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St. Basil Academy Featured in The Amazing Race 10
Academy site of $1 million giveaway
by Margaret Sternberg
 | | From left, The Amazing Race 10 series’ host Phil Koeghan, and $1 million prize winners James and Tyler. |
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St. Basil Academy in Garrison leapt into national prominence last week as it became the final destination for the three remaining teams participating in CBS’s The Amazing Race 10. The first team to arrive at St. Basil, Tyler and James, won the $1 million prize the show offers the winners.
St. Basil was featured in the final minutes as the contestants, who were in NYC at the time, were instructed to go to “St. Basil Academy in Garrison in Putnam County” and then scrambled to find a taxi to take them there. Tension mounted as the viewer “traveled” with the anxious teams as they drove northward, eventually turning into St. Basil’s entrance, which had been made far more visible with new signs that had been requested by the show in order to ensure that St. Basil would be easily identified. The color chosen, Byzantine Red, is a color prominent in the Greek Orthodox Church.
The choice of St. Basil came about by accident. According to Father Constantine Sitaris, the Executive Director of St. Basil, the show’s crew had been scouting West Point as a final location and had seen St. Basil from there. The crew came across the river, found the property, requested to use it and was eventually granted permission to do so.
Father Sitaris said the show was filmed over one weekend in June, and that from Friday afternoon until Saturday evening both children and resident staff had to be off the property. When the children returned from their overnight stays with friends, they and the staff peppered him with questions about what had occurred. Father Sitaris, however, was bound by a confidentiality agreement and could not divulge anything, although he occasionally dropped playful hints, such as describing what had occurred as having been “amazing.”
Although they did not find out any sooner than the rest of the country what had happened, the children of St. Basil, at a previously scheduled party celebrating the schools receipt of their operating certificate, erupted in cheers when they heard “Garrison, NY” on the TV. Father Sitaris said the children were thrilled and intuited where the taxis were headed, crying out “That’s our dorms, that’s our dorms” when the taxi stopped in front of the buildings.
The children, as well, were correcting the pronunciation of St. Basil when they heard it mispronounced. Father Sitaris said their college students were both calling and text-messaging him during the program and had brought in their friends to see the show, knowing something auspicious was going to happen. He said the children were contacting each other, their friends at school and their siblings away at college about the show.
Father Sitaris said the excitement, expectation and anticipation for the children was “almost like waiting for their Christmas presents” when they saw the large screen television at the party, after having waited for months to find out and after having tried, unsuccessfully, to get someone to say what had happened that day in June.
Among preparations involved in the shooting of the show, Father Sitaris said that security guards had patrolled the property and that he had been asked to contact Putnam County Sheriff Smith because “the contestants would be stopping people and asking for directions, so that in every county between here and NYC, they had to contact the local county police department.”
Father Sitaris said that what had finally determined the use of Garrison was the inability of various “test” teams and taxis to find Garrison, with one team taking two and a half hours and going to Harriman and another team going to Harrison, virtually guaranteeing an element of unpredictability.
One of the appeals of the The Amazing Race and the reason it was permitted to use the property, according to Father Sitaris, is that it is a family-oriented show and provides “good, clean fun.”
This is not the only time St. Basil has been used in a television show; several summers before, The Food Network had filmed using the same backdrop that The Amazing Race 10 used. An episode of Tyler Florence’s Food 911 was filmed there, having been contacted by Roseanne Roberts, Father Sitaris’s Administrative Assistant, who asked for help in cooking for 30-children. Father Sitaris assisted Mr. Florence in cooking a pizza on a grill, while the children looked on. Sitaris said they occasionally air the show, generally around the Fourth of July, adding that show, too, was “a lot of fun, and good for the children.”
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