Gerald Coleman knows all about the glory days of North Chicago basketball.
The main thing he knows is that those days were far too long ago. Heading into Friday night, it had been a mere 36 years since the Warhawks had won a sectional basketball title.
Coleman was an all-state player on that 1972 team, which won a school-record 26 games. He went on to play college basketball and then eight seasons of European pro ball, but North Chicago remained his home.
Through more than three decades, he has waited for his old school to win big again, especially since he became its head boys basketball coach in July 2005.
That wait ended Friday, when North Chicago (25-4) defeated Guerin 71-66 in the Class 3A Antioch sectional championship game.
“It feels good, man,” Coleman said as his players cut down the nets. “It brings a little water to my eyes. I’ve been there, and to see them experience it is the ultimate feeling.”
Basketball success used to be routine at North Chicago. It had nine regional titles and seven 20-victory seasons from 1966 through 1982 and another sectional crown in 1967.
The bottom dropped out in 1984 when the Warhawks were 5-20, and the program didn’t produce a winning season from 1989 through 2000.
Lack of talent was never the issue. Lack of discipline was. Too many players wouldn’t pay the price it takes to win.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s it was an honor to wear a North Chicago uniform,” Coleman said. “The next generation was basically that if you were not in the starting five they didn’t want to be part of the team. We took a turn backward.”
That started to change in 1997 when the school hired George Allen as coach. Allen was a master chief petty officer at nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and he demanded accountability, responsibility and teamwork.
North Chicago was winless in his debut season but won its first regional crown in 20 years in 2001 and had posted two straight 17-victory seasons when he resigned in 2005.
Coleman, the school’s girls basketball coach, stepped in and has extended North Chicago’s streak of winning seasons to five. This year he has led it to its first 20-victory season since 1982, with help from his wife, Cheryl, who is one of his assistant coaches.
The sectional final also was unexplored territory for Guerin (17-14), an all-girls school until 2004, when it went coed after nearby all-boys Holy Cross closed.
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Holy Cross had never won a regional basketball title. Guerin won one in Class A in that inaugural 2004-05 season, though it finished with a 12-19 record.
This year’s team ended the regular season just 14-13, but that was deceptive because Guerin played a tough Catholic League schedule and lost several close games, three of them in overtime.
“That was frustrating,” Guerin coach Tim Carlson said, “but I told our kids the postseason was an opportunity to start fresh, and obviously we’ve taken advantage of it.”
As you would expect for two teams starving for a sectional crown, North Chicago and Guerin played with an intensity that bordered on the ferocious. The Warhawks don’t have a starter taller than 6 feet 2 inches and use great quickness to fuel a pressure defense and racehorse offense.
“We basically start five guards,” said Coleman, who has built the team around two juniors, 6-foot Keith Ford and 5-11 DeShawn Chambliss.
“They are both great students who have worked very hard and are the type of athletes I have been looking for. They are like two coaches out there on the court.”
North Chicago’s accelerator-to-the-floor speed helped it build modest leads Friday, but also squander them with turnovers. Its 67-60 lead with 53.2 seconds left looked safe, though, until Guerin guard Jordan Johnson hit two deep three-pointers to cut that margin to one point with 25.4 seconds to play.
Chambliss then hit four of six free-throw attempts to finish with a team-high 20 points and send delirious North Chicago students streaming onto the floor. Coleman had repeatedly challenged his players to match or exceed what his own 1972 team had done, so his players full appreciated what they had just achieved.
“This was real big because every time we had a downfall our coach threw it in our face,” Chambliss said. “He basically compared us with his team so we’d play harder.
“He pushed us in every practice and every game. He knows what it takes for us to do it, that you’ve got to be focused and prepared, got to want it and be hungry.”
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Read Barry Temkin’s blog, “Upon Further Review,” at chicagosports.com/temkin