By Michael Wojtychiw
Whitney Young has seen a long list of talented freshmen walk through its halls. Some of those played on the varsity level right away, while others waited their turn as the varsity squad was full of upperclassmen and returning players.
This year’s freshman class, many of whom played on the school’s sophomore team, may be, as coach Brandon Bright called the “best freshman class the school has seen.”
“I started coaching at Whitney Young in 2010-11, which is when Jahlil Okafor and Paul White came in and they played frosh-soph first,” he said. “Seeing freshman dictate the game, I knew when I saw rhis group for the first time that it was a possibility that we can make it here. It was a matter of making sure they play together, good things happen.”
“I went to Whitney Young and am now coaching at Whitney Young and this is, by far, the best group of freshman to ever come to the school, as a group.”
Young and Curie had actually met twice this season prior to their matchup in the fourth game of the Championship Saturday quadrupleheader at UIC’s Credit Union1 Arena on Feb. 11.
The Condors had come on top both times, handing the Dolphins two of their three losses on the year.
“This is a good group of guys, a sophomore-dominated group that has been through it all,” Curie coach Mekiel Posey said. “Between last year and this year, we’ve been down in some situations where they don’t back down.
“The guys fought today and made some mistakes, but they’ve got nothing to hold their head down.”
The Dolphins got their revenge in the city title game, holding off a Curie comeback to defeat Curie 54-51 and bring home a city championship.
“This team has been really resilient,” Bright said. “There have been some ups and downs in the season, however, in the last five games of the season, which were the city playoffs, we righted the ship. We learned how to take those punches and fight back because when you play good teams, they’re going to come back.
“This is big because all five of us, when we came here, we all had our mind set on a city championship,” Young’s Nasir Rankin said. “For us to be able to do that, that’s really big for us.”
“We’ve been playing together for around three years and that helped a lot because we’ve got a lot of chemistry and makes it easy to play together,” Young’s RicoAntonio D’Alessandro said. “We all have big roles and have all been stars from where we came from before this, but when we got together we just gelled really well.”
Much like their previous two battles, this game was close throughout. The teams traded buckets back and forth and no until midway through the fourth quarter, the largest lead either team had was seven points.
Curie was able to draw it to a tie game twice in the fourth quarter, once with just over a minute remaining, but Young converted on four-of-four free throws in the game’s final 50 seconds and saw Curie miss twice in the last 15 seconds to secure its city championship.
“We got some stops in key situations,” Posey said about how his team got back into the game. “We’re a team that shoots a lot of threes and they weren’t falling but I told the guys to keep shooting, keep shooting, keep shooting because we’ve got good shooters.
“And they made some shots when they needed to down the stretch to put us in position to win and at the end of the day, that’s all you can really ask for.”
For Curie, it was the end of the season, but a very successful one that saw the team win 30 games.
“When we lost last year in the playoffs, I knew we had a chance to get back here this year.” the Curie coach said. “They didn’t know how to win last year and everyone wanted to get back at it.”
D’Alessandro led Young with 18 points and eight rebounds, while Rankin added 17. Isaiah Pickens was the high scorer for Curie with 11 points.
“In the first half, I noticed the points in the paint were really easy to get, so I went at that,” D’Alessandro said. “I was just attacking, not trying to overthink things. I wanted to leave it on the court.”
