As a graduate of Cardinal Gibbons School, Chris Burley can’t get together with his former teammates on a Friday night to watch their alma mater’s football team in action.
The school closed in 2010, so the Crusaders football team is just a memory, although a very vivid and emotional one for the former players. In 1994, Burley and his team won the MIAA B Conference championship.
Over the years, he has taken a lot of ribbing from friends who played on the Dunbar team that won Baltimore City’s first state football championship in 1994, about how much better they think the Poets were and how Cardinal Gibbons doesn’t even exist any more. One friend asked if they had an alumni event.
So Burley decided to get his former teammates together for a reunion game, a chance to come together and reminisce about their glory days as Crusaders.
“It spurred the idea that we should do one for ourselves,” Burley said, “so I started a Facebook group with all the Cardinal Gibbons football players that I knew and said, ‘Hey, we should just do one for our championship year, because last year was our 20th-year high school reunion, but we didn’t have one.
“I said let’s do a football reunion and we’ll incorporate it with the championship team and everybody else, so it grew from ‘If you played on the championship team, come out,’ to, ‘If played football at Cardinal Gibbons, come out,’ to ‘If you went to Cardinal Gibbons, come out.’ Overnight, it went from just about 20 or 30 of us to about 50 of us who came out last year.”
The second annual Cardinal Gibbons Alumni Flag Football Game will be held Saturday at 4:30 p.m. on the new multipurpose field on the site of the Crusaders’ old practice fields off Wilkens Avenue.
Burley, who couldn’t play last year because of his obligation as an assistant women’s basketball coach at Bowie State, said he will be playing this season.
“I am going to grace the field for a few plays, then I’m going to retire,” the former Crusaders running back and inside linebacker said with a laugh.
He’s also expecting Roger Brown, a defensive back who played at Virginia Tech and on the New York Giants’ Super Bowl XXV championship team.
Burley has also reached out to the Crusaders’ other NFL veterans — Vaughn Hebron, who won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos; Jean Fugett, a Pro Bowler who played for the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl; and Kiero Small, who played for the Cleveland Browns.
Between 40 and 50 alumni are expected for the game. Last year, Quintin Moody, a Crusaders’ basketball star who played at Towson, also came out.
As important as the game, reminiscing during Happy Hour festivities afterward is also something Burley and the other alums look forward to.
“This year, this is the Class of 1996’s 20-year anniversary, so what we’ve done is we’re going to start to allow whatever class it is, that is their 20th year, they can pick the Happy Hour spot,” said Burley, who made it to Happy Hour last year even though he had to miss the game.
