When Patrick McBride received the Jack Lenz Semper Fidelis Award as Chaminade High School’s top senior athlete at the school’s recent graduation ceremony, he might have been the most surprised person in the auditorium.
In fact, when he couldn’t initially locate his name in the alphabetical seating order for the pre-graduation rehearsal, he momentarily panicked and thought something was wrong. Then one of his classmates pointed out to him that he was listed to sit in the front row, and he knew that something was up – but he didn’t guess what it would be.
McBride immediately sent a text message to his father, Michael, who shot him a quick note back, saying, “I don’t think that can be bad.”
But the possibility of taking home the award for top senior athlete didn’t hit the gifted lacrosse and football player until he was presented with the rather imposing hardware.
“It was a great surprise,” he recalled.
But his father wasn’t surprised when one of the senior Chaminade staff members told him why the school’s faculty and coaches voted for his son to receive the award.
“His kindness and his character prompted the faculty and varsity coaches to give him this honor,” McBride said, adding, “He’s a special kid.”
He’s special enough, in fact, to have been approached to play football at Amherst University. Playing as a linebacker for Chaminade, he had also won the Gerard Benyo Most Outstanding Varsity Football Player Award. But his true passion is playing lacrosse, which he had only begun to play in his final year at East Islip Middle School.
“I turned them down. Football just wasn’t for me. I like lacrosse better,” Patrick said. “I love the physical aspect to it, the hitting, the contact, and the speed.”
Not long after that, McBride was accepted at the University of Richmond to play lacrosse on a $30,000 scholarship.
“It was the best academic school I could get into,” he said.
McBride was an honor roll student through his four years at Chaminade and was a member of the National Honor Society.
“He knows that he has no boundaries to his potential,” his father said. “But he knows his talents are from God.”
While attending Chaminade, McBride worked during the summer at the New Hyde Park Funeral Home, where his father is a funeral director. He said working at the funeral home gave him both work and life experience that most people don’t have at his age.
At age 15, McBride had already gone through a life-changing experience when his 11-year-old sister Katie died of Burkitt’s Lymphoma, a rare childhood cancer.
McBride visited his sister every day with his father and his older brother Michael. And he wrote eloquently about that experience, and his work at the funeral home, in an essay for his application to the University of Richmond.
He described the gut-wrenching feeling he had while watching his sister suffer through her fatal affliction. And he recalled the strength he saw her summon through the year she spent battling the disease.
One of his responsibilities at the funeral home has been “working the door” as he puts it, ushering family members in for wakes. “Working the door” became the title of his essay about a profound life experience, and the concluding paragraph described the confluence of his recent life experiences.
McBride wrote “I have worked the door for many wakes of children at the funeral home. I cringe when I see a mirror image of myself in the brother of the deceased. Now, understanding the feeling of overwhelming heartache, working the door will never be the same for me anymore.”
As he dealt with academic and athletic challenges at Chaminade, he said the memory of his young sister’s courageous struggle was ever present.
“I thought about it every day, how strong she was, how she put up with that,” he said. “It always puts things in perspective. My problems are really day-to-day trivial stuff.”
It’s a perspective he will doubtless take with him to Richmond, where he hopes to maintain a good enough grade-point average to be admitted to the university’s business school after his sophomore year.
McBride said he’ll likely follow his older brother’s lead and become an accountant. Working at the funeral home led him to realize that it won’t be his life’s work – but it gave him a new appreciation for the work his father does every day in helping people cope with their sense of loss.
“I don’t think I could deal with this all the time. I don’t know how my dad does it,” he said.
