🔦Program Spotlight: St. Martin's Academy (KS)

Those are the words of Dan Kerr, founder and president of St. Martin’s Academy.

When Kerr began forming the concept of a small, Catholic, all-boys boarding school in Fort Scott, Kansas, he was very intentional about the student experience at the academy. A working farm—to provide food for the faculty and students—was a chief component. Liturgical life, classes, and yes, rugby, all made the cut as key aspects to the experience of being a St. Martin’s boy.

To the outside observer, rugby may seem a curious choice for a school with strong monastic tendencies. Spend a day at St. Martin’s and you can go from milking cows at dawn, attending Mass and classes, to eating meat and veggies raised and harvested by the students themselves. And then, in the afternoon, jogging out to the rugby pitch — with a hint of sawdust and incense still clinging to your hair.

St. Martin’s is a peculiar institution in today’s world. And rugby, with its own peculiar demands, is uniquely suited to the academy’s ultimate goal: the formation of young men striving for a greater purpose.

Rugby wasn’t always a sure bet for St. Martin’s. The Kansas rugby scene was young and geographically fragmented, with Fort Scott sitting well removed from most established competition.

Add in the fact that the school has only about 60 students total, and the challenges are obvious.

But Kerr had seen the playbook before. He attended Gregory the Great Academy in Pennsylvania, long before St. Martin’s was even an idea, and was quick to give credit to his alma mater.

“St. Martin’s would absolutely not exist without Gregory the Great Academy,” Kerr says.

At Gregory the Great, rugby was embedded in the life of the school, and he knew what rugby did for young men. So when St. Martin’s was founded in 2018, rugby was chosen because Kerr had seen its fruits firsthand.

Turning that vision into a program, however, required help. And in rugby, help tends to show up.

Tim Kluempers, longtime head coach of Kansas rugby powerhouse St. Thomas Aquinas, played a pivotal role in helping the program get rolling—arranging scrimmages, offering guidance, and lending hard-earned perspective to a fledgling team.

It wasn’t always pretty. The early practices took place on a cow pasture littered with tree stumps. The boys were mostly undersized and inexperienced, and it was a humble entrance to the league. For the first three years, they were, in Kerr’s words, “basically getting destroyed.”

Still, a rugby team was launched. And the boys took to it with gusto.

An all-boys boarding school has a unique reality: a lot of energy, a lot of ambition, and a lot of testosterone — all under one roof.

“If you don’t give boys a common opponent outside the school, they’re going to find one inside the school,” Kerr says. “And it’s probably going to be the faculty.”

Rugby gave the boys something to train for together, something to measure themselves against. It took all that boyish energy and pointed it outward — toward a shared opponent, and shared struggle.

Young men need a challenge. Something bigger than themselves to confront.

In Kerr’s words, every boy needs a dragon to slay.

But rugby isn’t merely a pressure valve or a way to keep a group of teenage boys occupied after classes. At St. Martin’s, it also serves as a platform for everything the Academy is trying to form.

“I think it’s become a key part of the formation of our boys,” Kerr says.

So what is it about rugby that lends itself so naturally to the culture of St. Martin’s?

First, it’s the ultimate team game. There’s no quarterback equivalent. No single player can bend the game to his will.

“There is no sport in which individual brilliance counts for less,” says Kerr. “One player does not make the team.”

And beyond its demand for cohesion, rugby also places young men in repeated situations that require virtue.

“But also temperance,” Kerr continues, “because you get heated and you’ve got to exercise restraint constantly.”

That combination, in Kerr’s view, is where rugby becomes something more than just physical activity.

“You’ve got to combine those two things of meekness and ferocity,” he says. “The blending of those two virtues is so beautiful.”

Beyond courage and restraint, rugby also demands self-sacrifice—and it’s built into the game itself.

“And then it really also requires sacrifice,” Kerr says. “I think because of the nature of the backward pass. So many times what you have to do for the good of the team is you have to basically give yourself up.

“The longer you wait — that slight delay before you make your pass — makes the defender commit to you. And you’re basically giving up your body for the sake of the team.

“And I can’t think of another sport where that particular kind of sequence happens so regularly. And it’s just… what a beautiful thing that is, man.”

One person with a front row seat to the blending of virtues at St. Martin’s is Joe Bob Moleski, a 2024 graduate—and recently named Division III player of the year in college.

This fall, Moleski captained his college team, the Franciscan Barons, to a Division III national championship. When he talks about rugby, he points back to his time at St. Martin’s as formative well beyond the field.

“Everything at [St. Martin’s] is intentional,” Moleski says. “Waking up early, going to milk the cows, cleaning your room — it all builds discipline, but it also builds humility. And that shows up directly in rugby.”

For Moleski, the same habits demanded in daily life at St. Martin’s were demanded again on the pitch. Once he got past the initial fear of contact, rugby became less about bravado and more about responsibility.

“If I don’t do my job, I’m just pushing it off to my buddy,” he says. “And that’s not something you want to do. It’s not always some heroic thing — it just becomes part of what you do.”

One defining thread of his time at St. Martin’s—especially on the farm, in the classroom, and on the rugby field—was learning to get comfortable doing hard things.

“But there was way more joy than discomfort,” Moleski says. “What amplifies the joy is knowing what you put in to earn it.”

That mindset carried directly onto the rugby field, especially as St. Martin’s began measuring itself against larger, more established programs.

On paper, the odds were rarely in their favor.

The effort was there. The culture was there. But they still needed direction to get to the next level.

Both Kerr and Moleski point to the same turning point: the arrival of head coach John Prezzia in 2022.

Before Prezzia, St. Martin’s rugby was earnest, physical, and committed, but it wasn’t yet a force. What Prezzia brought was urgency and belief.

Moleski felt the shift immediately.

“Practices changed,” he says. “There was a seriousness to it. A belief that if we did things the right way, we could actually beat anyone in the state.”

That attitude shift changed everything.

In the first year under Prezzia’s leadership, the Kingfishers notched two huge achievements: beating St. Thomas Aquinas for the first time, and winning their first Kansas state title — again versus Aquinas.

For years, St. Thomas Aquinas had dominated the state, winning 14 state championships. Every serious program in Kansas measured itself against them.

St. Martin’s has now won three straight Kansas state championships, each of them coming against Aquinas — the very program that helped shepherd St. Martin’s rugby into existence years earlier.

“When we finally beat Aquinas, the entire league stormed the field,” Moleski recalls.

And by the time St. Martin’s lifted its third straight state trophy in 2025, the narrative had shifted in Kansas. What began as a ramshackle team practicing on a stump-filled cow pasture had become the program others were chasing.

But even as the trophy case has filled up, Kerr insists the results were never the ultimate destination.

That message, he says, is delivered to the boys by coach Prezzia at the start of each season.

“The goal of this school is to help you become saints,” Prezzia told them. “Saints are spiritually tough. But grace builds on nature. And in order to be spiritually tough, you’ve got to be mentally tough. And in order to be mentally tough, you’ve got to be physically tough.

“So what we’re doing here is getting you physically and mentally tough,” he continued, “so that God has the right kind of material to work with — to help you become a saint.”

“That’s really at the heart of it,” Kerr says.

At St. Martin’s, rugby reinforces the formation already taking place across the Academy. It places young men in situations that demand courage tempered by humility, and aggression governed by restraint. It teaches them how to embrace discomfort, how to carry responsibility, and how to keep moving forward joyfully when things are hard.

In that sense, rugby becomes a small rehearsal for life beyond Fort Scott.

That is the standard St. Martin’s rugby hangs its hat on: be excellent in this noble game. Acquire the virtues it demands. And carry them into the world in pursuit of something much bigger than yourself.

For more information about St. Martin’s, visit their website: https://saintmartinsacademy.org