January 2008 Archives

Spent a recent Friday night at Maywood Park watching the trotters go around the half-mile oval a couple of times., There were more horses on the track than there were fans in the stands.

They’re not the biggest. They’re not the best. But no team in our area this season has brought more smiles to this tired ol’ face than the Lake Forest High’s girls basketball team.

According to reports, Round Lake senior starter Jerome Brown sat out Tuesday’s game against Grayslake North – a 63-54 loss – and star senior guard Vernon Randolph sat out the entire second half.

In the IHSA Class 3A Antioch Sectional Complex, the clear top 4 teams are North Chicago, Grayslake Central, Chicago Senn, and Lakes – probably in that order.

Having spent the first two-thirds of this prep boys basketball season lamenting the fact that Waukegan’s Bulldogs were one quality player short, we now can all hope and pray that the missing piece to the team’s puzzle has been found.

There are no finer coaches and no finer people in charge of our young people around here than the cheerleading coaches at Stevenson (Jill Freitag) and Antioch (Robin Gwinn) high schools.

Chris Wroblewski is an outstanding choice. Besides being the best player on the area’s second-best team, he’ll be playing next year at Cornell University in the Ivy League. Clearly, he knows the game.

Besides us over here in this tiny corner of the world?

Just when you think that the era of specialization has taken over everywhere, along comes something to remind that it isn’t always so.

A reminder that anyone attending Thursday night’s prep boys basketball game, matching Zion-Benton against host Warren in Gurnee should not come to the game empty-handed.

Currently, Stevenson and Zion-Benton are tied for first place in the North Suburban Conference Lake Division boys basketball standings.

After this area’s top teams struggled on Friday night, Saturday was a great one for area prep boys basketball teams.

Given the high scores being rolled by boys and girls in high-school competition, it’s obvious that there’s a deep talent pool out there in the sport of bowling. So, how come the following high schools – which would seem to be natural fits to have bowling program – don’t have them yet?

Apparently, we have armies of cheerleader types out there upset with a recent article that appeared in The News-Sun about cheerleading, claiming that the cheer judges were being bashed. Nowhere in that article was anything said that was critical of how the judges scored the meet. If fact, quite the opposite was true!

Best high-school gyms in Lake County:

Two four-letter words of advice for Waukegan High’s boys basketball team.

Some rather unflattering reports have come this way regarding what occurred during and after Saturday night’s prep boys basketball game at North Chicago between the Hawks and Round Lake.

Something was missing from Sunday morning’s North Suburban Conference Cheerleading Championships. And we’re not talking about Round Lake High’s squad, which forfeited its right to compete when half the squad quit during the holiday break. No, what was missing was the energy.

Now that North Chicago High’s boys basketball team has set a school record for points in a game with 114 on Saturday night (114-71 over Round Lake), what can Hawks coach Gerald “King” Coleman’s squad do for an encore?

It is the ultimate team sport. It basically is the only sport around in which all team members are created equal. There is no “right field” in cheerleading and nobody to lead the team in scoring.

It would have to be the community of North Chicago NOT coming out in huge numbers to support its Warhawks varsity boys basketball team.

Just a reminder to the girls playing varsity basketball at Warren High in Gurnee. An overtime loss and a pedestrian-like six-point win over a conference opponent do NOT signal the start of the end of the world

Somewhere out there, actor Kevin Bacon is smiling. Borrowing from his degrees of separation theory, here’s how we arrive at the point where the mighty Rams of Grayslake Central are this area’s top prep boys basketball team

Seems like a couple of years back, when Warren High was the area super-power, it was Lake Forest – led by Bulls GM John Paxson’s kid, if the memory hasn’t completely faded – that was first in this area to knock the Blue Devils off the top perch. Turns out that history DOES repeat itself.

With Monday’s huge win over Cary-Grove, the Lakes High Eagles have now won 10 boys basketball games in a row.That streak will last …

Over here in The Locker Room, we luv the Lakes Eagles and their school-record nine-game winning streak. But, do we luv ‘em enough to pick ‘em to extend their winning streak to 10 tonight?

Which area prep boys basketball teams are going to be sizzling during the second half of this season?

It’ll be interesting to see how many of us pour into the Lake County Sports Center in Waukegan for Sunday’s 3 p.m. professional indoor soccer match between our Waukegan-based Rebels and a team from Massachusetts.

There’s an obvious reason why the Bulls didn’t bounce back from their traditional miserable, slow start this season: The December schedule was extremely difficult.

How’s that saying go? If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Well, somebody needs to do so some serious planning really quickly regarding two upcoming games involving Zion-Benton High’s undefeated boys basketball team.

With a 10-2 record and seemingly nine sure wins still on the regular-season schedule, let’s look at the games that will determine whether this is a boys basketball season to remember at North Chicago High, or just another nice season.

On Monday, Jan. 21, Zion-Benton (currently 15-0) will play at Hononegah (currently 13-0) in the final game of the Martin Luther King holiday tournament that Hononegah is hosting.