You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat West Aurora or Westinghouse.
In the case of Westinghouse, you can take that literally. Coach Chris Head got his Warriors up at 6:30 a.m. Saturday to practice even though his team had a 12:45 p.m. Class AA semifinal date with Peoria Richwoods in the Peoria Civic Center. Head couldn’t get anyone to open a gym that early, so he settled for showing his team tape of its Friday night quarterfinal rout of Bloom.
“Coach said that made it like a 6:30 practice,” guard Tavaris Wiggins said.
If Head is a man ahead of his time, West Aurora coach Gordie Kerkman has stood the test of it. His team didn’t gather until 10 a.m., but when you’ve been at this fine madness for about four decades, you learn the best way to make use of your time.
That helps explain why West Aurora, the tournament’s ultimate bridesmaid, finally grabbed the grand prize of Illinois high school basketball Saturday night. The Blackhawks solved Westinghouse’s unrelenting defensive pressure with an unyielding poise and savvy to beat the favored Warriors 60-57.
West Aurora had nine trophies (trophies go to the semifinalists), the most for any school without a state crown. That included four second-place finishes.
Kerkman had been around for two of the latter, including a gut-wrenching 45-44 loss to Morgan Park in 1976, in which the winner’s Laird Smith hit a jump shot at the final buzzer.
Kerkman was an assistant coach then. In 1997, he was the head coach when West Aurora lost 47-43 to heavily favored Peoria Manual.
After Westinghouse cut a 55-46 West Aurora lead to 58-57 with eight seconds remaining, you started to wonder if the ghost of Smith was lurking somewhere in Carver Arena. But when Wiggins’ last second desperation three-point shot went wide, you could hear instead an almost collective sigh of relief, not only from West Aurora’s fans but also from the city of Aurora, none of whose high schools has won a state title.
“It’s been a real long time coming but good things sometimes take a long time, and this has been well worth the wait,” said the 63-year-old Kerkman, who has coached at West Aurora since 1962.
Kerkman said the memory of 1976 “probably crossed my mind” during Westinghouse’s frantic rally, but that he was too busy coaching to take much notice. Similarly he said he never dwelled too much on his school’s long history of returning from the Elite Eight without the championship hardware.
“It wasn’t really a monkey on our back,” he said, “but people were always pointing out to us how many times we finished second or third. It would be really nice for the school and the city to win a state championship. But first of all, it would mean an awful lot to these kids, and I’d be very happy for them because they worked hard.”
No one worked harder than Kerkman, and his sweat paid off in his team’s cool dissection of Westinghouse’s various presses and in the way it found seams in the Warriors’ zone defense for open jump shots.
Few people expected West Aurora to defeat East St. Louis in the semifinals or Westinghouse at night, and that perceived lack of respect helped drive the Blackhawks to glory.
“That just added to our fire,” said center Austin Real, who led his team in scoring with 17 points and in rebounding with nine. “All year long, people have been talking about Westinghouse, and rightfully so, but it was nice to prove a couple people wrong.”
Real said another added pleasure was seeing Kerkman with a first-place medal around his neck.
“I couldn’t be happier for him,” Real said. “He has put in so much time and effort. He is so unheralded in his coaching and how he runs his program.”
The 34-year-old Head has emerged in his two years as Westinghouse’s head coach as one of the top young coaches in the state, and he met one goal of becoming the first Westinghouse coach to reach the title game. The Warriors’ best till now was three third-place finishes.
“We want to be that one team that has done better than the rest of those [Westinghouse] teams,” Head said after the semifinals.
He and his team did not, however, reach their final goal.
“The only time you’ll see me happy–really see me happy,” Head said, “is when we win the state championship game.”
As a coach, Head is driven and aggressive and leaves little to chance. That explains the 6:30 a.m. practice, a staple of his program.
“There’s no sense changing anything we’ve done all season,” said Head, who has coached AAU teams since he was a West Side teenager. “These kids have practiced at 6:30 since they were freshmen.”
Head’s tactics have produced a team that uses discipline, effort and unrelenting quickness to offset an almost constant size disadvantage. The Warriors use a bewildering assortment of pressure defenses to generate easy baskets and wear down their opponents.
But if Head has proved he is a coach to watch, he met his match Saturday in Kerkman.
