The Windy City Welcomes Winter

Even the basketball players aren’t safe as violence continues to hit CHICAGO’S WEST SIDE. Here, a former coach looks back and wonders if things will ever get any better.

- Rus Bradburd

THE SCHOOL YEAR is well under way, and I’m back teaching at New Mexico State University. But I can’t stop thinking about my summer in Chicago. And Marshall High School. And Shawn Harrington.

As a boy, I attended Chicago public schools for 11 years, and then stayed put for college. Chicago is also where my wife and I have spent the past 10 summers, to duck the heat of the Southwest and visit some of my old haunts. Our tiny apartment is in what we call “leafy Ravenswood,” an idyllic North Side neighborhood where the biggest hassle is that the bistros on Lincoln Avenue are too pricey.

Four years ago I began spending a lot of time in a very different part of Chicago, the West Side. What I’ve witnessed there since 2014 is what now keeps me up at night. Let me see if I can explain.

In the 1980s and ’90s I also passed countless hours on the West Side, convincing black teenagers to travel 1,500 miles to play college basketball. I was a college assistant coach, a basketball recruiter, and this urban enclave was fertile recruiting ground for sleepers—young men who would not be going on to play at Kansas or Duke but could rank among the best players in our conference. Our teams were well stocked with Chicago kids. In my 14 seasons coaching at UTEP and New Mexico State, I was a regular at high school games, summer leagues, rec centers and tournaments across the West Side. Often I was the only white person in the building.

I met Shawn Harrington in 1992, and he was the primary reason I returned to the neighborhood when I started coaching at New Mexico State. He had been a stand-out at city powerhouse Marshall, and I recruited him to play for our 1995- 96 team. The story gets murky here, but Shawn played one great season for us before transferring.