When a knee injury sidelined a Saint Andrew’s athlete, he tackled and conquered a new challenge: Bagpipes
Senior Chris D’Angelo leads the Saint Andrew’s football team onto the field in August while playing Scotland the Brave. While recovering from knee surgery, he learned a new skill, becoming an inspirational part of the team. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Ron Hayes
On Oct. 15, 2024, Theo Loucas, a goalie on the lacrosse team at Saint Andrew’s School in Boca Raton, was scrolling through his phone in the athletic training room when a TikTok video stopped him.
In 1996, the University of Notre Dame had a lacrosse player named Sean Meehan who also played the bagpipes. When his teammates found out, they insisted he play them onto the field with Scotland the Brave.
A tradition was born, and to this day a member of the Fighting Irish men’s lacrosse team leads his teammates out, piping that rousing march.
Theo, who lives in Ocean Ridge, watched the TikTok video, and had an awesome idea.
His best friend, Chris D’Angelo, had messed up his knee really bad in a football game against Somerset Academy Key the day before. He wouldn’t be playing football or lacrosse for at least nine months, and the Saint Andrew’s lacrosse season would begin on Feb. 15, 2025.
“Hey, Chris,” Theo called to his friend, “do you think you could learn the bagpipes in four months?”
Christopher D’Angelo, 17, is the captain of Saint Andrew’s lacrosse team. He is captain of its football team. He plays trumpet in the pep band. He has been a homecoming king. In ninth, 10th and 11th grades, he was the class president. This senior year, he’s the Student Government president over the whole school, and if that school had a Mr. Saint Andrew’s, he would no doubt be that, too.
“He’s an absolutely outstanding young man and a great student,” says Tony Seaman, the head lacrosse coach. “He does anything he says he’s going to do.”
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In an essay for his ethics class on the topic, “A Story That Shaped You,” Chris described the football injury he suffered:
“It was the district championship game. Third down in the red zone, everything on the line. The crowd was roaring, and the lights were shining on me like a Broadway play. We needed to score here.
“I lined up at left tackle, locked in and ready to go. I kick-stepped back into pass protection. Then I planted and reset my feet and just like that I heard a pop. I felt it and heard it at the same time. A snap in my knee. My leg buckled and I went down. The most pain I’ve ever been in. For a second, everything blurred. The crowd noise faded, my helmet started to get tighter pressing into the grass. I knew right away this wasn’t just a ‘just going to put ice on it’ scenario.”
Saint Andrew’s defeated Somerset Academy Key that day, 35-8.
Weight training takes on added importance as Chris D’Angelo strengthens his scarred left knee and gets back into football shape.
The pipes are calling
Chris considered Theo’s challenge.
Saint Andrew’s School is named for the patron saint of Scotland. Its sports teams are the Scots. In years past, bagpipes had been part of the music program. They’re heard at graduations, chapel and homecoming.
Could he learn Scotland the Brave for the opening game of the lacrosse season only four months away?
When life hands you a lemon, they say, make lemonade.
Football had handed Chris D’Angelo’s left knee a torn ACL and meniscus, so he would make music instead.
After all, he thought, how hard could it be?
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On Oct. 16, 2024, two days after the injury, Chris approached Emily Nichols, the school’s director of symphonic and advanced bands.
“Notre Dame does this cool thing,” he told her. “Do you think I could learn to pipe?”
Nichols jokes that she can make any instrument sound like she knows what she’s doing. Except the bagpipes.
“How about you play reveille on your trumpet?” she suggested.
But Chris was insistent, so she called Bill Paul, who had taught the pipes back when they were part of the school’s music program.
“It takes years,” Paul told her, but he agreed to meet the boy.
When his new bagpipes arrived in the mail, Chris sent Nichols a video of himself.
“He was making some kind of sound,” she recalled with a smile.
D’Angelo marches on the streets and docks of his Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club neighborhood in Boca Raton to practice playing bagpipes. He says the timing with his feet is important.
Taming ’a wild animal’
Pat Crowley played bagpipes with the Palm Beach Pipes & Drums for 25 years.
“The melody isn’t all that complicated,” he explains. “It’s nine notes. Once you get the balancing between the air and squeezing the bag to disperse the air, it’s a rhythm. But it does take upper body and arm strength. I set my pipes down four years ago, and I just wanted to die when I picked them up again. It’s like having a wild animal tucked under your armpit.”
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Chris did not come to the bagpipes as a complete musical neophyte. In third grade, the school let him try out instruments to choose the one he wanted to learn.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, “what do you think about the tuba?”
Mom said, “No.”
He moved on to the trumpet, which he’s played for nine years. He knows how to finger a wind instrument, and he can read music.
Now he set to work taming the wild animal tucked under his armpit.
“With the trumpet, you blow air into the mouthpiece and sound comes out,” he discovered. “With the bagpipes, you blow air into the mouthpiece, it goes into the bag, and then you have to squeeze the bag, the sound comes out and you have to finger the notes while marching in step.”
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On Oct. 29, Chris had surgery on his injured left knee at Boca Raton Regional Hospital.
“I was really nervous because I’d never had surgery before,” he recalled. “They had to give me some extra calm-drug, and then it was 10, 9, 8, and I was out.”
The surgery lasted two hours, followed by crutches for four weeks, then a brace, and physical therapy three times a week for 11 months.
When Bill Paul begged off more lessons for health reasons, Chris kept practicing. He couldn't march, so he lay on the couch with his leg up, until he could walk again. Then he practiced at home until bedtime.
“My dad was definitely bothered by it,” he says, “but Mom was very supportive.”
Chris has two brothers. Nicholas is 19 and attends Boca Raton Community High School. Matthew, 14, is a freshman at Saint Andrew’s.
“He would wake me up at 10:30 or 11 at night,” Matthew recalled. “Morning and night he’d march right into my room and not even knock.”
On weekends, Chris marched up and down his street in the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club.
“The neighbors loved it,” he recalled. “Old people said, ‘You’re getting better,’ and then they’d go back inside.”
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And he did get better.
He mastered a recognizable Scotland the Brave and moved on to Amazing Grace. And then Tartan Tapestries, a piece commissioned by the school’s arts foundation and composed in 2016 by Larry Clark, who specializes in musical arrangements for schools and universities.
“The hardest part is the lung capacity,” Chris said. “It takes a lot of air, and the timing with your feet. Every step is a different note.”
Did he ever despair?
“The lacrosse team told me, ‘You got this. Keep going.’”
D’Angelo leads the Saint Andrew’s football team onto the field in September while playing Scotland the Brave. He did the same for the lacrosse team earlier in the year while his knee was recovering.
Chris the Brave
The goal had been to lead his teammates onto the field for the opening game of the lacrosse season. But he beat it.
Two weeks before that game, he’d been practicing with a friend when the Rev. Ben Anthony, the school’s chaplain, asked if he could play in the chapel.
On Feb. 4, 2025, he led the processional for the weekly Tuesday Mass. His public debut was not Scotland the Brave, but Amazing Grace.
Scotland the Brave arrived that same afternoon, when he led the girls’ lacrosse team onto the field.
“For being nervous, I think I sounded pretty good,” he said.
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When the 2025 boys’ lacrosse season began on Feb. 15, Chris did not play lacrosse. He played the bagpipes.
“On game day, I put on my jersey, tuned the pipes and walked my team out playing Scotland the Brave. I didn’t touch the ball once that season, but in that moment, when I physically couldn’t play, I had never felt more connected to the team.”
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And what about Theo Loucas, who threw out the bagpipe challenge that October day in the training room? Did he really believe Chris would meet his goal?
“Not until he actually said he was taking a lesson and started practicing,” Theo said. “But that’s the guy Chris is. He’s been my best friend since seventh grade, and he’s a go-getter.”
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On Monday, Sept. 15, Chris returned to the football field for his first game since his injury nearly a year earlier.
“I played the second and third quarters,” he reported the next day in the midst of another physical therapy session. “I wanted to limit myself the first game back, and to be honest I was really nervous. I was sweating even before going in, but then after that, I just thought, if I’m scared and nervous, that’s how I’ll get hurt.
“I made a couple good blocks. I didn’t let anyone through, and that’s my job, so I did my job.”
Saint Andrew’s beat Saint John Paul II Academy, 47-8.
D’Angelo (second from left), a senior captain, lines up at guard on Sept. 19 for his second game in five days, marking his return from the knee injury he sustained almost a year earlier. He had limited playing time and wore extra support on his legs. The Scots beat North Broward Prep, 31-9.
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Next May, Chris D’Angelo will graduate, leaving the school he’s attended since kindergarten, and leaving its lacrosse and football teams without a bagpiper to lead them onto the field.
At Notre Dame, when a piper graduates, he chooses a younger member of the men’s lacrosse team to carry on the tradition.
Matthew D’Angelo is a freshman at Saint Andrew’s, and a member of the junior varsity lacrosse team.
“Hearing Chris practice was a little annoying at first,” he reflected one afternoon as he watched his brother pipe the football team onto the field.
“But the bagpipes are definitely exciting and fun. I also want to learn.”
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