Former four-sport athlete Harris inducted into MC Hall of Fame | Sports

Athlete outstanding Stephen Harris, a 1968 graduate of Malden Catholic High School, has received a great deal of recognition during his playing days.

Last Thursday night, the Tewksbury resident received another honor when his name was forever enshrined in the Malden Catholic Athletic Hall of Fame.

“When you say what it means to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, that’s a nice icing on the cake,” Harris said. “It’s just a nice gesture for me.

“I have loved my time at Malden Catholic, it has been a great four years. I grew up in Malden and I’m from Malden, so my father went to MC, my older brother went to MC, and my older brother is also a member of the Malden Catholic Hall of Fame.”

A four-sport athlete, Harris excelled in hockey, football, baseball and track while he was a lancer at Malden Catholic. On the ice, Harris made a significant contribution to the state championship finalists roster during his junior season.

“The biggest event for me personally was my junior year, where we went all the way to the state ice hockey championship,” he recalled. “We played three games at the (Boston) Garden and ended up losing to Arlington in the championship. Everyone wanted to go into the garden.”

Despite missing about 12 games through injury, the four-year-old varsity star still managed to earn all conference honors as the top-three goalscorer in the hard-fought Catholic Conference.

On the gridiron, Harris was a member of the last Malden Catholic team to win a state championship in 1966. As a senior, the Lancers were the top-scoring offense in the Catholic Conference.

“We were undefeated, we won the Catholic Conference championship and we also became state champions,” he said. “That was a big event. Malden Catholic has not had a state champion football (team) since.”

While his skills on the ice were perhaps at their best, his football career will always hold a special place in his heart.

“If you ask people who knew me, they would probably say hockey is my best sport,” Harris said. “But the irony is that my brother was an all-world quarterback and I played on the same team with him. So hockey was number one, but football was a B.”

Also a member of the Malden Catholic Hall of Fame, Red Harris was a football phenom for the Lancers who continued his career at Boston College and was later drafted into the NFL by the Detroit Lions.

Two years Red’s junior, Harris followed in his footsteps throughout youth athletics. Whether it was little league, hockey, basketball, or Pop Warner football, exercise was an integral part of growing up.

“That’s all we did was exercise,” Harris said. “I grew up there, three blocks from the main park in Malden and school was only a few hundred yards away. So we went to school every day and planned what we were going to do in the park that afternoon. We were at the park seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s all we did was exercise nonstop.”

After Harris earned his Malden Catholic degree, he decided to do a postgraduate year at the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, where he caught the attention of the Harvard hockey program and also had the opportunity to serve on the USA Jr. Olympic hockey team play.

“After MC, I was in no rush to go to college,” Harris recalls. “I got accepted to the University of Pennsylvania and was recruited to play football, but I decided there was no rush to go to college, so I did a (postgraduate) year at Philips in Andover. When I played the Harvard team, we beat the Harvard freshman and they recruited me to play hockey.”

After a year of hockey, football and baseball at Phillips, Harris continued to play Division 1 hockey at Harvard University, including being a member of the 1970-71 team that finished 18-8-1 under Ralph Weiland.

Harris graduated from Harvard in 1973.