Little perks of class

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The Illinois High School Association has caught a lot of grief lately for its bullish approach to class expansion of the state tournament series.

It’s not hard to find people who think this trend is not a good thing for prep sports. The playoffs are watered down, they say, especially in the smaller classes, and winning a state championship isn’t the honor it used to be.

Whether you subscribe to this theory, I guess, depends on your vision for prep sports in general, and the IHSA playoffs in particular.

If you’re believe the state finals should simply be the best of the best, then maybe the way to go is to seed every school in the state from No. 1 on down and have one class for every sport.

But maybe the IHSA’s mission should be to provide a rewarding athletic experience for more than just the kids whose profiles are on Rivals.com.

Maybe it’s a good idea to give kids like Jason Kotecki and schools like Illinois Lutheran a realistic shot at tasting a little postseason success, too.

That’s what Mark Kjenstad thinks, though he’s admittedly a little biased. The baseball coach at Illinois Lutheran, a school of 109 students in Crete, Kjenstad guided the Cavaliers to their first regional championship in any sport last Saturday.

If baseball hadn’t gone from two to four classes last spring, Illinois Lutheran might not have been facing the hosts in the Class 1A Morgan Park Academy Regional final.

“In the past, we’ve had to compete against schools that were much larger,” Kjenstad said. “We had to have an exceptional team just to have a shot. [Now] the field is a little more level, a little more fair.”

And without class expansion, Illinois Lutheran might not have walked off with a 17-14 win that set off quite a celebration.

“To me, it was like we won the World Series or something,” said Kotecki, a junior who came on in relief to halt a Warriors’ rally in the bottom of the seventh.

Little wonder, considering the hurdles the Cavaliers had to clear this season, over and above those faced by all of the state’s smallest schools.

Kjenstad came into the season believing the Cavs had a chance to win their first regional. Then about midway through the spring came a near-tragedy: Evan Teske, the team’s top pitcher, was hit in the face by a batted ball.

“It was scary lying on the mound,” Teske said. “My left eye was swollen shut for a few days after. We didn’t know if I was going to be able to see out of it again.”

Thankfully, Teske is recovering. He has undergone one operation, has another scheduled and has seen his vision gradually improve.

There have been other injuries as well, including Jon Boersema’s pulled hawmstring.

And then there was that roller-coaster of a regional final, a game in which the Cavaliers took and lost a 5-0 lead, jumped ahead 17-7 and then held off a Morgan Park Academy comeback.

After all that, there was a happy ending for Illinois Lutheran, a school that seems like a throwback in so many respects. In an age when so many prep athletes have tunnel vision, focusing on one sport to the exclusion of all other activities, these Cavaliers are renaissance men.

“Our baseball team is our basketball team is our soccer team,” Kotecki said.

And a little more besides. When the Cavaliers played Momence this season, Teske and two teammates left in the sixth inning to get back to school for the class play.

“I like baseball more than play-acting,” Teske said. “But I still like them both.”

And Kjenstad likes coaching kids who have a healthy outlook on life. That’s why he’s still at Illinois Lutheran, even though he has a good enough resume (99-73 record, eight winning seasons in 10 years) to go somewhere else if he so desired.

“I love the school,” he said. “I love the kids. I love the attitude the kids bring to athletics at our school. They play hard, but they’re not over the top on athletics.

“They keep it in perspective.”

It would be nice if the critics of class expansion would do the same.