The Back Nine

Our next activity in the great lake state of Illinois was an expedition to Geneva High School about 90 minutes west of Chicago. Geneva, a public school located in a small town of only 20,000 is consistently one of the highest performing teams in the state and a perennial feature in the national rankings.

The trip out there however was marred by a few setbacks. Firstly, in a moment of Christopher Columbian brilliance, our driver took us the wrong direction out of Chicago. He was taking us to a different Geneva. Upon realising his mistake (since this Geneva was about 5 hours away), we turned back West and started towards the appropriate school. At that time, we were set upon by what has been recognised by a number of agencies around the country as the worst traffic bottleneck in America. This 12 mile stretch of expressways and interchanges is known affectionately by locals as the Hillside Strangler.

The Strangler meant that we were a little later to Geneva than anticipated, but our gracious hosts were happy to delay the start of our games being totally understanding of our plight.

Unfortunately, all three of our teams went down to another strong program of athletic kids who can shoot the lights out. The games did give us a chance to experience a quintessential American high school sporting fixture – cheerleaders, a brass band in the stands, local families, young kids screaming and older graduates screaming.

The boys once again were able to be billeted out and experienced the typical weekend for a Varsity athlete, many of whom gathered at one player’s house for a Saturday night cookie bake. We picked the boys up on Sunday morning and headed to St Patrick’s High School, the oldest all boy’s high school in the nation. Despite losing our games to #ShamrockNation, our Churchie teams remained competitive and were able to show the (fairly decent considering the Bears game was on) crowd the up-tempo style of basketball we play. That night after another session of post-game host pizza, we went back to our hotel before our 4am wake up to fly out to Bean Town.