75 years of… ASL athletics!

We can’t truly celebrate 75 years of ASL without looking back at our long history of athletic excellence—and our equally longstanding commitment to sports as a way to build character and community. From our earliest days spent playing games in local parks, to the thriving, sprawling modern program (and facilities!) we enjoy today, athletics has always been a pillar of the ASL experience, and remains critical to how we show up as Eagles in the wider world.

To understand just how much our program has grown over 75 years, we sat down with two people with decades of institutional memory between them: former director of athletics John Farmer ’97 P ’29 ’31 (ASL 2012–26), who played 12 seasons of high school sports as an ASL student in the mid-1990s before returning as an employee in 2012, and Doreen Murphy (ASL 1988–present), assistant to the athletics director, who has been one of the beating hearts of the program since 1988—more than half of ASL’s history!

For more ASL history, please visit our brand new online timeline.

When Doreen first arrived at ASL in the late 1980s, the School’s athletic landscape was a fraction of the size it is today.

“It’s probably tripled in size,” Doreen estimates. "When I started, there was just a varsity team and a junior varsity team for each sport—but there weren’t many sports.” Soccer, baseball, softball, basketball, volleyball, rugby, tennis, field hockey, swim, track and field, cross country, wrestling, and gymnastics were all on the docket, and of those, all but the final two still are today. But certain teams that would appear later in ASL’s history—dance, water polo, and crew, to name a few—were not yet in the picture. And today, with the addition of the middle school athletics program and high demand from students across sports, seasons, and ages, we boast more than 100 athletics teams: a number the late 1980s department likely couldn’t have imagined.

Other sports, such as cricket, may never have been officially formalized at ASL, but still played an important role in our earliest athletic history. According to our 2022 article about ASL athletics, some of the School’s earliest alumni recall playing cricket at recess at Kensington Gardens, near the School’s original Knightsbridge site, in ASL’s very first days. 

American football, on the other hand, was, at one point, an official ASL sport. In the 1961 edition of the Gateway, ASL’s (first-ever!) yearbook, the sports section features American football (or simply, “football”) as one of just three sports, with 17 team members listed. (The other sports mentioned in that same Gateway are boys basketball and baseball, suggesting that the many other sports—and girls teams—that would be around by the time Doreen came on the scene in 1988, were not yet on offer.) 

A black-and-white photo, presumably taken during ASL’s first year as school, and captioned “London school for young Americans, 1951,” features a large group of boys of various ages looking to cheekily offer an American football to an overcoat-clad bobby with a begrudging smile at the gates of Winfield House—the Regent’s Park estate that serves as the home of the US ambassador to the UK. To this day, ASL PE classes and athletics ASPs and teams regularly make the most of Regent’s Park, and neighboring Primrose Hill, for classes, practices, and field days alike, though we no longer have quite the same level of ambassadorial special access as we once did.

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought the earliest incarnations of the International School Sports Tournament (ISST) to life: American and international schools from all around Europe started coming together to explore collaborations and competitions, and ASL was a proud founding ISST member school—and remains one of eight full member schools today. 

Eddie Hufford (ASL 1967–2005), an ASL physical education teacher, was one of the organization’s founding members and, from 2002–2005, he served as its chair. Not long after the inception of the ISST, member schools settled on a model favoring championship tournaments once per season, rather than requiring athletes and coaches to engage in near-constant international travel. 

Still, members of our sports teams today frequently travel internationally at least once per season ahead of the ISST championships, to compete in matches against other ISST schools in Brussels, Paris, The Hague, Frankfurt, Zurich, Vienna, or Munich. Otherwise, our teams primarily compete against local, London-area schools—British and international schools alike.

Soon after starting her job at ASL, Doreen found that hosting an ISST championship weekend required a massive, community-wide effort—and she has since played a major role in coordinating that effort three seasons per year, year after year. Making it extra complicated, for decades after Doreen joined, ASL families would house every single visiting athlete (often requiring 200 beds at a time)... and she had to keep track of it all by hand. 

“People would avoid me in the hallway,” Doreen laughs, explaining how parents came to expect her to ask them to house a student (or two or three) from another ISST school. She and a colleague would stay on campus into the wee hours of the night as tournament weekends approached, compiling an exhaustive information package for host families (“We’d mail hundreds of things,” says Doreen)—only to arrive on campus the next morning to find the “light on the phone,” i.e., the blinking omen of a series of apologetic voicemails from five or ten families, informing the athletics department that they had to drop out of hosting, for this reason or that.  
 

John Farmer, the seventh director of athletics with whom Doreen has worked (and the first who was once a student-athlete in the program himself!), agrees that housing—that piece of ISSTs that invited perhaps the truest mingling between different school communities and families—used to be “bedrock of the ISST.” The housing piece of the puzzle was removed around the time of the COVID pandemic, in part because ISST competition had recently expanded to include middle school and JV athletes, and the requirements around housing became untenable. Hotel blocks became the more manageable, if less “immersive,” solution.

“I’d say the positives outweigh the negatives,” says John. “Now we have so many more kids participating in ISSTs—and what a great thing that is.” He highlights in particular the opportunity for middle schoolers to learn what it means to travel as part of a team ahead of their varsity years, as well as the chance for student-athletes who may never compete at the varsity level to have this special experience of traveling and competing with their Eagle teammates.

The ASL athletics program expanded significantly in the mid-1990s, when middle school athletics were officially introduced under their first director, Debbie Gatto P ’97 (ASL 1995–98). Today, our athletic offerings extend from Grade 5 all the way through Grade 12, with sports played in developmental teams in Grades 5 and 6, and competitively from Grade 7 onward, giving hundreds of middle school students the opportunity to participate. In doing so, they form invaluable connections with high school athletes who serve as role models. In just a few years’ time, the very same bright-eyed students who were once in Grade 7 and brand new to their sport, are confidently leading their teams, and inspiring their fellow athletes, as Grade 12 captains.

For John Farmer, Canons Park remains ASL’s very own “crown jewel.” 

“Pre-Canons Park and post-Canons Park, from an athletics standpoint, is night and day,” John says, explaining the critical importance of ASL’s 1994 acquisition of our private playing fields and fieldhouse on Honeypot Lane. 

“On any given Tuesday, when we’ve got both middle school and varsity teams out at Canons Park and it’s just a sea of ASL kids playing sports, it’s an amazing thing. It’s what I’ve always referred to in our athletics program as the ‘pressure valve’: we can always figure out ways to make opportunities for kids because we have Canons Park,” says John.

“Not to mention, we have the most unbelievable groundskeeper in the world, who, from my biased viewpoint, is the most irreplaceable person at ASL,” he continues. John is referring, of course, to Dan Bingle (ASL 2008–present). John says that Dan has “turned [Canons Park] into a first-class sports facility,” adding, “We are so lucky to be able to host all the things that we do all the time, and to be able to have our kids be out there—it’s the best.”

We are extremely lucky, too, to have a state-of-the-art Aquatic and Fitness Center shimmering just meters underneath Waverley Playground as of 2016, after funds for the major campus renovation were raised in our last capital campaign, New Frontiers. 

Our indoor swimming pool, which has six 25-meter lanes, allows us to do everything from teaching onsite swimming units to every single one of PE students, to swim and water polo practices, to hosting swimming ISSTs, and more. (The pool has even seen its fair share of dramatic cardboard boat rowing races—for high school physicists’ experimental purposes only!)

ASL enjoyed a strong swim program from long before the addition of the pool, but it was always limited by off-campus logistical considerations and constraints. Back in the mid-1970s, Standard writer Jon Englund ’76 published the article, “Swimming Pool Idea All Wet?”, in which he reports, “Rumor has it that there is a plan to construct a pool, possibly underneath the playground,” going on to briefly explain the difficulties of securing pool space off campus. Forty years later, that rumor became a wonderful reality.

All of these fantastic new spaces and facilities have allowed our sports program to grow and thrive along with our athletes. And while our program has, accordingly, shifted toward more of a participation model over the past decade—meaning that we rarely make cuts in the High School anymore, preferring to welcome aspiring athletes of all levels rather than turning them away—our competitive edge has never been sharper. 

ASL has won the Eddie Hufford Trophy (awarded to the top-performing school overall in the ISST at the end of each school year) for the last “five or six” consecutive years, John says. The award places equal value on athletic championships and the Sportsmanship Award, which honors the team at each ISST tournament that, according to the other schools’ votes, displayed the most sportsmanship throughout the weekend—“it’s a really good foundational principle of the ISST,” John notes.

“I am so proud of the sportsmanship displayed by our teams,” John says. “It’s part of the all-encompassing thing of the administration identifying sports as being a major part of what we do here; it’s not treated as a ‘different’ part of the school, and it’s incumbent upon everyone to do the right thing, play the right way, and represent the School in a way that they want.”

Ever since John started at ASL as a student, he has known it to be a place that recognizes the importance of athletics, and puts kids around adults who also care; coaches that are in it not just for an extra paycheck, but because of a genuine love of the game, whatever that game may be, and real care for the athletes they coach.

“The knock-on effect of that is that our students take a great deal of pride in being an ASL Eagle. I’ve heard it so many different times from different coaches and athletic directors: ‘Man, the ASL team just always plays so hard.’ I’m not uber-competitive, but I do take pride in the idea that this is a school where people try hard and play hard; where it really matters to them, and they’re willing to put it all out there,” says John.

But the success of ASL athletics doesn’t just belong to our fantastic students and coaches—it also belongs to our families. John recalls traveling to Luxembourg for a varsity basketball tournament in January 2016: his third winter as director of athletics. “There were 10 traveling girls and 10 traveling boys, and 38 parents went. I thought to myself, ‘Almost every single parent is here, and they’re wearing black and orange,” John remembers with a smile. “The other athletic directors were stunned. They’d never seen anything like it. But that’s what ASL is: Whether it’s families traveling across Europe or coming out to Canons Park on a weekday afternoon, athletics is the thread that pulls our community together.”

As we look forward to the next 75 years of Eagle athletics, we carry forward those same throughlines: coaches who care, students who play hard, with sportsmanship and pride, and a community that shows up to cheer them on every step of the way.

In June 2026, John Farmer ’97 left London and ASL to return to his home state of California as the athletic director at the Menlo School. We already miss him dearly, but as he has proven throughout his two ASL tenures: Once an Eagle, always an Eagle. He left an indelible mark on ASL athletics, and we are forever grateful!