Loren Jackson never seemed totally comfortable coaching basketball in a conventional setting.
Edgy, driven and ultracompetitive, he wanted to do things his own way.
Now he is, and then some.
The 38-year-old former Julian coach has started his own school, the likes of which Chicago has never seen. It has just 16 students, and they all play basketball for the Boys to Men Math & English Academy.
This is by design, and Jackson makes no apologies for it.
“We are,” he said, “a basketball academy.”
His academy takes up several rooms in the Morgan Park Baptist Church, located in a middle-class residential area on Chicago’s Southwest Side. All 16 students, Jackson said, live in one of two houses.
His players come from seven states, including five from Illinois. They have two things in common: All are talented and hope to play professionally, and all have yet to qualify academically for freshman eligibility in a NCAA Division I program.
That academic deficiency has brought them to Jackson, who claims that through personal attention Boys to Men will do what their former schools did not.
“We educate, we discipline and we qualify through athletics,” he said.
Boys to Men is one of a growing number of high-powered basketball programs at prep schools nationwide. Some are at new schools; some are stepped-up programs at existing schools.
Many of these programs have joined the new National Elite Athletic Association, which will conduct its first national championship in March in Georgia.
This growth could change the landscape of high school basketball, and with it has come talk of sham schools and grades given out like candy.
“I don’t think some schools have the best interests of the kids at heart,” said Sonny Vaccaro, who oversees Reebok’s grass-roots basketball program. “I guess it’s as good as the people running it, and we’ve found out some people running it are doing it for self-serving reasons.”
The vast majority of prep schools have strong academic credentials and a more traditional approach to sports, but the increase in elite basketball programs and talk of possible abuses concern athletic officials, including those at the NCAA, which is forming a panel to examine the issue.
Boys to Men has raised eyebrows in part because of eligibility controversies that dogged Jackson late in his eight-year tenure as Julian head coach.
Last February, Julian forfeited 19 games for using Nyal “Mac” Koshwal, a 6-foot-9-inch player who was born in Sudan and moved to Canada with his family. Calvin Davis, director of sports administration for the Chicago Public Schools, ruled that Koshwal’s eligibility had been established with altered documents.
Early last season, Davis had denied eligibility to Thijin Moses, a 6-8 African-born player who also arrived at Julian by way of Canada, because he presented an incomplete school record. Koshwal and Moses attend Boys to Men.
And during the 2001-02 season, the Illinois High School Association ruled 6-10 African foreign-exchange student Ousmane Barro ineligible because he was living with Jackson, something the IHSA said violated a recruiting bylaw. Barro is now at Marquette.
Jackson denied wrongdoing in each case. He points to his status as a certified teacher and to the numerous Julian players who have gone on to college, including Duke’s Sean Dockery, as proof of his commitment to his players and to education.
“I’m a teacher first, and that’s what people have to understand,” Jackson said. “This school is not about Mac and Thijin. It’s about young people across the country who aren’t qualifying.
“The bottom line here is we qualify kids because we work our butts off in the classroom and make them better students and kids.”
You hope that commitment is genuine, because as the man in charge of his own school, Jackson has the power to do it right or do it wrong.
He got the idea for Boys to Men about six years ago. Last spring he registered it as a not-for-profit corporation and rented space at the church, where he had attended Boy Scout meetings as a kid.
Jackson said his faculty consists of four teachers, including himself and his wife Paula, who volunteers her time. About 20 education students from nearby St. Xavier University teach and tutor to help meet their observation-hours requirements.
Jackson gets his curriculum from Keystone National High School, a Pennsylvania-based provider of on-line and correspondence courses that grades his students’ work.
More Top Picks Best Pans For Scrambled Eggs
Players awaken at 5:30 a.m., dress in collared shirts, slacks and dress shoes and spend about six hours a day in class Monday through Thursday and 3 1/2 hours on Friday.
Jackson and his mother Laura, a teacher who helps out at the school, own Boys to Men. Tuition, room and board cost $3,500, a below-cost figure that will at least double next year.
Expenses this school year, Jackson said, will run into six figures. Funding comes from tuition and donations from family members, friends and supporters.
Four students formerly attended Julian. The rest mostly learned of Boys to Men through Jackson’s contacts, including club and college coaches.
Two players have graduated from high school and are taking a postgraduate year to fulfill NCAA eligibility requirements. A few others are repeating a grade to catch up academically.
Junior Craig Brackins from Lancaster, Calif., heard about the school from his club coach and enrolled in order to improve his grades without having visited.
“I have not been pushed like this in my life, and I figure it’s what I needed,” he said of the academic work. “I’m pushed in school and on the court.”
Junior Gerald January from Macon, Ga., visited Boys to Men in early August with his mother, Eleanor, after a man who runs a Macon-area basketball camp suggested it.
Eleanor January said Jackson spelled out how his school would improve her son’s academic performance, especially his writing, and added she is satisfied so far.
“I was impressed with the overall conversation of what they could do for my son,” she said.
Darion Anderson graduated from Carver this year but hadn’t qualified for freshman eligibility. He considered attending a junior college but chose Boys to Men to preserve four years of eligibility at a Division I school and also because he believes the school’s national schedule will enhance his recruiting prospects.
“I’ll get a better chance at a bigger university,” he said.
Boys to Men cannot compete against IHSA member schools. It will practice and play a handful of home games in off-site facilities but will compete mostly outside Illinois, including at the National Elite Athletic Association championship.
The NEAA is a 32-member organization that its director, Linzy Davis, projects will grow to about 100 schools within two years. Davis is optimistic a national television deal and shoe company affiliation are forthcoming.
Davis, a Georgia prep school coach and co-director of a successful club program, acknowledged the existence of rogue prep school programs and vowed to bar them from NEAA membership.
The growth of elite prep school basketball worries National Federation of State High School Associations Executive Director Robert Kanaby, whose organization does not regulate such schools.
“In my judgment, it’s not educationally based,” he said. “It would appear to be more athletically motivated.”
Diane Dickman, the NCAA’s managing director for membership services, said the NCAA cannot be an accrediting agency but said its new panel likely will study the possibility of tightening initial-eligibility rules and procedures.
“We want to ensure student-athletes are coming prepared,” she said.
Jackson argues his students will do exactly that, even if Boys to Men’s goals include preparing players for college and pro basketball careers. It’s OK to help someone pursue such dreams, he said, as long as you emphasize education and the need for a backup plan.
“All people have God-given talent, and it’s up to us to use that talent to go as far as we can,” he said. “Would it be this big a fuss if this were a music academy and, instead of Mac dribbling a basketball, he was one of the best trombone players in the country and came here?”
IHSA Executive Director Marty Hickman, however, believes schools such as Boys to Men overemphasize basketball.
“This whole concept, you have a basketball school and education connected with it, seems to me to be setting an expectation for these kids I hope they can meet,” he said.
Jackson expects his school to stay near its current size for two more years, then perhaps expand.
He appears to be trying to establish a legitimate school, and heaven knows, he says all the right things. But questions linger.
You wonder, for instance, if he has quite enough teachers. You wonder, too, whether his team’s heavy travel schedule, which includes nine trips outside the Midwest lasting at least three days, will hamper the players’ academic mission.
And you wonder about a school where the boss coaches the team, especially when Jackson is under pressure to get his players qualified.
“You have 16 young people’s lives in your hands on a daily basis trying to achieve a goal,” he said. “I’m fortunate to have a very good family to help me with this venture, and it’s not easy.
“It’s not an easy deal.”
———-