It sure isn’t your typical group, this collection at Loyola.
It may have a 6-1 record, best of any Division I team in the area and the school’s best start since Jimmy Carter was president. It may be coming off a victory over Purdue, its first over a Big Ten opponent since 1994, and it may be one of the surprise teams of the young season.
But typical? They are so far from that they hardly can be considered Ramblers anymore. They should be viewed instead as Mongrels, “a cross (as the dictionary informs) between different breeds, groups or varieties, especially a mixture that is or appears to be incongruous.”
“We are. We ain’t pretty,” coach Jim Whitesell said, acknowledging the nickname is appropriate.
Then he laughed.
“It is a strange-looking group when you look out and see them,” he said. “But that’s what basketball is, a lot of it. Finding parts to make the other parts better.”
But these parts . . . see how incongruous they are. There is a 6-foot-7-inch point guard in junior Blake Schilb, the team’s star and a player of the year candidate in the Horizon League. There is a (barely) 6-foot off-guard in senior Chris Logan, a defensive terror whose cousin Nook Logan plays outfield for the Detroit Tigers.
There is a center who played for Australia last summer at the World University Games in Turkey in 6-9 junior Kye Pattrick, who attended the same junior college as Whitesell (Ellsworth in Iowa).
There is a forward from California in 6-6 freshman Leon Young, who idolizes Charles Barkley and who once weighed 280 pounds. Young is down to 235 but still watches a tape of Barkley before every game.
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There is freshman point guard J.R. Blount, whose parents insisted he attend a strong academic school. And sophomore center Tom Levin, whom Whitesell originally recruited to play for Division II Lewis University when he was there.
Junior guard Majak Kou was born in the Sudan and raised in Canada and was a member of Canada’s under-21 team at last summer’s world championships. And sophomore guard Pierre Parker, whose father (Tony Sr.) starred for Loyola and whose brother (Tony Jr.) stars for the Spurs, played for France in last summer’s under-20 European championships in Russia. Another brother, T.J., left Northwestern recently to play professionally in France.
There is Whitesell himself, who landed at Loyola after rebuilding programs at Division III Elmhurst and Lewis. He has one brother who directs movies and another who writes soap operas, a third who writes for “Cold Case” and a fourth who is the agent for stars Matt Damon and Ben Afleck.
“What am I doing coaching?” Whitesell asked with a laugh after relaying that news.
“Coach Whitesell has done a good job of bringing people in who would fit his mold,” Young said. “I think it works because we’re diverse. Because we come from different backgrounds, we all have to make compromises.”
“With me, Pierre and Kye being foreigners, we know how it is being from a different country and trying to relate,” Kou echoed. “We know how to make people comfortable. . . . There are no individual groups on this team, no `these guys go with these guys.’ We’re all together as a team. You know you can trust this guy, and no one has a hidden agenda.”
The only agenda belongs to Whitesell, who was on a first-name basis with rebuilding when he took over at Loyola in April 2004.
Back in 1987-88, his first season at Elmhurst, he went 6-20 and his center was a student janitor who never had played a college game. But the Bluejays were 19-9 and made their first NCAA tournament appearance in 1991-92, his last season there.
He went 6-20 again in his first season at Lewis but eventually guided the Flyers to five NCAA tournaments. He wasn’t intimidated by the prospect of taking over a struggling Loyola program.
There was nothing fancy about his plan; it involved discipline and a willful work ethic and unselfish play, and it inevitably grated on some who preferred the looser ways of previous coach Larry Farmer.
Whitesell acknowledges some resistance. New coaches always expect that. But with his team 2-8, he returned from a short Christmas break and made his stand, saying, “`Guys, you have to change. We’re not changing. There are certain things we know you have to do to be successful. You guys have to grab that.'”
Kou says the Ramblers were willing to listen:
“When we were losing, he kept telling us, `Just keep preparing. You guys are right there. Eventually you’re going to break through.’ He never gave up on us. He had more faith in us at the worst times than we had in each other.
“Some of us were like, `Man, is this ever going to turn around?’ But he kept his faith in us and eventually it turned around.”
It turned so abruptly the Ramblers won seven of their last 10 regular-season games and then won twice more in the Horizon League tournament before losing to eventual champion Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the semifinals.
“One thing that was kind of fun at the end of the year, people were like, `Hey, it’s March and we’re playing for stuff. This is exciting.’ Our guys really got a taste,” Whitesell said.
That taste pushed them through off-season workouts, preseason conditioning drills and right into this season.
Sunday’s victory over Purdue is the team’s signature moment, at least for public consumption. To Whitesell, a better example of Loyola’s improvement came two days after its Dec. 3 loss to Northern Iowa.
Young had suffered a concussion in that game, and so had Blount, who was cut badly enough by a stray elbow to need stitches above his eye. Schilb and some others were suffering from the flu.
“But we had a good Monday practice,” Whitesell said. “There were a lot of hurting guys. OK, that was a step. I told them, `Now you’re starting to look like big boys, starting to show you can take a little beating and come back.’
“Now they’re not out two weeks. . . . Last year I think we would have been a little softer that way.”
But last seasonthey were still the Ramblers. This year they’re the Mongrels, a tougher breed by far.
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