NEW SERIES: How North Shore Country Day Transformed its Sports Program

Pat McHugh could not do the math when he took over as athletic director at in the fall of 1994.

In a school where most students aspire to gain admission into the nation’s elite universities, almost no one thought to use athletics as a springboard. The school’s sports facilities were outdated, including separate gyms for boys and girls, and the coaching staff was small and mostly inexperienced.

“When I came to North Shore I thought we were behind the times,” said McHugh, a former college track and field coach. “It was about getting us where we wanted to be.”

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The transformation of North Shore’s athletics program in the past two decades has been remarkable because of its breadth. Within the last five years North Shore has completely rewritten its athletic record books. Sammy Gray was named the best field hockey player in Illinois in 2010, three different girls tennis players made the state tournament in the past three seasons, and sophomore Juliette Corboy took third in the diving competition at state in November. McHugh said he now has at least a dozen kids in each senior class who might participate in college athletics.

But as noted above, the small, 200-student high school on Green Bay Road was not always filled with students who took sports seriously. Before McHugh came to North Shore, the school had achieved some athletic success from time to time -- the 1977 football team advanced to the state semifinals and the school’s field hockey team had always been a top program – but by and large, North Shore’s sports did not make a lot of noise around the state. McHugh has changed that, taking North Shore from a place where athletics were an afterthought to a school that routinely competes at a high level against its peers.

In 1994, McHugh arrived in Winnetka with a teaching background at institutions with similar relationships to sports. He had worked at Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia and coached track and cross country at Amherst College in Massachusetts. These schools were not nationally known athletic powerhouses, but their involvement in and attention to school sports was far greater than North Shore’s recent experience.

“I had seen other schools just like ours with similar kids do these kinds of things,” McHugh said.

McHugh set out to change the sports culture at North Shore.

This week you’ll read about:

• The impact of a new set of coaches, including Hall of Famer John Schneiter
• Vern Gambetta’s innovative training techniques and their influence on McHugh
• Peter Callahan and his journey to three state championships in track and field
• The 2011 North Shore boys golf team and their path to the school’s first state championship
• The rising expectations and standards of athletic achievement and preparation that shape North Shore’s future 

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