Illinois’ great prep school basketball experiment is over, at least for now.
Boys to Men Math & English Academy, a Southwest Side boarding school created from scratch for basketball stars, is history after only two years. Decatur Christian remains, but its venture into high-level hoops with mainly foreign standouts is at best on hiatus after a single season.
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A lack of resources at least partially drove each change. Loren Jackson, the former Julian coach who founded and ran Boys to Men, said it has lost money.
Decatur Christian coach Alan Huss, hired a year ago to build a high-powered team, has left, saying the school’s inability to secure adequate practice and game facilities made it impractical to continue such an operation.
“It’s not conducive to having a program that’s successful long term,” he said. “It’s not fair to the kids.”
Jackson had connections around the city and country, and Huss had connections around the world, so assembling talent-laden teams was the easy part. Boys to Men was 65-15 in its two seasons. Decatur Christian was 22-6 last winter.
Outside the gym it was more difficult to assess the programs. Neither seemed to engage in any of the shenanigans a few prep basketball factories did, actions that produced newspaper horror stories that in turn helped produce new NCAA rules.
Still, there was something unsettling about Boys to Men, whose enrollment was basketball players who needed to shore up their academics and had a coach in charge, even if Jackson is a certified teacher.
Decatur Christian, meanwhile, has pursued its mission — excellence in education with Christian values — for 34 years, 33 of them with a low-key athletic experience, and a high-level basketball program wasn’t going to torpedo that. Still, part of the motivation for building a powerhouse team was to raise the school’s profile, and you wonder about the wisdom of using sports for that.
Neither Jackson nor Huss, however, expressed regrets.
“I think it was a great success,” Jackson said of the accomplishments of the 30 or so athletes who attended his school. “Every one of these kids will play college basketball someplace. How many schools in Illinois can say all their kids are in college playing college basketball?”
Of course, no other school in Illinois has just basketball players, but even beyond that it’s not quite so simple.
Two of Boys to Men’s top Division I signees left the school after one season and played this year at Eastern prep schools. Three other players from the 2005-06 season attended junior colleges last season, and another sat out the season at a four-year school as an academic non-qualifier. At least two of this year’s players likely will attend junior college as well.
All that chips away from the success Jackson had meeting his professed goal of getting players eligible to play as freshmen at Division I schools, a rate he says is about 75 percent.
The school’s successes include Thijin Moses, who just completed his freshman season at DePaul, and Mac Koshwal, who signed with the school last fall.
Three juniors have been cast adrift by Boys to Men’s closing. At least two, Jackson said, will attend out-of-state prep schools. One of those, junior guard Jeremiah Kelly, said he had benefited athletically and academically from his two years at Boys to Men.
“I had a great experience,” said Kelly, who played at Julian before following Jackson to Boys to Men and who has committed to DePaul for the 2008-09 season. “I learned a lot as far as not just basketball but life, period.
“It helped me focus more.”
Jackson’s other reason for closing his boarding school (although he said it will remain under another name as an online educational resource) was to pursue his dream of coaching at the college level.
Decatur Christian is not a boarding school. Its non-resident players lived with coaches and other local families. The difficulty finding enough people to house players next year apparently was another reason for the suspension of its stepped-up program.
Huss brought in eight foreign players and one out-of-state U.S. star. At least five of those nine are headed for Division I schools next season, including 6-foot-7-inch forward Mario Stula of Croatia, who has signed with DePaul. The two foreign players who have not graduated yet will attend other prep schools next season.
Huss also expects to coach at a boarding school next year.
His Decatur Christian experience reflects the growing importance of foreign players in U.S. basketball. Boys to Men reflects the academic deficiencies too many young athletes have and their quest to play college basketball as freshmen.
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Both types of players form a steady flow of talent, and that pipeline doesn’t figure to dry up soon. The only question is whether we’ll see another major prep school program around here.
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