DePaul Prep Defeats Loyola 55-45

[Preview of this week’s Inside—Booster article.]

By Jack Lydon

It was an electric atmosphere in DePaul Prep’s Tom Winiecki Gym Friday night. The #1 ranked DePaul Prep Rams hosted the #5 ranked Loyola Academy Ramblers in the first Chicago Catholic League Blue game of the year for each squad. The Ramblers brought a big crowd into the City and the usual DePaul Prep students and supporters showed up en masse. The band was playing. It was high school basketball at its best.

DePaul Prep jumped out to a second quarter lead as they often do. Loyola (4-1) could not catch them. The Rams won 55-45 improving to 5-0 on the young season but more importantly grabbing a big advantage in the struggle to win the Chicago Catholic League’s Blue division, always the Rams’ first goal of a season.

The story of the game has to be DePaul Prep’s impressive defensive effort in the second quarter. Trailing 10-9 at the end of the first, the Rams just dialed up the defense holding Loyola to just two buckets and five points. The lead moved up and down a little from there but the Rams would hold that ten-point lead at the buzzer.

That defensive effort denied the Ramblers the outside shots they would need if they wanted to beat the bigger DePaul Prep team. Loyola got its first points of the second quarter on a three-pointer from senior Charles Ellis two minutes in but the only other points came on an inside putback by senior Broderick Munsey-Johnson with under 10 seconds to play in the half.

“We got down to guarding. It's a tough guard with all that movement and excellent switching. We prepped for it. We had a three-day prep. We feel confident with three days prep but we also have anxiety trying to play Loyola. It’s the toughest guard all year,” said DePaul Prep’s legendary coach Tom Kleinschmidt. 

Defense is great but a team needs to score too. The Rams outscored the Ramblers 17-5 in the quarter. Senior star and Brown University commit, Rykan Woo, lead the Rams with 19 points, including 11 in the decisive second quarter.

It was something of a breakout game for senior transfer from Springfield’s Sacred Heart-Griffin high school, Zion Lee.

“What we do is a lot. It took Z [Zion Lee] a couple games, actually we thought it take him until Christmas, but we glad to see [it tonight]. He had some big buckets tonight for us. He rebounded the heck out a ball. He was great for us. I am very happy for him,” Kleinschmidt said.

DePaul Prep turns right around and faces La Lumiere in the Chicago Elite Classic Saturday afternoon. La Lumiere is a Porter, Indiana boarding school and nationally ranked basketball powerhouse with multiple players committed to play at division one colleges, included Devin Cleveland, a transfer from CPS’s Kenwood Academy. Cleveland was widely regarded a top, if not the top, high school player in the Chicago last year.

The Rams look to repeat their upset win over Mater Dei, a Santa Anna, California nationally ranked powerhouse at last year’s Chicago Elite Classic.

“Mater Dei is good. They are really good. They are nationally ranked. But La Lumiere is a different level,” Kleinschmidt said.

A different level. I guess will see exactly what level DePaul Prep is on early in this season where the Rams look to win a fourth straight state championship.

DePaul Prep Advances to Third Straight Title Game

By Jack Lydon

The DePaul Prep Rams (32-4), Chicago Catholic League Champs, defending state champs defeated the Glenwood High School Titans, from Chatham, Illinois, 39-25. The Rams advance to their third straight IHSA title game against Brother Rice at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow.

Please forgive me for not doing a complete story about the game. I shot three games yesterday. I have spend the last 24 hours working on getting the photos right. Photography at this state tournament level shooting demands a lot of attention. There is good light and a lot at stake so I need to concentrate on that.

Going into the Finals I planned to concentrate on blog posting. It didn’t work out that way. I largely neglected the writing and blog posting even though I planned to do more of that. It just didn’t work out. I found that I basically can’t do both. It’s time consuming enough to write a proper news story about a game that I shot.

These are my photos from the game.

Blog Posts and DePaul Prep's 3A Semi-final Opponent Glenwood

By Jack Lydon

I think I am finding my voice when it comes to blog posts. The blog on my website usually just contains galleries of photos from games and events I cover with some explanation. I also post my news articles that appear in the Inside—Booster.

Starting tomorrow, I am going to post news related items from the IHSA boys basketball playoffs that the U. of I. State Farm Center in Champaign in more of a first person blog format. I hope to do it in as close to real time as I can for games that I am not photographing. Tomorrow are the 1A, 2A and 3A semi-finals.

We have six Chicago area teams in playing tomorrow: Chicago Hope, Christ the King, Dyett, Brother Rice, DePaul Prep and St. Patrick. So I will post what I can as I watch the games. But I will probably be photographing the 3A games with just the usually Twitter/X score updates.

Here is some stuff DePaul Prep’s opponent, Glenwood. The Rams take on Glenwood in tomorrow’s 3A sem-final starting at 8:15 p.m.

The Glenwood Titan (24-9), with an enrollment listed by the IHSA as 1,466, are from the Central State Eight conference where they finished fourth behind MacArthur (3A in Decatur), Springfield (3A) and Lanphier (3A from Springfield). All of those schools were in the same sectional that the #3 seed Glenwood won.

The Glenwood starters are senior guard Cameron Appenzeller, senior guard Gavin Simmons, junior forward Jack Kurman, senior forward Mason Neumann and senior forward Jonathon Helm.

Glenwood’s leader scorer is Appenzeller followed closely by Helm. Based upon the games played, it looks like their starters get almost all of the playing time with the only bench player getting significant playing time being junior guard Brody Green.

Knowledgeable high school basketball commentator Big Tim Shabazz suggests in his blog that Glenwood’s size could give DePaul Prep some trouble. Check that out at Big Tim’s blog. Click here to read it.

Michael O’Brien reported this afternoon in the “No Shot Clock” podcast that the Glenwood’s Cameron Appenzeller is a 6’5” lefty pitcher who might be a first-round draft pick in the Major League Baseball draft. So that’s something. Must be quite an athlete.

Appenzeller does not show up in the PrepHoops.com rankings of Class 2025 basketball players. I am guessing that is because he probably plays baseball and not club basketball in the off-season, so he is not on that radar.

Chatham (Glenwood) team photo as appears on the IHSA website.

DePaul Prep Volleyball Photos From Resurrection and Rosary Matches

The DePaul Prep Rams varsity team had two home matches against rivals Resurrection and Rosary this week. I couldn’t pass that up. Tuesday’s Resurrection match turned out better for the Rams winning in two straight games. Not so much in today’s match against Rosary. Rams fell in two straight games.

Volleyball is hard to photograph. I am out of practice. I will keep working at it. I hope you like the photos.

Chris Haas Leaves DePaul Prep to Be AD at IC Catholic

We learned today that DePaul’s Prep’s head baseball coach and teacher is leaving to become the athletic director at IC Catholic high school in Elmhurst.

After seventeen years at Gordon Tech and DePaul Prep, Chris is moving up. I know coaches and teachers coming and going from high schools normal but I can scarcely conceive of DePaul Prep without Chris Haas. When my kids started at Gordon, Chris was the Bill Jeske’s offensive coordinator, he was at every home basketball game and of course, he was the manager of the very successful baseball program for GT and DePaul Prep.

With Mike Wieda, Paul Chabura, Sean Connor and now Chris Haas being snatched up by other schools, I hope the loss of all this coaching talent doesn’t hurt too much.

Best of luck Chris. Thanks for teaching and coaching my kids. We will miss you. Don’t be a stranger. I will have to get out to wherever IC Catholic is and photograph some games.

Go Rams!

Day 28

We are four full weeks into this stay-at-home phase of this historic global pandemic, and I have not written a word about it in this blog. I started this blog as a place to post photographs, not a place to vent or opine on subjects I know little about. I am not a columnist with a gift for observation, analysis and the English language.

Since I haven’t been shooting events, I have only posted twice in the last 28 days. The first was on Day 1, photos from the DePaul Prep v. North Grand regional final basketball game a few days prior. The second was Day 15 when I posted previously unpublished photos from a DePaul Prep regional playoff baseball game last spring. I was missing baseball that day. I ran across the photos that I did not have time to process immediately after I took them. Then the relevancy of the photos was overtaken by events, so they never got posted. On April 4th, I thought people would like to see them.

Nevertheless, I have still been taking photos. I have started carrying my DSLR everywhere I go—which turns out to be very few places, basically just to the Jewel and to my office downtown.

Some of those photos are below. I generally don’t publish in black and white but somehow it seems appropriate now. The photo the bird is in color. I saw this strange looking bird among some pigeons sitting quieting in a corner of a building on LaSalle Street. I have never seen a bird like this before. It seems quite out of place—a duck sized bird with an unusually long beak. Perhaps someone knows what it is?

These photos are not particularly good. I am not a good street photographer, nor am I particularly trying to be. This global pandemic is requiring me to adjust and pushing me in an other direction.

I hope you like the photos.