Alumni Profile: Mike Scannapieco ‘09

Nine years after graduating from the Prep, Mr. Mike Scannapieco ‘09 was working in admissions at Temple. 

Unhappy and looking for a change, Scannapieco looked one subway stop south to a place he’d grown to love over his four years as a student and as a member of the Prep’s Alumni Service Corps.

“I coached freshman football with Leo Carlin [as an ASC], who was an alum and coached freshman football here for a while, and I'd spoken with Andrew Whelan, and he had had me speak to his film discussion club a couple times after studying film at Temple, where I was like, oh, [teaching is] cool. I liked coaching and teaching and forming relationships with those students, and then after my ASC, it was a four-year journey to find my way back here to do admissions.”

That journey, which eventually led back to 17th and Girard, began in the fall of 2005, when Scannapieco came to the Prep as a freshman. 

“I came from St. Dorothy's in Drexel Hill, which, at the time, was a large diocesan school. I graduated with 56 kids. Coming to St. Joe's Prep after eight years with the same 50 or so kids, and then taking a 45-minute bus to North Philadelphia with kids from all over, broadened my world. Some of my best friends to this day are guys I met in my homeroom who were from Maple Glen and neighborhoods of Philadelphia that I had never heard of in my entire life until first period science.”

One of the biggest impacts the Prep had on Scannapieco was his view of Catholicism, which shifted significantly from his time at St. Dot’s, an Archdiocesan school, to the Prep.

“I learned the Ten Commandments, and I remember learning that sin is bad and we want to go to heaven. But in all seriousness, then going to a Jesuit school, you sort of start to learn either explicitly or intrinsically the idea of faith in action, of community service, and being a man for others, and our faith being deeply, deeply tied to how we interact with the people in the world around us rather than necessarily a set of rituals that we abide by on a day-in and day-out basis. It goes beyond the hour that we spend on Sunday sitting in a pew; if it ends there, it's not worth much.”

Following being a four-year manager with Temple football, Scannapieco’s time coaching freshman football sparked an interest that would continue when he returned four years later: coaching. 

“When I came back and coached freshman football and got to see what Gabe Infante and Tim Roken and a lot of the guys who are still here that I've worked with now for, you know, nine, ten years were building, it hooked me.”

While coaching and teaching, Scannapieco also works in admissions. There, he gets to welcome hundreds of new students to the place he loves each year. 

In that process, Scannapieco and the team he works alongside don’t hide the fact that the Prep is tougher than most other schools, but they prove that the school is well worth it to attend. 

“We don't shy away from us being the different option or the sometimes harder option. Students are gonna take a longer commute to go here. They're probably gonna have more homework. It's gonna be a little bit more rigorous. They have to take Latin. They have to take more years of language than they would at most other high schools. We're very open about that, and we believe that those are the things that shape our students in our community: not being afraid of difficult things. Being willing to take hard things head-on is what makes our students successful and so much ready for the next level beyond, because they're not afraid of hard stuff.”

Scannapieco doesn’t see his job as ‘selling’ the Prep as outsiders might. He sees it as showing Prep pride, something he’s had for the past 21 years of his life.

“It's easy to sell something when you really believe in it and love it. It doesn't necessarily feel like selling. It is in a professional sense, but internally it doesn't feel like I'm trying to sell somebody. [There’s a] sense of pride for me.”