Playing Through The Pandemic
As 2020 nears close, private sports industry leaders continue to search for a path forward
(Photo Credit: Daily Herald)
November and December are two of the busiest months of the year for Kyle Kessel.
Kessel runs Kessel’s Training, a basketball training organization based in Lake County, IL.
In late fall, Kessel is typically ramping up feeder programs for Mundelein High School, Fremd High School, located in Palatine, while also running 15 of his own AAU teams, Kessel Heat.
“Winter has turned into crazy time,” Kessel said, an all-state basketball player at Mundelein in 1993-94 who went on to play at Texas A&M.
But the coronavirus pandemic has made the last eight months anything but typical for Kessel. Like so many small business owners, navigating through and around constant-changing health and safety guidelines makes every day a struggle to earn revenue and provide activities for the high-demand youth basketball training business Kessel, along with his father, Dennis, started from scratch almost two decades ago.
This fall, Kessel was using four facilities to run camps, clinics and private instruction for both boys and girls ages 6-18. But after the state’s latest Covid-induced order that went into effect on Nov. 20, Kessel is scrambling to find available gym space.
Canlan Sportsplex in Barrington, Libertyville Centre Club and Volo Sportsplex have paused youth sports activities, per Governor Pritzker’s order. Only a church in Grayslake is keeping its lights on for Kessel to use.
“Friday (Nov. 20) was a big blow. It has pretty much put me to a halt. In the summer I could do stuff outside, but I can’t do that now,” Kessel said.
Kessel’s circumstances are not unusual in 2020. Many small businesses in the youth sports space are barely hanging on, forced to accept haphazard commands from Pritzker and public health officials, none of whom provide objective data to explain their decisions. The victims of dogmatic government overreach, masked as ‘health and safety’ directives, are the small businesses and those they serve—children in need of physical activity and emotional wellness.
Kessel and those like him balance two essential traits to playing through a pandemic—that of a survivalist and creative dreamer.
They must find the means to remain solvent in a time of mass insolvency.
For years, getting to work was an easy task for Christopher Pickens.
He’d leave his Libertyville home in the morning for the seven-minute drive to the Libertyville Sports Complex. There, using the facility’s plentiful space dimensions of basketball courts, he’d tutor young hoopsters on dribbling, footwork and shot technique.
“I’d be upset if I caught two lights in a row (on the trip to work),” Pickens said.
In March, at the beginning of the pandemic, the Libertyville Sports Complex closed its doors. The building has remained closed, with no plans on re-opening.
The situation forced Pickens to find a new location to run his basketball instruction business.
“I had to find a facility that was willing to be open and have their protocols in place and trust those,” Pickens said.
He found a spot in Northbrook, a gymnasium inside the Athletico Center. The managers said he could rent gym space early in the morning, starting at 6 AM.
The wee hours of the morning time slots were also accommodations for his clientele—high school and college students—whom preferred to train before classes began.
But to maximize his earning power, Pickens needed to fill the remaining hours of the day with lessons. Where would he find a home base? The overhead required to be a basketball coach is minimal but an upright basket is an essential piece of apparatus.
So Pickens got in his car and drove all over Lake and Northern Cook Counties. He made old fashioned house calls for his students—stopping in driveways that had baskets, and going inside homes that featured indoor courts.
‘A park? Is there an available basket there? Sure. Let’s work on handles and pull ups today,’ Pickens would say to his young clients, eager to get better at basketball.
“I’d be in Libertyville, Palatine, Grayslake, Mundelein. I’m driving more and it makes for longer days, but I’m lucky to be able to do it,” Pickens said.
By November, Pickens trades his private business card for that of a public school sports coach.
He is an assistant at Mundelein, a team that made a Class 4A sectional final last year (that never got played due to the coronavirus pandemic) and returns all five starters in 2020-21.
On Nov. 19, The Illinois High School Association temporarily paused the winter sports season, which includes boys basketball. A mid-December target date was given for revisiting when to resume the season but it is unlikely boys basketball will be played over the winter.
That leaves more time for Pickens to grow his private tutoring business.
But on Nov. 20, the Tier 3 mitigations were instituted in Illinois. Those included a ‘pause’ on ‘indoor group sports and recreational activities.’
Once again, Pickens is forced to adjust and modify.
With the temperatures dipping into the 40’s, outdoor driveway workouts are no longer an option.
“Finding gym space is at a big premium. Some places have shut down or some places have conflicts with soccer,” Pickens said. “It’s kind of been a big mess.”
That basketball court inside Athletico Center that Pickens uses for early morning workouts?
Andrew Braverman is in charge of booking it, along with the adjacent NFL size turf football field.
“We bring together likeminded businesses and are multi-dimensional,” Braverman said, General Manager of NorthShore Health and Wellness, the company that operates and manages the Northbrook Athletico Center.
Five years ago, NorthShore Health and Wellness moved out of the Joy of the Game building in Deerfield, found a new home in Northbrook with more space, expanded its reach and added more partners.
Instead of being almost exclusively soccer-focused, NSHW repurposed the space inside the new facility—it also operates the Berto Center in Deerfield, the former practice home of the Chicago Bulls—and added basketball, volleyball, football, lacrosse and fencing.
(Photo Credit: Avi-On Labs)
“It’s a wholesale model,” Braverman said “We fill our space with partners that sign long term deals and treat the space like their home. We’ve found success even through a pandemic.
“That was before the latest round of shutdowns.”
Before the latest round of shutdowns, there were the first shutdowns.
In mid-March, at the advent of the pandemic, both facilities, NSHW and Berto, were forced to close.
But over time, public health protocols eased up. By June 1, team practices were allowed. Right after the July 4 holiday, events were held with restrictions. That lasted about five weeks.
In mid-August a new round of health and safety mitigations were instituted. Braverman and his staff dissected spaces into ‘pod’ like formats.
“We divided all of our spaces with curtains that were installed years ago so we can tell our people that ‘this is your area, you can participate safely in your area,’” Braverman said.
That was the norm for several months. Until Nov. 20, when Gov. Pritzker wielded his heavy hammer once again and ordered new cutbacks on athletic activities.
“All of it went out the window,” Braverman said. “We have to shut down for no more than one-on-one training or one-on-two for siblings."
Braverman said he does not have any direct communication with Pritzker’s office or the Illinois Department of Public Health. How he learns of changes in public health guidelines is via txt messages or emails from partner contacts or parents (“they’ll be like, ‘did you see this?’ They beat me to the punch,” Braverman said).
But each time it happens, and its happened too many times to count at this point, Braverman’s job is to deal with the consequences and find solutions. He must take the phone calls from program coordinators asking when they can get back in the building, the emails from parents wondering if the basketball courts are still open.
But Braverman can’t stay in reactive mode for very long. He has a business to run and space that needs to be filled.
What’s the opposite of incapacity? Ingenuity.
“We went with 100 percent full with contracted space to 100 percent open as our contracts are with teams which we can’t host right now. So we asked our parents to send out notices that we are now available for rent,” Braverman said. “We have lessened our rent, we have divided our space to accommodate more families at once. It’s not a solution but it may be for other families so they can get out and do things safely.
“It’s really difficult. It drove a stake through us to have these (Covid) numbers come out.”
As Thanksgiving approaches, Matt Truding and his All In Athletics basketball organization shifts gears.
Fall ball is over, the high school season kicks in. Up next is the winter season for AIA.
“We had about 50 junior high teams,” Truding said, AIA’s President and Co-Owner.
Fifty teams and the hundreds of players filling the rosters requires gym space. Lots of it.
AIA has relationships with the Berto Center in Deerfield and Dunbar Recreation Center in Mundelein. But high school and middle school gyms are needed to run four dozen-plus teams. Schools have locked their doors since the most recent Tier 3 mitigations.
It is not how Truding envisioned the winter season beginning.
“We started with team practices and non-contact stuff but now with the pause, we are doing individual lessons,” Truding said. “For the training aspect, you have four different baskets you can have four different trainers with a kid, depending on what the facility will allow.”
On its website, AIA offers this mission statement:
The Mission of ALL IN Athletics is be the premier basketball player development program in the Midwest. ALL IN Athletics is completely committed to educating, training and developing the whole person through basketball. Our staff will strive to provide our players with the coaching and training they need to reach their highest possible potential on and off the court.
All of the public health restrictions is impactful on AIA’s bottom line. It’s hard to run a ‘premier basketball player development program’ the scale of AIA without available gyms to practice.
But money can be recouped. Holding true to the group’s mission and developing the ‘whole person’ has never been more important, according to Truding.
“You have to find the silver lining,” Truding said. “It’s a way for our coaches to get more in touch with our players relationship-wise and for the players, skill-set wise.”
When the latest mitigations went into effect, AIA sent out an email to parents and athletes urging them to ignore the messaging (not the actual guidelines) underlying all state public health orders.
Pausing does not mean stopping. Restrictions on activity, while frustrating to understand and follow, are not insurmountable burdens.
“We told them this is the time you can put time into things you wouldn’t have before. Individual work is not fun all the time but at the same time its the little things that matter,” Truding said. “The attention to detail on your shot, how strong you can make your handle. The kids who stay stagnant are the ones who fall behind.”
Truding is hoping for new guidance by early December and that limitations will ease.
“We just hope and pray that everyone is making the right choices for the next few weeks to get those numbers down and we can get back in the gym,” Truding said.
The week of Thanksgiving is the official kick off to the boys basketball season. The girls season, which starts a week earlier, is also littered with tournaments all over Chicagoland.
But this year, gymnasiums are empty.
“I’d see 50-60 games games between now and New Year’s. I’ve done that for most of my adult life,” Mike Mullins said, who runs the Illinois Wolves AAU program.
Labeled a ‘high-risk’ sport by the IDPH, competitive games are not considered safe by Pritzker and his public heath custodians. But that’s not preventing enterprising proposals.
Kessel is advertising on his website a high school league. Games would be played over four weekends in December.
“We did a fall league for six weeks with no spectators and did temperature checks and I sat there by myself watching every game,” Kessel said. “The kids would show up very happy and we had no problems.”
Kessel said he has gotten enthusiastic responses from many Chicagoland high school coaches (who by rule, aren’t allowed to organize any non-high school activities) and more so, from parents and athletes.
There is no IHSA rule stopping such a league from forming.
“(There are) no IHSA rules to prevent players from playing in them until their school starts playing within the established ISHA season,” IHSA assistant executive director Matt Troha said.
Will Kessel’s offer be just another noble idea squashed by anecdote-driven fear over the pandemic? Or will the proposal convert into an opportunity for area kids to play basketball and normalize an otherwise bleak holiday season?
Kessel is going to try his best for the latter. He’s buoyed by steady positive feedback.
“We had a (recent) tournament and I had more parents come up to me and tell me how much they appreciate what I’m doing and thanking me,” Kessel said. “I love kids and coaching.”
That sentiment—a desire to coach and bring the game basketball to young people—is always top of mind for Kessel and others in the private sports industry when faced with difficult decisions in steering through the coronavirus pandemic.
The best path to survival and eventual flourish?
Resourcefulness and imagination with a little bit of hope sprinkled in.
“Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel because I don’t want to talk about the other options at this point because you don’t want to play that game anymore,” Braverman said. “Could it get worse? Well it’s shown that it could.”
“Whatever loops and curveballs that get thrown at us we are trying to figure out what’s best for kids,” Truding said.