It’s shaping up to be a bleak winter for high school basketball fans. The Illinois High School Association’s decision-makers are keeping their options open, but that doesn’t matter. It’s all in the hands of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Pritzker has been remarkably consistent since this summer. There won’t be any medium or high-risk high school sports until spring.
So it is time to find some alternative options to get your high school basketball fix this winter. The first option is to head to Indiana or Wisconsin, where they are playing high school basketball with varying degrees of success.
There is a safe local option though, thanks to a project that the IHSA started six years ago. It’s called the IHSA Archives and is free to watch on YouTube. The IHSA has uploaded more than 1,000 games and adds new games nearly every week. There are hundreds of boys basketball state tournament games, stretching all the way back to the 1930s.
I’ll be featuring one game a week on the Sun-Times website every Thursday starting this week. I’ll watch the game, write up thoughts and put it in some historical perspective and then include the original Sun-Times game story (when available, some of these are really old).
It’s going to be a long winter, so why not bone up on your Illinois high school basketball history? There are so many great teams and players that most of us haven’t seen and old favorites that we haven’t watched in years.
I’m going to play it by ear and pick my games week by week. Watching old sports on the internet is definitely tricky, you have to be in the mood to watch the game so I don’t want to tie myself to something I’m not feeling at the time. The IHSA archive doesn’t give final scores or even indicate the winner, which is a great move. If you don’t know who won you can hold on to the surprise.
Here are some games I’m looking forward to checking out:
1978 Class AA quarterfinal: St Joseph vs. Westinghouse.
Sure, this is only a quarterfinal game but it is Isiah Thomas vs. Mark Aguirre.
1991 Class AA state championship: Proviso East vs. Peoria Manual
The Pirates featured the Three Amigos: Donnie Boyce, Sherrell Ford and Michael Finley. Peoria Manual had its own legend in Howard Nathan. Kind of hard to imagine but this was the first title game appearance for Manual coach Dick Van Scyoc. It took him 43 years to get to a title game. He would return.
1995 Class AA quarterfinal: Thornton vs. Farragut
One of the most famous games in state history. Farragut superstars Ronnie Fields and Kevin Garnett vs. Thornton and Tai Streets. This one features several iconic moments.
1989 Class AA state championship: East St. Louis Lincoln vs. Peoria Central
I never watched the Cuonzo Martin-LaPhonso Ellis teams so I’m excited to see this. Ellis graduated in 1988 after helping the Tigers to back-to-back state titles so he wasn’t around for this one. East St. Louis Lincoln was attempting to become the first team to ever win three consecutive titles and the game went to triple overtime.
There are so many important games and teams to check out including 1972 Thornridge, regarded as one of the greatest high school basketball teams in US history. I did come across one notable omission. The 2006 showdown between Derrick Rose and Jon Scheyer hasn’t been uploaded. That’s probably the most hyped game I ever covered. Maybe the IHSA can remedy that over the next couple of months. They will probably have plenty of free time on their hands.
