Shattuck-St. Mary’s Honors Its Recent Champions

Faribault, MN — Shattuck-St. Mary’s experienced its own form of March Madness this year with three national championships earned within 10 days. While ice hockey certainly had a role to play in the trio of national wins, leading the series was Daniel Eras ’16, a student from Costa Rica, who won the 2015 Senior Piano National Competition in Las Vegas on March 22. The competition was sponsored by the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), which conducts local and regional competitions to select competitors for its national meeting in the categories of composition, strings, vocal, brass, woodwind, and piano. In addition to earning the top piano prize, Eras won the Chopin Prize for the best Chopin performance of the competition. Before heading to compete in Las Vegas, Eras also won First Place in the Senior Division of Minnesota’s Schubert Club Competition on March 21.

The national title earned by Eras was followed by two USA Hockey Tier I national championships, earned by Shattuck-St. Mary’s Boys U16 and Girls U16 teams. The Boys U16 team beat Michigan’s U16 Honeybaked team 7-0 in the final game in Amherst, NY. The Girls U16 team beat Chicago Young Americans 3-1 in Green Bay, WI. Both teams are part of Shattuck-St. Mary’s nationally recognized hockey Center of Excellence, which had a total of five teams competing for national titles last week. 

The celebration of these three champions was held in Johnson Gymnasium on Wednesday morning. Daniel played a piece by Rachmaninoff and both hockey teams presented their trophies to Mr. MacMillan. It was a great event for the school to celebrate such incredible accomplishments by SSM students in two very different realms. 

Streaming video of the assembly