Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. High School has a great boys basketball team. It has a not-so-great academic record.
It is a school with plenty of basketball stars, but no National Merit scholars.
Nobody is more aware of that than Principal Richard C. Smith. The question he faces: Can athletic success be used to improve the overall quality of the school?
Flush with victory Monday, Smith answered yes. At times, he sounded like one of those losing coaches looking for the proverbial bright side after being trounced by undefeated King on its way to this year’s Class AA state title.
But it helped his logic that his team’s point guard, Ronald Minter, also is No. 1 in the senior class.
“What I’m saying is basketball does a lot of things for us,” said Smith, noting that seven players made the honor roll this year. “It gives pride to the students.
“You accentuate the positive while you’re working up. The basketball program itself may pull in another Ronald Minter. It may pull in a Ronald Minter who doesn’t even play basketball.”
Maybe, said Yolanda Simmons, a writing-workshop instructor, there’s something to be learned from basketball coach Landon “Sonny” Cox. Educators, she said, should try to be as goal-oriented and as motivating as a good coach.
“I’m proud of what Cox is doing,” she said. “He’s meeting his objectives, and you look at literacy, and perhaps we aren’t doing too good a job coaching.”
The academic statistics at the school, 4445 S. Drexel Blvd., aren’t sparkling. Only 41 pecent of its seniors took the American College Testing exam, averaging 14.5, near the bottom among the city’s 63 high schools. It was 42nd in writing scores for 11th graders, 45th in math scores, and 46th in reading scores.
There is another telling number: 83 percent of King’s students are from low-income families.
Simmons said students must endure all sorts of obstacles to learning. Two of her students have told her about being abused, and another, a 16-year-old, was shot last week in an incident that also killed an 8th grader.
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“There are just so many variables-and this isn’t a copout,” she said. “For some of them, just walking through the door is an accomplishment. It really is.”
Some students said that, if forced to make a choice, they would rather attend a strong academic school with a lousy basketball team than a hoops powerhouse with poor scholastics.
If a school is going to have a reputation, “it should be for academics,” said senior Kenya Harris, who plans to attend Lewis University in Romeoville.
“There are a lot of smart students in the school. They’re just not getting the respect they deserve.”
As for Minter, he boasts that being No. 1 in his class is better than being No. 1 in the state.
“It meant more than anything,” he said.
He cited two reasons. One was “beating the girls-let them know we have some intelligent boys.”
And sounding a more serious note, he said: “In the world today, you have to have a good education. You have to go farther than high school. Sometimes you have to go farther than college.”
King’s basketball reputation is a mixed blessing, he said. For the players, it provides the opportunity of an athletic scholarship. But it also means that King is known for little else.
Minter doesn’t want to be regarded as a teenager who excels only in sports, and he said he doesn’t think the school also should be regarded as one-dimensional. “It’s more than just basketball at King High School,” he said.
Of course, King basketball usually involves more than on-court action. The school and Cox have been subjects of controversy over the years.
The most recent was a midseason protest by some coaches about the number of transfer students enrolling at King to play basketball, a practice that has made Cox’s squad something of an all-star unit. Some have called this stockpiling of talent unfair.
But on Monday, Smith said the program had been vindicated. Scrutiny is good, he said, because it keeps coaches and administrators honest. In addition, all the attention has failed to uncover any wrongdoing, he said.
But the transfer issue lingers. Six of King’s players are transfers.
That may not happen again, said Fenger Principal Linda Layne, a member of the principals committee formed by interim Supt. Richard Stephenson to study the liberal transfer rules.
“With the restructuring and the reform that the principals committee will bring to the Public League, I believe we won’t have a team like that one representing Chicago Downstate,” she said.
The legacy of this year’s King team is uncertain. It may be that Minter and company helped inspire academic success. It may be that Cox inspired changes in transfer policies.
One thing is sure: Students, who will celebrate the title at a rally this week, will remember the season as loads of fun.
“It’ll go down in history, our senior year,” said LaToya Manney, 17. “It’s something I can tell my kids when I get older.”