Kankakee senior Eli Cunningham is a three-sport athlete, including serving pivotal roles as the football team’s kicker that’s on a program-record six-year playoff streak and a forward on the boys basketball team that just won a school record 29 games.

But what Cunningham and his Kankakee boys volleyball team got to do on Tuesday might have been his favorite athletic memory so far.

After playing in the first-ever All-City varsity boys volleyball game against Bradley-Bourbonnais last spring, Cunningham and the host Kays scored the program’s first-ever All-City win with a 2-0 (25-20, 25-19) sweep of Bishop McNamara on Tuesday night, the first All-City game with all three city schools participating in the sport at the same time.

With the win, the Kays (5-3) are now halfway to the All-City title, which they can earn when they visit the Boilermakers next week.

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Kankakee's Eli Cunningham, center, watches his kill go past Bishop McNamara's Oliver Heinrich, left, and Sean Price during a game at Kankakee Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (Mason Schweizer)

“It’s really fun,” Cunningham said. “I’ve been wanting to do this for football and basketball. It’s an honor to do it in volleyball and we look forward to it. You can’t look past anyone though, Mac put up a great competition and now we’ve got to move on to the next one and get ready for B-B.”

Kays coach Matt Donley is the former golf coach, where he saw how beloved the local rivalry matchups can be. Just like Cunningham, he was thrilled that the city opponents got to square off.

“It means everything,” Donley said. “ ... Just having that rivalry, it’s wonderful that some of these athletes that don’t compete in other sports or their sports don’t have All-City, it’s a great opportunity for them to come out and compete against these teams.”

Fresh off a 3-2 effort at the Belleville East tournament over the weekend, the Kays were able to take an early 5-0 lead and led the first set wire to wire, despite a few McNamara runs that included a 5-0 run late that cut the score to 23-20 before a pair of Fightin’ Irish hitting errors gave the host Kays the first set.

After falling behind early in their season opener – and the program’s first match in two years after not fielding a team last spring – the Irish settled in after a mid-set timeout as they found some late momentum. McNamara coach Leah Jungels, a volleyball coaching veteran who admitted she still gets opening day jitters herself, thought her group just had to relax mentally and get more aggressive with their play as they transitioned from practice to game action.

“As boys I think they try to not let that on,” Jungels said. “I’d ask them and they’d say, ‘no, no, I’m OK, we got this.’ It’s against their friends, and I think they learned today that it’s much more different than what we’ve practiced and scrimmaged with, that we’ve got to be more aggressive.”

That aggressiveness showed in the second set, where the Irish started ahead on a Justice Provost kill and forced a couple of early ties before back-to-back aces from Yael Calderon helped the Kays find some separation at 14-9. That lead swelled to as large as 21-12 on an Aidan Lidell kill, allowing the Kays to cruise to their sweep.

In that final set, the Kays saw Cunningham, Lidell, Miles Yohnka, Jamon Barlow and Trayvone Jackson each catch offensive fire at times, in addition to three aces from Calderon.

“I think this group that I have, they’re really good at correcting themselves and really good at knowing if something isn’t working or if someone’s going on a run against us, they’re really good at policing themselves and re-adjusting,” Donley said. “They’re a very intelligent team and I think they’ve played enough games together that they know how to adjust.”

Tuesday’s game, like all of the Kays’ home games this year, was played in the Dr. Genevra Walters Community Center. The severe storm and tornado that hit the area three weeks ago left both Kankakee and McNamara without a gym for the rest of the year. While the Kays have the fortune of using their community center, the Irish had a week away from practice before finding a home at the school’s Bradley site, where their first three practices were without a net.

But after everything both schools and their students have had to go through, both teams were just happy to be on a volleyball court together in the first-ever Kankakee-McNamara varsity boys volleyball matchup.

“We were a little worried with it raining today that we could get a call that there was a leak again,” Jungels said. “Luckily that didn’t happen and we got our first game together. Now we’ve got some stuff to work on, we’ve got spring break and then we’ll hit the road for a bunch of away games.”