After finishing a successful run at Hyde Park, Jarve Lewis-Bey and Keenan Phillips-Riley took last year off from football coaching.
But they got the itch to get back in the game when they saw the Curie job open up and they made a pact. They would both apply, and come on board as a package deal no matter who got it.
“My resume was pretty much lost,” Phillips-Riley said. “Which pretty much turned out to be a good thing.”
Lewis-Bey got the job, Phillips-Riley took over as offensive coordinator and the rest is history.
After starting 1-4, the Condors returned to the IHSA playoffs for the first time since 2019. It’s the latest success story for Lewis-Bey, a Senn graduate who also took his alma mater and Marshall to the playoffs before joining Phillips-Riley’s staff as defensive coordinator.
Curie finished 5-5 after losing to Glenbard East in a Class 8A opener. The previous four seasons, the Condors had four victories and went winless twice.
It was a puzzling fall for a program that seemingly checked all the boxes for football success. Curie is one of the biggest schools in the state with an enrollment of more than 3,000. It had a solid football tradition with 23 playoff berths under five coaches dating back to 1980. And its basketball program is led by one of the state’s most respected and successful coaches in Mike Oliver, who actively encourages his athletes to play football.
Yet when Lewis-Bey held summer workouts, he had only around 15 players show up. Those players didn’t have it easy.
“I’ve got to see who’s going to be tough enough just to be around,” he said. “who can take me being on [them] constantly and can deal with it.”
At the end of summer camp, Lewis-Bey shifted his tactics, saying his message was “nothing but positives. … ‘I knew you didn’t quit when I yelled at you. … Let me see where you step up now that you know you are the man and that I believe you can do what I need you to do.'”
The Condors have fewer than 40 varsity players, a low number for Class 8A. But they’re heading in the right direction again.
“It means everything to me,” senior fullback/linebacker Eduardo Seija said. “I went from seeing everyone crying on senior night to actually be in the playoffs and be happy for once.”
The Condors weren’t in the playoffs just because Lewis-Bey was tough on them.
“We got taught things I never got taught in my first three years playing here,” Seija said.
“We brought the teaching point,” Phillips-Riley said. “We taught them how to play football.”
Lewis-Bey, 52, has been doing that for three decades. Fresh out of college, he came back to Chicago and started coaching. There were stints as an assistant at Austin, Englewood and Brooks before he got his first head-coaching job at Senn in 2006.
The Bulldogs hadn’t been to the playoffs in 14 years, but.that drought ended with back-to-back appearances in 2009-10 and Lewis-Bey finished 35-16 in five seasons. Then he was off to Marshall, taking the Commandos to the playoffs in each of his first two years and three times overall in an eight-year stint that ended in 2018.
He then joined Phillips-Riley as defensive coordinator at Hyde Park.
“It was such a relief off me from being a head coach,” Lewis-Bey said. “You didn’t have to deal with all the other stuff. I loved being an assistant.”
But then the Curie job opened up and he’s back in charge.
“I’m a Public League kid,” said Lewis-Bey, who is 76-58 in 14 seasons as a head coach. “So I’m trying to help as many kids as I can go to [college]. We’re just trying to get the kids out of Chicago, go to school, see something different.”