New school, facilities ready to roll

Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Raphael Talisman⁄the gazette The gymnasium at the new Henry Wise High School in Upper Marlboro has room for three basketball courts and a track around the perimeter of the second level.

Its athletic teams will hit the ground running, literally, as the school will field varsity teams this fall, rather than spending a year playing at the junior varsity level, as C.H. Flowers High did when it opened in 2000. Wise’s athletes will have the advantage of some of the top athletic facilities in the state.

The school cost taxpayers more than $92 million, including a 5,000-seat gymnasium that added nearly $7 million to the final tab. On the second floor of the gym is an indoor track and the structure is so large that several teams will be able to share the facility for practices on days when inclement weather forces everyone indoors.

While the gym’s lofty pricetag was the source of controversy, the facility is a genuine blessing for Wise Athletic Director Glennard ‘‘O.J.” Johnson, who will also be the boys’ basketball coach this winter.

‘‘Our main goal from the beginning has been getting the athletic programs established,” said Johnson, as Wise opened Monday with roughly 1,900 students in grades 9 to 11. The school is projected to have more than 2,500 students enrolled next fall.

‘‘Everything here is just immaculate,” Johnson continued. ‘‘Everything was done right. All of the coaches are happy. There is a main gym and an auxiliary gym and a world class weight room. It looks like one of the weight rooms that a top-five major college program would have.”

As is the case with every other school in the county, the football and soccer teams will share the same field, but there is a separate baseball field complete with a warning track and fence and a softball field which doubles as the football practice field. Johnson has filled all of the fall coaching vacancies, although the volleyball team has yet to conduct tryouts.

When the county last opened a new public high school, Flowers started with freshmen and sophomores and the sports teams were relegated to junior varsity schedules. When the school began its second year, the Jaguars were upgraded to the varsity level. Wise will be thrown to the wolves right from the outset, playing in the highly competitive County 4A League.

‘‘I think the one advantage that Flowers had, especially with their football team, was they had one year of junior varsity,” said Wise football coach DaLawn Parrish, who spent the two previous seasons on the sidelines at DuVal High. ‘‘We’re starting from scratch and we’ll have to go into a varsity schedule right away. One thing about this school is we’ll always have numbers. We won’t have any seniors and we don’t have a year of playing together before our season starts.”

Wise will assume the schedule previously assigned for Douglass High, which has been reclassified as a 2A school, largely because a number of its students will now be attending Wise.

In football, Wise will open the season Sept. 9 at home against Largo, which has moved from 4A down to 3A this year.

E-mail Ted Black at tblack@gazette.net.