The sparkling white helmets weave and bob in front of Rev. Donald Lewandowski as the Mendel High School football players run through drills on the picturesque campus that covers four city blocks on the Far South Side.
He speaks proudly about the financially strapped school he runs, its struggling football team and the aspirations he holds for both. Lewandowski, an enthusiastic young coach and a promising young athlete perhaps will be irrevocably linked this season, three months that could seal the fate of a program that has bonded them at this time, in this unlikely place.
The practice uniforms were part of $15,000 Lewandowski allocated for new equipment last year in one of his first acts as Mendel`s principal. At the time, Mendel`s projected enrollment for the 1985-86 school year was 730, safely above the 700 students needed for the school to break even financially. The actual enrollment turned out to be 656. This year, it has dipped to around 550.
For two years before the new equipment arrived, Lewandowski fashioned makeshift rubberbands out of old innertubes and placed them around the legs of the players` practice pants to keep the pads from sliding or falling out.
”These were things from my era,” says Lewandowski, an All-Catholic League lineman for Mendel in 1960. ”It was embarrassing.”
Lewandowski graduated from Mendel in 1961, an era when the school was all-white and the football team was a power. Since then, the demographics of the surrounding communities have changed drastically. Enrollment dropped from a high of close to 1,800 in the late 1960s to just below 500 in the mid-1970s. The school was turning from a white enrollment to a black one. The last white student at Mendel graduated two years ago.
Students from primarily black communities would come from grammar schools that do not have football programs. Basketball, not football, was important to them. It showed.
”They`d come in as raw as can be,” says John Wilson, who coached Mendel last year. ”Then you`d have to whip them into shape to play the Ritas and Laurences and Carmels. The skill positions, it doesn`t hurt you that much. Where it hurts you in the Catholic League is the offensive and defensive lines.”
Mendel has not won a Catholic League game since 1982 and has not had a winning season since 1973. The last three seasons, the Monarchs finished 2-7, 1-8 and 1-8. They are 2-6 this season.
”I don`t know how much worse it can get,” says Mendel athletic director Mike Curtin. ”The football times here are just not real good.”
This season once appeared to hold special promise. An experienced group of seniors would be molded by an enthusiastic group of seven coaches, with an average age of 25. Then there was Charles Collins.
An erstwhile basketball player, Collins has grown into a 6-foot-4-inch, 270-pound defensive tackle, one blessed with speed normally unheard of for a man his size, an ingredient that has enticed college recruiters to visit Mendel at a time when students are staying away. A recent Sports Illustrated article rated him the country`s fourth-best high school prospect.
Collins, who broke the school shot put record as a sophomore, its discus record as a junior and one of its backboards while dunking a basketball last winter, was larger than life heading into his senior season. Last spring, when he weighed about 255, he ran a 4.6-second 40-yard dash and an 11.3 100 meters. At 270, he has been timed in 4.8. He has a vertical jump of 37 inches and has been able to dunk since the 6th grade.
His presence appeared to be a godsend for such a program.
”We`ve got enough problems down here without having a losing season and, because we have Charles Collins, having people focus on that,” Curtin says. ”He`s not a savior, that`s for sure. We need 14 or 15 of those guys. Like St. Rita and St. Laurence, they have a bunch of Collinses. And we have him.”
Now Mendel does not even have Collins. He was sidelined for the season after suffering partially torn ligaments in his left knee in the fourth quarter of a 9-0 loss to St. Laurence Oct. 12. It may have been the last in a series of blows that could eventually fell an entire program.
”I just wanted to finish the season,” Collins says. ”Everything was there. It was right there and all we had to do was put it together. I wanted to get in the (Catholic League) playoffs, the Prep Bowl, something. We hung with a few teams we felt we couldn`t hang with, like St. Laurence. I just wanted so much out of this season.”
The fates seem to have conspired against Mendel. The Monarchs lost to Fenwick 25-24 in overtime and 7-6 to De La Salle when an extra point went awry. They were losing 3-0 to St. Laurence late in the fourth quarter.
”What can you say? We`re that far from being 5-1,” says first-year Mendel coach Jim Lick, 24, an All-Catholic League lineman at St. Rita in 1979. ”We haven`t won a Catholic League game in four years. Just one would be something.
”We had a group of seniors with experience and we felt we could play with anybody, which we have been doing. No one has blown us out. It`s like there`s something missing. You don`t know what it is, you can`t put your finger on it.”
”It was heart we were really missing,” Collins says.
For Lewandowski, the problem is not just salvaging Mendel`s season, it`s saving Mendel. He is part of a study group that is looking at possible scenarios that could solve many of the school`s problems. The possibilities include making the school coeducational; merging with nearby Willibrod Catholic, a small coeducational school; and merging with nearby Unity Catholic, a small all-girls school.
”If we go coed, we could become the premier black school on the South Side,” says Lewandowski, tempering his enthusiasm by noting that such changes come slowly within the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In the interim, the school`s administrators undoubtedly will face some difficult decisions. The most difficult might involve football, a sport Lewandowski coached for 14 years, including six as the freshman coach at St. Rita, where one of his charges was Lick.
”There will come a time–and it might be very, very soon–when we will have to make some tough decisions,” Lewandowski says. ”If we have a championship cross country team (1985 Catholic League champs), and if we have a basketball team that`s very competitive, and if we have a championship track team (1986 Catholic League champs), I`ll tell you right now I don`t think we`ll cut those programs. Then it becomes a question of what is it that`s not of championship quality. Football will get the nod when we ask that question. ”We could lose it next year or the year after that. God only knows. We`ll keep it as long as we can.”
The impact Collins has had–and would have had–on this season is difficult to gauge. A mild case of hepatitis kept him out of the opener against Corliss. The Monarchs won without him. He didn`t return to practice until Sept. 8 and, three days later, he had four quarterback sacks in a 24-0 victory over Whitney Young.
What is more difficult and perhaps more vital to determine is the impact Collins` presence will have on the program`s future. He is being held up as a model to potential recruits that a player at Mendel can achieve acclaim.
”I think they`re in a Catch-22 situation,” says St. Ignatius athletic director Gerald Brockhouse, the president of the Catholic League`s Board of Control. ”They can`t afford to keep it (football), but they can`t afford to let it go, either. We were in much the same situation at Hales when we had football.”
Hales Franciscan dropped football in 1970 after its team finished 7-2-1 in 1969. Brockhouse was an assistant football coach at the all-black school at the time and later served as its athletic director.
”Finances were the main reason,” Brockhouse says. ”I still think it was a big mistake on their part. After they dropped it, there was an immediate drop in enrollment. We were at about 600 kids at that point. Within a year or so of dropping it, there was a drop of about 100. And it has continued to drop in plateaus since then.”
Hales, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, has an enrollment of approximately 295.
Now it is Mendel that is on the verge of losing football. Even the presence of Collins and a winning season might not have been enough to prevent that.
”I used to think it would hurt us, but now I`m not so sure,” Curtin says. ”Dropping football says something about the stability of a school–that would hurt us. As far as students coming to the school for football, I don`t think that would hurt.
”I think football is special here because it is something no other all-black, private school has to offer. It separates us from the other schools around.
”I`ve heard people say dropping football was the beginning of the end for Hales. It`s been a long end, if that`s the case. Maybe some people are doomsdaying us, but I`m not.”
