Boys Basketball: Mustang Rising
How a group of kids from the same Chicagoland neighborhood became one of this century's best Illinois boys basketball teams
Sometime during the first half of the 20th century, the flatlands north of Chicago became populated with city dwellers.
Sick of the noise, smell and crowds of the city, families built weekend getaway homes on grassy open lands that extended for miles and miles in all directions.
Within a section of a newly incorporated area of about 10 square miles, a Catholic Archbishop, George Mundelein, decided to start a seminary.
In 1915, the incorporated village located about 40 miles northwest of Chicago re-named itself after the archbishop.
In the ensuing decades, the city of Mundelein has developed well beyond being known for just being a small village that houses future priests.
If a visitor today took a drive down Illinois State Hwy. 176, headed west past St. Mary’s Of The Lake Seminary (which still remains), they’d recognize the landmarks of a modern American city.
A high school. A Starbucks, a Target. Residential homes.
The families who reside in those homes live on everyday suburban roads named Wildwood Avenue, Highland Road or Somerset Lane.
Four other streets within the same neighborhood pocket are named Joshua Drive, Chadwick Way, York Court and South Arden Lane.
The farthest distance between the four points is six miles; York Ct. to the south and S. Arden Ln. to the north.
On these streets, separated by a few stop lights along Route 60, is where Conor Enright (Chadwick Way), Jack Bikus (Joshua Dr.), Scottie Ebube (S. Arden Ln.) and Trey Baker (York Ct.) spent their formidable basketball-playing years.
Over the past four seasons, Enright, Bikus, Ebube and Baker have transformed the Mundelein Mustangs from one of Chicagoland’s losing programs into one of the area’s best high school teams. In early March of this year, the Mustangs won the North Suburban Conference regular season title, the first time a Mundelein team had won a conference title since 1993-94.
Tonight, the Mustangs play Fenwick in the quarterfinals of the Chipotle Clash of Champions, featuring eight of the best teams in the Chicago area. The two-day event is a substitute for a cancelled-due-to-Covid Illinois state basketball tournament.
It might not seem that unusual for four boys that grew up in close locality would end up on the same high school team. But proximity and prominence are not always intertwined. Intangible forces must come into play, making all the jigsaw puzzle pieces somehow fit together.
This is the story of how greatness and significance are made.
Matt Badgley always believed he would get back into coaching. He just needed a nudge from a trusted colleague.
An assistant principal at Wauconda High School, Badgley had been out of coaching for several years when the Mundelein boys basketball job opened up in March of 2017. Frequent conversations with Wauconda Athletic Director Andy Lambert led Lambert to offer Badgley a piece of advice.
“I was so convicted in my thoughts and approach and (Lambert) said, ‘you have to get back in.’ I knew it,” Badgley said. “I couldn’t get to the end of where I was without giving it another shot. It was just an itch I needed to scratch.”
The conviction Lambert noticed originated from Badgley’s years coaching in the southern part of Illinois—in towns named Campbell Hill and Lebanon and Pinckneyville.
There, Badgley learned how the way the hometown basketball team played reflected the identity of the towns they represented. Hard nosed man-to-man defense. Respect the opponent while at the same time trying to beat them up physically. That’s what the locals wanted to see on cold Friday nights in January and February.
All successful coaches hold personal truths on how they see the game but are smart enough to understand the line between rigidity and pliability.
When Badgley was hired by Mundelein Athletic Director Troy Parola that April of 2017, he entered the second chapter of his coaching career. He knew coaches out of game for as long as he would do not inherit lions but sheep. He also knew his vision of the game, the attacking defense, the motion-style offense, learned in all those packed gymnasiums in southern Illinois, could work north of Interstate 80.
But he had to be nimble to succeed. And first, he had to see what he had.
It was probably sometime during the summer of 2012 when Kyle Kessel first noticed the new crop of fourth graders bouncing basketballs at the Sports Complex in Libertyville, IL.
Four of the players—Conor Enright, Trey Baker, Scottie Ebube and Jack Bikus—all attended Fremont Elementary School and up to that point, played in local YMCA leagues.
The fact they had signed to play for Team Kessel and transition into the world of organized travel basketball meant a step up in training and commitment.
“They were good at a young age,” Kessel said.
So good, by their 8th grade year, 2016-17, a team with Enright, Baker and Ebube won the Illinois age group AAU state championship. They made it all the way to the national championship game in Orlando in July 2017 before losing to a team sponsored by Ray Allen, the former NBA star.
Also on the national runner up team was Libertyville’s Blake Ellingson, a future college football player, and future Carmel Catholic star Kimahri Wilson. Kessel didn’t get in the way of a group that remains, four years later, the best travel team he’s ever coached.
“They were all great athletes and I let them go,” Kessel said.
Sometime in the spring of 2017, not soon after he’d been hired as head coach at Mundelein, Badgley wandered into a area gymnasium to watch an AAU game.
Badgley heard how there was a team of future Mustangs coached by Kessel, the former Mundelein great and school’s all-time leading scorer.
It didn’t take long before Badgley locked in on one player named Conor Enright.
“The first defensive possession, the way he guarded a kid, I was like ‘whoa, I like that kid,’” Badgley said.
Baker and Ebube were also on the court that night and Badgley walked away impressed with he saw.
In June 2017, Badgley held organized practices for the first time. When the time came to roster summer league games, he left Enright off the varsity and put him with a team of underclassmen.
“He had to earn it,” Badgley said.
When Badgley would review the game reports from the freshman/sophomore games, a statistical pattern emerged.
Enright: 27 points.
Enright: 25 points, 10 assists.
Enright: triple double.
Badgley eventually relented and called Enright up for a game in the Stevenson summer league.
“We were down 10 and I put Conor in and we’d be up five. I’d take him out and we’d be down 10, then back in and we’re up five again,” Badgley said. “I stepped back and said, ‘OK, he’s not going to play just freshman.”
Summer contact days rolled into fall league play.
The older players get to pick teams in the fall, a rite of passage of sorts.
When the seniors put the rosters together, they all wanted the same 135-pound freshman.
“I’d ask for Conor every time,” Jeff Bikus said, a senior on the 2017-18 team. “We’d play three on three and he’d get a steal and easy finish. He was so competitive and hated to lose.”
(Photo Credit: Daily Herald)
Enright, along with Ebube, made the freshman team in 2017-18. Enright scored 275 points for a Mustangs team that won 14 games.
To put that victory total in context—the previous four years, Mundelein won 11 games combined.
On December 5, 2017, Mundelein defeated Zion-Benton for its first conference win since 2012-13. Sitting high up in the stands at Zion were Kessel and Chris Pickens.
Pickens, at the time a Lake Zurich assistant coach, wore a Bears pull over jacket that night. But he couldn’t resist a fist pump and cheer for the Mustangs after the final buzzer.
A few short months later, Pickens returned home for a seat next to Badgley.
Chris Pickens didn’t expect to land a coaching job at the mall.
Riding down an escalator at Hawthorn Mall in Vernon Hills about 10 years ago, he noticed a woman at the bottom starting straight up at him.
“She foot sprints up the escalator and and asks me, ‘are you Chris Pickens?’” Pickens said.
The woman’s name was Stephanie Enright. She quickly explained to Pickens the urgent nature of her business.
Could Pickens coach her oldest son, Kyle? Oh, and could she also bring along a small group of other young and eager players as well?
“She said, ‘I have a younger son as well named Conor. He’s really quick and might be good some day,” Pickens said. “I’m like, ‘OK, sure.’ So she brings all these kids.”
A 1992 graduate of Mundelein, Pickens had been doing private coaching sessions and built a reputation in the area. He had also been working for Kessel, a longtime friend from their Mustang playing days.
Hired to train soon-to-be middle schoolers Jeff Bikus, Kyle Enright, Andrew Silva, Tommy Marcotte and a handful of others, he couldn’t take his eyes off Enright’s younger brother, Conor.
“He’s just flying around like a wild man,” Pickens said. “I started training him from there.”
Fast forward to the spring of 2018.
The head coach at Lake Zurich, Billy Pitcher, left to take the Lake Park High School job. Pickens, Pitcher’s top assistant, becomes a free agent. He gets a call from Badgley, fresh off his first season at Mundelein.
The roster, featuring rising sophomores Conor Enright, Scottie Ebube and Jack Bikus, Jeff’s younger brother, needed another guiding hand.
Badgley offered Pickens a job as his assistant, which he accepted.
At a restaurant in Libertyville soon after taking the job, Pickens listened to Badgley map out to his vision for how he wanted the Mustangs to play.
After a year of breaking in a freshman point guard (Enright) and calling set plays on every possession, things would be different in 2018-19.
“We talked about it and I told (Pickens) I want to make sure we play free. I want us to work constantly on making sure the kids get to the right spots and their decision-making from those spots,” Badgley said.
Pickens was the perfect ally to help execute Badgley’s ideas. Pickens understood player’s strengths and weaknesses from training them in private settings. He’d coached against them in 2017-18 as an assistant at Lake Zurich.
The relationships were already established, trust built. Pickens knew the only way to beat conference rivals Stevenson and Lake Forest and their long possession schemes was to not adopt their format, but to play a different style.
“We’d have hours of talks about how we wanted them to play,” Pickens said. “We wanted to push as much as we could, get out and pressure in the gaps and force us to play faster.”
With Pickens and assistant Noel DeLaMar, Badgley had the coaching staff in place. That season of 2018-19, Mundelein took another step forward.
The team won 20 games and made it to a Class 4A regional final. The arrival to the varsity of Jack Bikus, a swiss-army-knife-do-everything guard/forward and Kessel Heat graduate along with Enright and Ebube, a true center at 6-foot-8, added depth to the roster.
But more than the competitive leap, a cultural shift took hold.
That Christmas of 2018, rather than play in a tournament close to home, the Mustangs went on a trip downstate.
Badgley got his team into a holiday tournament hosted by Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
Before games, the team conducted shoot arounds inside the school’s 8,000-plus seat arena, the Banterra Center. Three of the four games were played on the Saluki’s home court.
One game, against Carbondale High School, three Mustangs starters (Enright, Ebube and Bikus) got in early foul trouble. Bench players, like junior Jake Salvador, were forced into more prominent roles.
Mundelein won all four games and took home the tournament’s first place trophy. On the train ride home (yes, the Mustangs took the train) the conversation was about the possibilities that lied ahead.
“There was a cultural piece that was developing,” Badgley said. “It has been whispered back to me from players that have graduated how (the Carbondale trip) was a tipping point for that group, when we knew we were a family.”
Said Enright: “The train was interesting. Better than sitting on some uncomfortable bus. We got to know each other better. My most fun trip.”
There is a marked difference between good and great. Mundelein had shown it could be great, but winning a conference or regional title required more than bursts of brilliance. Consistent winning meant an upgrade in talent and regular maturation.
Both came in the form of a familiar face.
When running a youth basketball organization, good coaches are always in demand.
In 2015, Kyle Kessel found one in Pat Ambrose.
The Stevenson High School coach, fresh from a Class 4A state championship title, had two sons, Matthew, an seventh grader, and Evan, in sixth grade, both basketball players eager to learn and improve.
Ambrose called Kessel one day and asked if he could help coach.
“He came on board to work with (Matthew and Evan),” Kessel said.
For a couple of years Kessel had coached Trey Baker, a talented young shooting guard who lived in Mundelein.
Baker was a key contributor on Kessel’s 2017 team that made the AAU national finals in Orlando. Two of Baker’s teammates, Conor Enright and Scottie Ebube, promptly enrolled in Mundelein High School.
While they zigged, Baker zagged.
He chose to attend Stevenson, the varsity team coached by Ambrose. Baker made the Patriots varsity team as a freshman in 2017-18.
But in the summer of 2019, Baker left Stevenson and transferred to Mundelein. Baker’s skill set provided what had been a missing piece for the Mustangs—a true shooting guard with excellent three-point range. Having grown up with Enright, Ebube and Bikus, Baker instantly felt comfortable around old friends.
“I wasn’t given the opportunity I thought (at Stevenson) I was capable of. I was real close with the guys (at Mundelein) and they welcomed me with open arms,” Baker said. “Coach Badgley gave me the opportunity to play on the front stage and show what I can do. It was an easy transition.”
Said Badgley: “We didn’t bring in somebody we had to worry about. (Baker) was tested and had a chip on his shoulder.”
(Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune)
With a true two-guard to partner with Enright, Mundelein reached unprecedented heights in 2019-20.
The Mustangs rattled off 30 wins (a school record) to just four losses. With bigger contributions from Ebube, Bikus, as well as role players Chris Rooney (guard), Nick Borcia (guard) and power forward Syam Atade, they won a regional title for the first time in seven seasons. Games, home and away, turned into must-see events.
“We went beyond what we thought we were going to get to. It was one of those things where we started to get a lot of fans that we didn’t see before coming to our games,” Badgley said. “That’s the way I grew up, where teams follow their high school boys teams.”
(Photo Credit: Chicago Sun-Times)
(Photo Credit: Chicago Tribune)
All it took to stop the Mustangs that season was a global pandemic.
And that’s what happened.
On March 12, 2020, a day before Mundelein was scheduled to face Stevenson in the Class 4A sectional final, the Illinois High School Association cancelled the rest of the season.
Just like that, it was over.
“I’ll say it over and over. We were 30-4 and still playing,” Badgley said. “It took a world wide shut down to stop us.”
Not long ago, Pickens was walking through a park in Libertyville. He recognized a man playing with his son.
It turns out the man Pickens recognized, Eric Levernier, was one of the many basketball players tutored by Pickens. A Mundelein graduate himself (1998), Levernier chit-chatted with Pickens and the conversation turned to the current Mustangs boys basketball team.
“He (Levernier) said, ‘I’m watching every game,’” Pickens said. “It makes me proud how former players care about that stuff.”
A few hundred miles away to the east, Jeff Bikus, now a junior basketball player at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, flips on the television in his apartment whenever his younger brother, Jack, is playing.
“I watch him in my apartment whenever I can. My roommates are probably tired of me talking about it,” Jeff Bikus said.
Sports can be a powerful connective agent.
There are two ways to look at the run the Mundelein Mustangs have been on the past two seasons.
One is with a pessimistic eye, how twice the Mustangs had seasons shortened due to the coronavirus pandemic. The best bad luck team of all-time.
The other way is less cynical and more rapturous.
How a group of young men, all from the same neck of the woods, found their way, through basketball, into the hearts and minds of a community.
This weekend, Conor Enright, Scottie Ebube, Jack Bikus and Trey Baker will suit up for the final time together as Mundelein Mustangs. But their legacy, as teammates and winners, that will be forever timeless.
“I think there will be some closure. There will be some part of us that will always wonder what could have happened with a normal season,” Enright said. “Being able to walk away with this group of guys will be good enough for me.”
Footnote: Conor Enright will next attend Drake University on a basketball scholarship. Scottie Ebube will attend Southern Illinois University and play basketball and Trey Baker plans to attend and play basketball at Maryville University in St. Louis. Jack Bikus is uncommitted.