Three years ago, I was asked by the Religion of Sports, in conjunction with Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas’ production venture), to write a treatment for a documentary series about the history of Chicago high school basketball. The catch: They wanted to include current basketball currency. They wanted to include the now.
So outside of telling the 100-plus-year story of the Chicago hoops version of ‘‘Game of Thrones,’’ which really is the story of Chicago Public League, Catholic League and suburban basketball, I wrapped the story around what I thought was going to be the new ‘‘it’’ to shape the city’s high school basketball landscape on the boys side, having the cameras follow Curie and Kenwood for a whole season while telling the story of two schools in a yearlong battle for the city championship.
One school defending it (Curie), the other avenging its loss in it (Kenwood) the year before. Trying to win its first.
The reason being that Kenwood, never known as a sports or basketball power, was the school that had both its girls and boys teams in the top-ranked city and state basketball mix and both its gender-specific squads swept the JV/sophomore city championships that year. (Note: Even the school’s cheerleading and varsity dance teams took home city-championship honors that year.) Apparently, something major was in progress on 51st and Blackstone.
Three years later, the fellas finally beat Curie for Kenwood’s first city chip the day after Valentine’s Day, and the Lady Broncos’ 71-55 state-playoff victory Thursday against Red Division enemy Young (which had beaten Kenwood in the last three Public League girls title games) gave answers to any questions about whether they were for real.
Both teams searching for basketball state titles has been a part of Kenwood’s new identity, part of the new force that has become its reckoning. As a dual select-enrollment/magnet program, as well as remaining a neighborhood high school and one of the top academic institutions in the city’s public-school space for decades, Kenwood recently has grown into a perennial powerhouse, a symbol of the true power of sports.
How success via sports builds presence, builds profiles, builds the public and social status and self-esteem of an entire school by being a part of the city’s sports conversation when, for generations, academia was the only lane that framed it.
Adjacent to Kenwood’s basketball arrival, its baseball program won the city title in 2023 and is poised to avenge its loss in the city-championship game last year to Lane Tech and its football program hoisted city–title trophies in 2021 and 2023 and lost its most recent defense to Young in the city championship game last year.
Overachieve much?
(The school’s girls flag football team, in only its third year of existence, already has a second-place finish in the city championship, followed up by an 11-3 season and an appearance in the IHSA semifinals.)
Yet the full backdrop behind Kenwood’s current basketball run is not the run itself but what the school had to overcome to get here. The boys basketball free fall from the player-enrollment scandal last year that forced five players and three coaches — including then-head coach Mike Irvin — to be ineligible during the state tournament (17 players in total were found offenders in the residency-fraud investigation over a four-year period), mandating members of the JV to represent the school leading up to its exit to Simeon in the sectional semifinals, seemed as though it might be a death penalty to the program.
One impossible to rise above and distance itself from. So to watch first-year coach Joe Mason rebuild this team from the ashes in a single season to end the regular season ranked No. 1 in the state and No. 17 in the nation (MaxPreps.com), to be the only remaining team in the state with a single-loss record (28-1), winning the city championship and entering the state playoffs as the favorite to win it all . . . ‘‘special’’ seems like such an understated term to apply.
Making the Broncos’ 120-34 rout of Juarez in the regional semifinals seem like a statement game to every other team still alive that might have to face them on this determined Class 4A state-chip journey.
All said, on both sides of Kenwood’s young men’s and young women’s basketball curriculums, we are witnessing a forever educationally venerated public school of advanced learning transforming into a sports seminary. Witnessing it without it losing what it always has been and what it always has been about in the process. A heavy, purposeful task. One that only a few high schools inside of these Chicago city limits ever have been able to pull off. Definitely not in a span of only five years.
As a father of two sons who graduated from Kenwood and also being a Sherman ‘‘Dilla’’ Thomas-aspiring historian of this city’s basketball history, the Broncos’ attainment registers differently.
As original Kenwood principal Elizabeth Jochner once said in a 1985 interview: ‘‘The whole secret is high expectations. I have them, the teachers have them, the students have them and the community has them.’’ Unexpectedly, 50 years later, it’s the athletics program inside Kenwood Academy that has risen. Win or learn. Never lose. Only to expect even more.