, two-site school with little parking and no athletic fields and 78 years of tradition will be a sprawling, 200,000-square-foot facility with new science and computer labs, an auditorium, two gymnasiums and acres and acres of athletic fields.

Think Seneca in Gloucester County.

Only private.

Think 1,200 students, an increase of more than 50 percent from Gloucester Catholic's current enrollment of 776 - many from the affluent new developments that have emerged in recent years in Mullica Hill, East Greenwich, Logan and Woolwich as well as Washington Township.

Think sports programs suddenly flush with state-of-the-art facilities - nearly all the fields are expected to have the latest in artificial turf, and there will be a wrestling/weight-lifting complex that will rival a small college's set-up - plus a massive infusion of new athletes.

The Rams are good in a lot of sports right now.

They likely will be a broad-based athletic powerhouse in their palatial new home.

And that will impact the entire South Jersey sports landscape.

Some members of the Tri-County Conference, which already is wrestling with the impact of the growth of Williamstown to Group 4 dimensions with Clearview and Kingsway not far away, could have issues with a 1,200-student Catholic school in its Royal Division.

The Tri-County already has had preliminary discussions with the Cape-Atlantic League on cross-scheduling in football - one proposal has all private schools in the same division, another has the schools grouped by enrollment - and the building of a new Gloucester Catholic only will add urgency to that initiative. And others.

Paul VI and Camden Catholic could feel the effect of some Gloucester County student athletes deciding to attend the new high school instead of traveling into Camden County.

Same goes for St. Augustine, an Atlantic County all-boys' school that has dozens of student athletes from Gloucester County.

Same goes for public schools such as Washington Township, Clearview, Kingsway, Williamstown and Delsea, among others - as the lure of a private school with those kinds of facilities, in that location, is likely to grab the attention of some parents in those sending districts.

And that likely will stir up more of the resentment that has threatened to split public and non-public schools in the northern part of the state, and has compelled the NJSIAA to form a committee to look long and hard at the ongoing issue. The committee is scheduled to make recommendations on possible realignment of conferences in September.

At the sectional and state level, non-public A competition in nearly every sport, girls and boys, likely will be impacted by the emergence of a new high school with an old athletic tradition.

Something will be lost.

Something will be gained.

Gloucester will change forever (some will lament, some will celebrate).

Mullica Hill will change forever (ditto, ditto).

And there will be this powerful new player on the South Jersey sports scene.

This new player will be big, strong and young, with an old, familiar name.

It will be like the son or daughter of yesterday's hero, the long-faded star who used to play in that little gymnasium with the cranky heating system and the dim lighting and the stage at one end in that now-shuttered school two blocks from the river.

You know, back in the good old days.