Six years ago, Alex Renchen was at a coaching crossroads.

After resigning from his role as the Bradley-Bourbonnais boys basketball coach, where he still had three years left of teaching before he could retire, one of Kankakee County’s biggest coaching names was unsure where or if he’d work as a head coach again.

And he never could have imagined where that next job would come.

Last Saturday, Renchen was officially announced as the upcoming replacement at Bishop McNamara, where he currently serves as an assistant for the retiring Adrian Provost.

Once he officially takes over in his new role next winter, Renchen – who amassed a career record of 315-345 during stints at Kankakee (1993-2007) and Bradley-Bourbonnais (2007-20) – will be the first boys basketball coach to serve as the varsity head coach at all three All-City schools.

“I never would have imagined that,” Renchen said. “I didn’t really know what was going to happen six years ago. It’s been an adventure, for sure.”

Renchen took over as the PE teacher at McNamara after retiring from Bradley-Bourbonnais a few days into the 2022-23 school year. After taking a year off and then two years as an assistant under Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Famer Ron Oloffson at Peotone, Renchen is in his third year serving as a Fightin’ Irish assistant.

“I’m really grateful to Coach Oloffson and Coach Provost,” Renchen said. “I was looking for a place to work, and actually had two places I went to and said I’d volunteer, and they both turned me down.

“I’ve always had a growth mindset and also lived to learn. These last six years I’ve learned quite a bit, because not being a head coach has allowed me more time to go watch other people.”

In addition to finding his own growth, Renchen also grew to enjoy the more backseat role of an assistant, sharing a laugh as he noted the only people he has to talk to now are players and the coaching staff. But as he returns to the front-facing role of head coach, he’ll do so with some new lessons learned under Oloffson and Provost, as well as a coach for the nationally recognized MeanStreets AAU program based in Chicago.

And there’s one lesson that stands out to him more than others.

“For me, and maybe it was a lack of maturity on my part through my life, it’s not being defined by the results,” Renchen said. “I love the process. I’m here coaching in the summer because I love it. I’m driving up to Chicago to coach because I love it.

“Sometimes there’s anxiety with results, and I’ve learned you really don’t have control of those results, so I might as well do something I love, and hopefully I’m impacting in a positive manner.”

Provost and Renchen have known each other in various capacities spanning back several decades. They first met on the court when Renchen was the JV coach at Kankakee, going against Provost and the Fightin’ Irish. Provost was teammates with Renchen’s brother Jack, a 1991 Bishop McNamara graduate.

They coached against one another when Renchen was at both of his first two head coaching stops. And during part of Renchen’s tenure at Bradley-Bourbonnais, Provost, now the deputy chief of the Bradley Police Department, served as B-B’s school resource officer.

“You talk more than basketball; you talk about family, personal lives, spouses, things of that nature,” Provost said. “It’s more than basketball. It makes you want to go to practice every day when you work with people like that. You want to work with quality kids and quality people, and this year we for sure have a lot of quality kids and quality people.”

As he returns to being the head of a program, Renchen will do so for a program that’s much smaller in size than his first two head coaching jobs. But as he makes his return, he’ll do so with the same six foundational pillars he had at those first two stops: commitment, integrity, the servanthood of team sport, quantifiable hard work, resilience and being as competitive “as the third lion in line for the Ark when it started to rain.”