The Week That Was -- February 21-28

I learned when I had children in lower school, that managing transitions is something young people struggle with. There was more than one teacher in the North Shore lower school who in parent teacher conferences would say a long list of compliments about our children and then slip in the negative -- he struggles with transitions. Well, after last week, let me just go on the record that it must be inherited. I struggle with (seasonal) transitions too!

Basketball season ended last week. But not without a lot of excitement.

Our Varsity Basketball team entered the IHSA state tournament as the #2 seed in the Guerin Regional.

Intro's at Guerin

To win a state tournament, you first have to win your Regional, then your Sectional, then your Super Sectional game and finally a semi-final state championship game and a final game. For most high school basketball teams, the road the state final is 7 straight wins.

For the last four years, our boys basketball team has been forced to play in the 2A tournament -- that is a larger division than our enrollment reflects. That is based on a success formula the IHSA has for schools to balance the competitiveness. In 2012 we won a state trophy in the Class A State Tournament. Based on that result, the IHSA success formula has forced us to compete in the larger school division. So we had our hands full at Guerin.

Our first opponent was Latin who we played twice during the regular season and split the outcomes of those games. This would be the rubber match and both teams were ready.

Latin seemed to hustle more and out-rebounded us early but we shot better and had a 6 point lead at the quarter extending it to a 12 point lead by the half. The second half was a physical battle as Latin gradually winnowed our lead. With 3 seconds left, it was a Raider 2 point lead but we were able to hang on through solid free throw shooting and won 50-46.

That gave us the opportunity to play Uplift who was the defending IHSA 2A State Champion. We knew Uplift would be a tough opponent but we had a 2 point lead at the quarter and were only down by 5 points at the half. Could this be the greatest upset in Raider Basketball history?

The answer was no as Uplift wore us down in the second half, holding our scoring to only 10 points and scoring 38 themselves. The final was Uplift 77 North Shore 44. So ended a terrific 2016 basketball season.

Across town at the University of Chicago,  the track team was competing in their fourth meet of the year. The Henry Crown Fieldhouse was the site of our meet. We were competing in a 10 team meet and although we were a little short handed, we had a number of excellent performance. The highlight was a new 800m record by Junior Katie Glew in 2:26. But we also had more than 30 personal bests spread across the team.

Brendan & Tommy after their school record efforts

But this busy week did not end on Friday night. With the end of the basketball season, Senior Brendan Doyle -- who had been working for months on his High Jump technique -- finally was able to demonstrate what he had learned. As the  of C meets don't offer the High Jump we had to travel to a meet on Sunday in Romeoville. There Brendan shattered the indoor school record -- formerly held by John McQueen from 1999 (John must be in his mid-30's now!)  -- and cleared 6'4"at the ICOPS meet at Lewis University. He also had several close misses at 6'6" too.

Junior Tommy McHugh also competed at ICOPS in the 3200m run and lowered his own school record by 7 seconds to 10:06. So the last weekend in February results in three new school indoor records for the Raiders. What a great way to end the month.

We are now off to the spring season! It has been a happy happy winter with many successes. I am hoping this will continue into the spring even if these transition weeks for me are not much fun.