A sleek forward named Demetrius Evans snares a pass from guard Temi Soyebo and dunks the ball to punctuate Von Steuben’s victory over south-side Catholic power Brother Rice. As the scoreboard clock counts down toward zero, Evans, Soyebo, and the other Von Steuben players celebrate at center court.
Since the emergence of DuSable, Marshall, and Carver more than five decades ago, the city’s top boys basketball programs have been located exclusively on the west and south sides. From 1986 to 1993, Martin Luther King High won three AA state championships. In the last ten years four graduates of Westinghouse, last year’s state champion, have played in the NBA. In 1995 Kevin Garnett played at Farragut Academy and then became the first player in nearly 20 years to enter the NBA directly out of high school.
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“A lot of things go together,” Carter says. “I think it’s a fair assessment that basketball is a bigger point of emphasis on the south and west side. The demographics of the neighborhoods have also changed. You have more Asian and Hispanic kids at north-side schools, and culturally they don’t have the same connection to basketball that young black kids do. Different sports and different areas have taken advantage of the kids they draw. Clemente is a big power in baseball. A school like Lane Tech, they’re not a great basketball power, but they have won in a lot of other sports,” he says.
Carter had begun teaching math at Von Steuben in 1977. He lost his job there in a staff reorganization, taught at several grammar schools, and returned in 1986. He coached girls track for two years, and continued to run the Demons program, which grew to include more than 100 boys and girls. In 1993 Carter became the sophomore boys basketball coach.
As freshmen, these three players were the mainstays of a Von Steuben sophomore team that reached the city finals. That same year, Carter’s second as varsity coach, the varsity made a significant leap, winning 20 games. Von Steuben played an aggressive, trapping defense and an offense that favored speed, quickness, and outside shooting.
Under the old format, Von Steuben’s loss to Lincoln Park would have ended its season. But now the state tournament meant a fresh start for Chicago’s public schools, as it did for every other school in Illinois. Between the Lincoln Park loss and the start of the state tournament, Von Steuben went almost a month without a game. Most coaches would dread such a long layoff. Carter says it transformed his team. “I told them after we lost to Lincoln Park, ‘We are going to start over again. This is the start of the third season. This is the end of a bad season.’ We did not play to our capabilities in either the regular season or during the Public League tournament. That definitely turned us around. We approached [the layoff] as though it were a minicamp, and [the players] responded.”
“I have a core group of kids that play year-round, and that is beneficial,” he says. Chicago high school basketball never really stops; there’s merely an interlude between the end of the official season and the beginning of off-season competition. This month the team competes in a tournament. Over the summer the Demons club team–which now includes all the top varsity players–will play in a series of regional and national tournaments, from Indiana to Florida. “I hope it will continue next year,” Carter says. “I told them, Now we’re a marked team. We got a lot of young kids and some very good kids at the lower levels, and we’ll be pretty good the next couple of years.”
