Thanksgiving in Illinois is the time of both slow-cooked fowl and the first official games of the high school basketball season. With the usual full platter of holiday tournaments, fans, bellies distended, put the first groans into many a bleacher. There were some lopsided games, but also enough solid matchups to fight through the tryptophan. It is also an appropriate juncture to highlight a few other Illinois basketball stories of the past months.
Thanksgiving Roundup
Among the Thanksgiving tournament highlights was Iman Shumpert’s Oak Park team getting its first taste of humble pie at the Lane Tech round robin, losing to a Zion-Benton team led by rapidly rising sophomore Lenzelle Smith’s 19 point effort.
Brandon Paul’s Warren Township won a 48-47 barn burner over a Waukegan team that was without its centerpiece, sophomore Illinois recruit Jereme Richmond who was serving a three game suspension, and then closed out the Fremd tournament with a dominating, Paul-led title game. Paul’s performance no doubt pleased his college coach-in-waiting who fought Hawaii jet lag to take in the game.
Northwestern recruit Nick Fruendt notched MVP of the Batavia tournament, putting together a 26 point (9-15 FG), 11 rebound, 4 steal championship game line. Carmody could use his shooting now.
A Bum’s Rush In Country Club Hills
When a legendary high school coach is unceremoniously shown the exit by the school he has served for twenty-three years, 502 wins, 20 conference championships, all of it accomplished with class, comportment, and his kids best interests first, bureaucratic rationalizations don’t wash. The treatment of Hillcrest’s Tom Cappel by the school he had loyally and peerlessly served since 1984, guiding the program to two Elite Eights, 4 Regional Titles, 2 Sectional Titles, 2 Super-Sectional Titles, and a 27-5 mark in 2006-07 suggest an ugly tale may lurk beneath the surface of the institution’s banal citations of procedure.
Even from the Chicago Sun-Times’ brief accounting of the situation it is clear Hillcrest is using a supposed union rule to try to obscure what was more likely a power grab by an assistant coach and his loyalists. The school’s official line is that when Cappel retired as a teacher, union rules required his coaching position to be opened to other applicants. According to the school, when assistant coach Don Houston applied, the administration had no choice but to appoint him. But, given the many months of vacillation by the school it is clear this wasn’t merely a cut and dried case of a rule being enforced.
Assuming Cappel’s retirement from teaching was planned and announced well before the end of last season why was the decision about whether he’d continue as head basketball coach left to dangle into May? If it was merely about a union rule why didn’t Cappel accept the resolution blithely, congratulate Houston, and move on? You would think if it was an inviolable rule that had the potential to end his coaching duties, Cappel would’ve been aware of it. Instead he sounds confused and mistreated. He doesn’t sound like a man who can’t accept the rules. He sounds like a man who got ambushed.
Former Athletic director Lisa Wunar’s quotes about “support from a lot of people” and “he definitely has my vote” probably strike closer to the real truth about what transpired. Is it unfathomable that this was a tale of politics, perhaps racially tinged, in which certain factions of the community lobbied for the installation of a preferred candidate?
The degree of Houston’s complicity in Cappel’s ouster is difficult to ascertain, but it is clear he didn’t stand in its way. There is certainly not much evidence of Houston’s, or Hillcrest’s, loyalty to a coach who had more than earned it. Another question worth considering is whether Houston’s simultaneous assumption of the school’s Athletic Director post, replacing Wunar, is coincidental or another component of the story.
Only time will tell how well Houston treats Cappel’s legacy. In the immediate term Hoopraker will be interested to see if Houston’s leadership renders the kind of well taught, effort rich basketball that was Cappel’s trademark and was the reason for his program’s consistent excellence.
It was Cappel’s basketball teaching that was instrumental in the development of program alumni such as Monwell Randle (SW Missouri State), Odartey Blankson (Marquette, UNLV), Reo Logan (Miami, FL., Loyola-Chicago), Maurice Acker (Marquette), Jerel McNeal (Marquette), and Hoopraker favorite Shelby Jordan.
Stan Simpson Joins Hunt For Three
The transfer of Illinois 2008 recruit Stanley Simpson from Chicago Leo to Simeon gives Robert Smith’s team a significant boost in its bid for a third straight IHSA Class AA title. Already in rarified company Simeon seeks to string together another and close in on the record four straight by Wayne McClain’s former program at Peoria Manual. Simpson will benefit from a year of Robert Smith’s teaching and will be pushed by the practice company of fellow Division I signees Kenyon Smith (Illinois State), Steve Walker (Northern Illinois), and Pierre Sneed (Ball State).
The inbound transfer of Simpson and Walker from Thornwood (Hazel Crest) has no doubt raised the spectre of illegal recruitment, but allegations of this sort are increasingly, thanks to better enforcement, unfounded. Simeon, like Whitney Young which will benefit from another high profile transfer this year in Marcus Jordan, is an Option school, admitting students citywide by application rather than by geographic zone. This classification may give these schools a better cover for illegal recruitment of athletes, but the overall vibe from both programs is one of propriety.
Certainly neither school is emulating the Sonny Cox model of rule-skirting high school basketball programs. Whitney Young in particular can point to the handful of basketball players that have been and continue to be recruited by academically inclined programs such as Northwestern (e.g. Sterling Williams, Chris Colvin).
AAU Package Deals
The plucking of four ballplayers from the Reggie Rose coached (Derrick Rose’s brother) Mean Streets Express AAU team is either a statistical anomoly for Ernie Kent’s Oregon Ducks or the kind of silent brokering between college coaches and their AAU counterparts that is becoming more and more common. Joining Joevan Catron (Thornton Harvey) from the 2006 Meanstreets class are the 2008 trio of Josh Crittle (Hales Franciscan), Matt Humphrey (Hales), and Michael Dunigan (Chicago Farragut).
The fact that these four kids have been steered to a college coach who has routinely failed to maximize his often superlative talent is unfortunate. But as is often the case with AAU driven deal making, it is less about the kid’s best interests than that of the coaches making the deals. Package deals, as the aforementioned appears to be, may work out for one or two of the players involved, but others may find themselves in less than perfect fits, mired on a bench or with coaches and systems that are antithetical to their skill sets.
This does not stop an increasing number of college coaches who have found the easiest, and least policed, route to high school talent is to skip the high school coach and go straight to the AAU coach. With little to no regulation the interactions of AAU and college coaches are a murky unknown where the temptation for malfeasance is high.
And as AAU coaches influence over the recruiting game grows it will get to the point where it threatens the natural order of high school programs. The cases of AAU coaches using their power to influence high school coaching hires, already too common, will increase. The pressure on high school coaches to install more player driven, stats first, team second basketball will rise. These developments are already afoot and need to defended against.
