Men's basketball: After years of irrelevance, can college basketball in Chicago be revived?

One day last month, Chicago State basketball coach Tracy Dildy was sitting in his basement office, reminiscing about the sweet long ago of Chicago college basketball with two of the biggest stars of that era.

They were talking about the late 1970s and early 1980s, when DePaul basketball was by far the biggest sports story in the city, Loyola was beginning a string of successful seasons, Illinois-Chicago was making a solid start as a Division I team, and Chicago State was putting together such a strong NAIA record, it soon would move to the top NCAA division as well.

The two former players in the office, Mark Aguirre (Westinghouse/DePaul) and Darius Clemons (Phillips/Loyola), were Chicago Public League products, who had allowed their schools to stand tall in a winter sports landscape when the Bulls and Blackhawks were lost in the snowdrifts.

“Back then, the kids coming out of high school had pride about wanting to represent their city,” Dildy said. “Mark’s sophomore year, DePaul had an entire great team from Chicago. Because of Darius, Chicago guys like Carl Golston, Greg Williams, Tim Bankston and Alfredrick Hughes went to Loyola.”

The discussion soon turned from the happy past to the bleak present and the long, seemingly futile struggle to recapture the glory days of men’s college basketball in Chicago.

This is a city that loves basketball and whose high schools produce one college star after another – for places like Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Memphis.

Yet it has been more than a decade – and most of the last 25 seasons – since one of the four men’s Division I programs at schools with campuses in the city has had a team that compelled the attention of Chicago sports fans.

The record is stark:

Since 1991, the four teams have made a combined four NCAA Tournament appearances, two by DePaul and two by UIC, most recently in 2004 for each.

Chicago State has had one winning season in those 24, Loyola just five. UIC has six straight losing conference seasons, DePaul and Loyola eight straight.

Average home attendance at the schools last season numbered 411 (Chicago State), 1,745 (Loyola), 2,913 (UIC) and 6,238 (DePaul). The arenas they play in have capacities ranging from 4,963 to 18,500.

“Success and non-success is cyclical,” said Dave Leitao, beginning his second go-round as DePaul’s coach this season. “But if all four are in a down cycle at the same time, you scratch your head and wonder why.”

The head-scratching extends across the city’s northern border to Northwestern, which never has made the NCAA Tournament, even if the Wildcats essentially are sui generis: a school with formidable academic standards in a Power Five conference, and the only Division I school in the area with a football team. At the other four, basketball is the sport.

“We want to be relevant in college basketball,” said fifth-year Loyola coach Porter Moser, an honest admission that his team, like the other three in Chicago, remains largely irrelevant in the city and beyond.

That each school plays in a different conference makes their all being down so long together even more perplexing. There are few evident answers, save this one: Chicago-area high school players such as Aguirre and Clemons, those who might be “one-and-dones” in this era, no longer think of staying home for college.

“That’s on us as coaches,” Dildy said. “It should be easier to convince a guy who isn’t going to stay more than 6 months in college to stay home.”

According to basketball-reference.com, Illinois high schools have produced more NBA and ABA players (253) than any state but California (417) and New York (326). Of the Illinois players, 113 went to Chicago high schools and nearly 50 more to Chicago-area schools.

“At the end of the day, for our colleges to get national prominence, we need to keep our best players,” Whitney Young High School coach Tyrone Slaughter said. “Until we get the first one, that is going to be a challenge.”