With the possible exception of the golf course, Mike McCracken was in his happy place on Tuesday.

He was in the gym at Amboy Junior High School. In front of him were the Little Lady Clippers, a group of about 40 third, fourth, fifth and sixth graders soaking up some basics of basketball from McCracken, a few current and former Amboy players, and a few volunteer parents. The early part of the session is spent on proper passing technique, with some shooting drills to follow.

The hope is that some of the players catch the basketball bug, so to speak. They’ll play some ball at home, a friend’s house or at the park, and later go out for the junior high team.

Then they’ll play as underclassmen in high school, and perhaps join a summer AAU team. Ideally, they’ll stick with it until it’s time to put on a Clippers varsity uniform.

Then it’s up to McCracken to mold them into a cohesive unit that can win ballgames. It’s a process he’s been a part of in Amboy for nearly half a century.

The 2018-19 Amboy girls basketball team was one of the most, if not the most, successful in school history. It finished 27-3, placed second to Aquin in the NUIC East, and won the Class 1A Annawan Regional and Ottawa Marquette Sectional. It had been 35 years since the Clippers had gone that deep in the postseason.

It was McCracken who provided a steady hand in guiding the Clippers into that virtually uncharted territory. For that, he is the Sauk Valley Media girls basketball coach of the year.

•••

Amboy was a bit of an unknown heading into the season. The Clippers finished 14-14 in 2017-18, but that included an upset of local rival Ashton-Franklin
Center at the Wethersfield Regional. A host of players who contributed to that win were back in the fold, so there was
reason for guarded optimism.

Then the season started, and Amboy was an immediate force to be reckoned with. It won the Oregon Thanksgiving Tournament as part of an 11-0 start.

A key personnel decision came from those early games. McCracken had toyed with the idea of floating sophomore guard Mallory Powers between the fresh-soph and varsity, to have a top scoring threat at the lower level. Powers was soon installed as the full-time varsity shooting guard, alongside sophomore point guard Abi Payne.

“That’s when we started clicking,” McCracken said. “Our defense got a little better, and our offense certainly got better, and that was the reason.”

The first bit of adversity came in a 47-44 home loss to AFC on Dec. 12. The Clippers shot a mere 31.4 percent (17-for-54) from the field, and the Raiders closed the game on a 7-0 run.

“That was our first game that we didn’t play better down the stretch of the game,” McCracken said, “so it was something we knew we had to get better at. When we played Hall in the championship at Oregon, we did finish. We finished very well. We went from 1 or 2 up to an 11-point lead, so we knew we could do that.

“Then against AFC, we shot the ball so poorly. It was kind of like a Prestegaard [sister] did it to us again. The thing I really didn’t like about it was it was at our place.”

The Clippers soon righted the ship. They rattled off a 12-game winning streak, including a payback win at AFC on Jan. 17, before concluding the regular season with a 58-56 home loss to Aquin in a showdown for the league title. It was a game reminiscent of the first AFC contest.

“We just didn’t finish again,” McCracken said. “It was another wake-up call for us, I think.”

The Clippers soon answered that call. After dispatching Galva in an Annawan Regional semifinal, they tangled with the host Bravettes in the final. Annawan has been the gold standard in small school girls basketball in these parts, highlighted by state titles in 2014 and 2017, but for the first time in a while, it didn’t have a dominant Van Hyfte sister wreaking havoc.

The last of three, Jayde, is now a freshman at Arizona State, and Amboy was able to handle her supporting cast to the tune of a 57-38 rout in the regional final.

“I think that game showed everybody on the team that we could win and we could beat anybody,” McCracken said. “It was nice them not having a Division I player, but they still had quite a bit of talent. We really took it to them, considering it was in Annawan’s gym. That was a really important game for our players, because I think they believed more than ever after that win.”

The wins kept coming at the Ottawa Marquette Sectional, played in Marseilles. First was a comfortable win against Aurora Christian in the semifinals, then a nail-biting 39-35 win against Newark in the sectional final. Noelle Jones, who averaged 7.7 points for the season, poured in 18 to lead Amboy to the win.

“When Mallory and Abi combined for three points and we still won the sectional final, that was quite an accomplishment,” McCracken said. “It just showed how balanced we were overall.”

Amboy’s run came to an end at the Pontiac Supersectional against one of the top teams in the state, regardless of class, in Danville Schlarman. The Hilltoppers featured three Division I players, including one, senior guard Anaya Peoples, who is a McDonald’s All-American and will play next season for defending national champion Notre Dame.

As fond as McCracken was of his team, he’s also a realist.

“I don’t know if we could have beat them one time out of 100, if we had that one perfect game out of 100,” McCracken said.

•••

McCracken, 70, has been a lifelong Amboyan. A son of former mayor Ken McCracken, he graduated from AHS in 1967. He played 4 years of football and basketball, and when baseball was dropped following his freshman year, he ran track for 3 years.

After graduating from Illinois State University in 1971, McCracken and his wife of 48 years, Pam, returned to their hometown to become teachers. They never left.

“I figured we’d come back home, teach for a couple of years, and move on to somewhere else,” McCracken said.

McCracken has coached basketball at some level in Amboy since he began teaching there in the fall of 1971. In two stints as varsity boys coach, the Clippers went 235-196, and he oversaw a golden era of Clippers basketball. Amboy, led by Mike’s son, Jaron, and a talented crew around him, went 68-15 over a 3-year span (1995-97) and won two regional titles.

“It was a great time, but looking back, I don’t think I enjoyed it enough because we were always trying to beat Hall at the sectional or the Bosnians from Princeton,” McCracken said. “We were always trying to beat somebody. We had such great rivalries with Mendota. We beat them 2 out of 3 years when they had their all-stars, so it was fun doing that.”

McCracken also posted a 122-35 record coaching boys at the junior high level, and an 85-69 mark as the fresh-soph coach, but until 2007, had not tried his hand at coaching Amboy girls. His last 5 years on the boys side were as an assistant to head coach Dean Powers, and McCracken planned to ease his way out of the coaching ranks.

The late Mike Pasley was not going to be retained as varsity girls coach after a 12-15 campaign in 2006-07, and McCracken was eventually coerced into giving it a try.

“I had said no to girls basketball all the way into October [of 2007],” McCracken said. “It was about 2 weeks before the season when two or three of the kids came, and then two or three of the kids came with their parents and talked to me. I had been running girls basketball camps before because nobody ever ran them here, so I had a little bit of knowledge about what it would be like.”

It didn’t take long before the Amboy girls began rounding into form. McCracken’s first team, in 2007-08, went 15-14 – the first over-.500 mark for the program since it went 16-9 in 1991-92. It’s only gotten better from there.

The Clippers have gone 224-116 under McCracken, including a 28-2 campaign in 2014-15 that ended with a loss to Annawan at the Roanoke-Benson Sectional.

“Five out of our last 6 years, we’ve had 20 wins or more, and that’s something that says a lot about the players,” McCracken said. “They’ve developed while they’re here, and we hope to keep it going a little bit.”

When it comes to X’s and O’s, McCracken hasn’t adjusted much when it comes to coaching a different gender.

“It is different, but it’s still basketball,” McCracken said.

McCracken does his best to avoid what he referred to as “drama” when coaching teenage girls. If they’re sick, he doesn’t ask why. Assistant coach Shauna Dinges, Mike’s daughter, deals with some of the more sensitive issues. He tries not to yell too much, if at all.

“He never yells at us, he just talks to us very loudly,” Payne said with a smile.

And he does his best to relate to the players in his own way.

“On the buses from the regional all the way to the supersectional, we’d listen to music on the bus to help us get pumped up,” Payne said. “He clapped along the whole time.”

McCracken is quick to credit a dedicated coaching staff that includes Dinges and Chris Payne at the varsity level, along with fresh-soph coach Todd Hobbs. Dinges also coaches at the junior high level. A granddaughter, ex-Clipper Kennedy Dinges, also was on the staff for 2 years while a student at Sauk Valley Community College.

Kennedy Dinges, a senior at Winona State in Minnesota, currently coaches volleyball, boys and girls basketball, and track at a junior high in western Wisconsin near the Winona State campus. She helped out with the Little Lady Clippers while on spring break this week.

Another granddaughter, Mychala Dinges, a freshman at SVCC, films the Clippers’ games.

“I have a tremendous coaching staff, from the varsity level all the way down to grade school,” McCracken said.

•••

While some losses on the basketball court have stung McCracken over the years, it’s paled in comparison to what he’s dealt with off the court within his own family.

Pam McCracken, along with her mother, Jeannette, and Shauna, were involved in a serious car accident on Jan. 22, 1975. Pam got the worst of it, with a shattered pelvis and a severe brain injury, to name a few things.

“We’re both teaching, I’m coaching at the junior high level, and all of a sudden your whole life changes in an eye blink,” McCracken said. “I was walking my kids down to lunch at school, and [secretary] Darlene Ross says, ‘Come on in here Mike, the Mendota hospital wants to talk to you.’”

Pam’s spleen was removed at Mendota Hospital, but there was nothing that could be done there about severe swelling on the brain, so she went by helicopter to St. Anthony’s in Rockford. There, she was accorded last rites twice before her condition improved after emergency surgery.

“We thought we lost her,” Mike said.

The oldest of the McCrackens’ children, Shauna, now 45, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was 10. After an ill-fated visit to a doctor in Peoria, where the message directed toward the young patient was less than uplifting, Shauna was taken to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis.

“It was not easy, but we got through 8 or 9 months of chemo,” McCracken said. “She lost her hair, which was of course traumatic.”

A second daughter for the McCrackens, Kendra, was stillborn about 2 years after Shauna was born.

Their third child, Jaron, is the best basketball player in Amboy High School history. He is the career leader in points (2,256) and assists (478), and is third in rebounds (785). He averaged 20.5 points, 7.1 rebounds and 4.3 assists in a 4-year varsity career.

Jaron McCracken is a 2012 Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee. He received that honor 1 year after his father.

In June of 2017, Jaron, now a teacher at Lenart Elementary Regional Gifted School in Chicago with a wife and two young boys, was treated for vertigo symptoms.

On September 10, 2017, Jaron collapsed. He was taken to a hospital, where it was discovered he had glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He had surgery that day to remove some of the cancer, another procedure 3 days later to take some more out, and a third surgery, performed on Oct. 23, 2017, to get the rest of it.

“That’s when the road to recovery started,” Mike McCracken said. “He had to get rid of the rest of the cancer and try to keep it from growing back fast.”

Many of Jaron’s friends and teammates that live in the Chicago area volunteered to get him to and from doctor’s appointments in the last 18 months. His last two MRIs have come back clean, and a third one is scheduled for later this spring.

“It’s gone for now, but this [glioblastoma] is the worst kind of cancer you can have because it grows back,” Mike McCracken said. “You just hope for the best.”

Despite all of that, Mike has never asked himself “Why me?” when it comes to his wife’s car accident and his children’s illnesses.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Why could one family have so many things go wrong?’” McCracken said. “You don’t know why, but most of them, we got through. We always plan on getting through somehow, and so far we have. We’re pretty lucky.”

•••

McCracken’s athletic itch was scratched by playing slow-pitch softball for more than 3 decades, for various bar-sponsored teams in the area. He finally hung up his spikes and glove about 15 years ago, at age 55.

He had long wanted to get into golf, and after retiring as a teacher in 2003, he decided the time was right to chase around the little white ball. When Pam bought Mike a golf cart that summer, that sealed the deal.

In the summer, Mike plays golf each weekday morning at Shady Oaks, right at 7 a.m., with buddies Neil Brinkmeier and Joe Jahn. Dick Vivian, Ed Blake and Tom Full are others that have rounded out the foursome.

On a good day, McCracken can break 80. On a rough day, it will be higher. Either way, it’s fun.

“Luckily as clubs have gotten better, I’ve been able to hit the ball a little farther,” McCracken said. “I’ve enjoyed it.”

Come this summer, he’ll once again conduct his girls basketball camp at Amboy High School – in the early afternoon, after that day’s round at Shady Oaks.

And in the late fall, it will be time to ramp up the 2019-20 version of the Clippers. The backcourt of Payne and Powers will be back, as will steady forward Kyleigh Donna and super-sub Ashley Althaus. Olivia Dinges, Mike’s granddaughter who will be a sophomore, will be looked upon to play a larger role as a sophomore post player.

“Hopefully we go further than we did last year,” Payne said. “We have a lot of our players back, so I think we’ll have a good chance.”

McCracken file

High school: Amboy, class of 1967

College: Illinois State (1971)

Resides: Amboy

Family: Wife, Pam; children, Shauna, 45; Jaron, 40

FYI: Teacher in Amboy from 1971-03. … Also was athletic director for 11 years (1995-06). … Has a 666-416 record coaching basketball in Amboy at the junior high, fresh-soph and varsity levels. … 2012 Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee.