Rockford basketball ambassador gets call into Illinois coaches hall of fame
Jack McCarthy didn’t bring a resume when he applied in 2001 to coach Belvidere boys basketball for the second time.
“I brought a deck of cards,” he said.
McCarthy stacked the deck to deal the athletic director four aces and a king. He gave the vice principal, former Freeport Aquin coach Neal Trainor, three kings and two queens for a full house. He dealt himself 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, in four different suits.
He then said if he drew the high straw, he would keep picking 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. His interviewers called him nuts and said they would win every time.
“I said you are right,” McCarthy said. “You are Boylan. You always win. And you are Guilford. You are supposed to finish second. I will take 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 because I know Belvidere and I will win 14 games.”
McCarthy got the job. And finished 14-14. The previous coach had gone 11-43 in two years and Belvidere hadn’t won more than eight games since McCarthy had stepped down the first time seven years earlier.
McCarthy was famous in the NIC-10 for getting more out of less.
“It seems like every year he beat somebody he wasn’t supposed to,” former Boylan coach Steve Goers said when McCarthy retired for good in 2007. “Coaching against Jack was always like pulling teeth.”
Hall of Fame: Three to be inducted into Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame
Although he won only one regional title in Illinois, McCarthy was so respected he will be inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame on April 30 at Illinois State’s Redbird Arena. He will go in alongside his greatest player, 1985 South Beloit grad Peter Scalia.
“To go in almost 40 years later with your high school coach, that’s pretty something,” said Scalia, who broke future Illini Perry Range’s school scoring record with 1,831 points. “My first taste of basketball was understanding his philosophies. Coach McCarthy is an ambassador for basketball. He put his heart and soul into the game.”
And he always seemed to take over teams at the bottom. Range had graduated two years before McCarthy got his first head coaching job at South Beloit after being an assistant for Class AA state champ New Lenox Providence. Without Range and without McCarthy, the Sobos had gone 3-20. With McCarthy, they went 112-45 in six years, including 24-2 his final season, but never won a regional.
“It was very important that you play top-notch talent to understand how to win at that level,” said Scalia, a 6-foot-4 guard who played four years at Centenary, then the smallest NCAA Division I school in the country. “Our conference was on a down cycle. and we could never get nonconference games that prepared us for regionals.”
McCarthy left South Beloit to take over a Belvidere team coming off 11 consecutive losing seasons, including 0-23 the year before. He started off 1-22 and 5-20 but then went 93-96 his last seven seasons, from 1986 to 1994, and won the 1990 regional title. That was Belvidere’s only regional title in a 35-year span until the Bucs won two in Class 3A in 2016 and 2017.
“Jack was a master teacher of the game,” said long-time Rockford Auburn coach Bryan Ott. “He was a tremendous Xs and Os guy. He got an awful lot out of, at times, not a lot of talent. And even more important than that stuff, what a great human being. His players would run through walls for him.
“He managed to do this without the yelling and the barking that a lot of us do. He is an even better man than a coach. What a great role model for kids. What a great role model and mentor for coaches.”
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Besides coaching 15 years at Belvidere and six at South Beloit, McCarthy also coached for 27 years at Dale Greenlee’s Rockford All-Star Camp, 13 years at a camp in Beloit and 13 years at Rock Valley College’s summer camp.
“I am kind of an ambassador to basketball,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t coach my own kids in the summer. I coached other kids because I wanted everybody in Rockford to know how to play basketball.”
McCarthy got his best taste of winning in the area when he took the Beloit Catholic job in 1996. He had only six players on the team — in a school with only 51 students — but took them to a 24-2 record and the Final Four of the Wisconsin private school state tournament his first year. They went 33-30 the next three years.
And then the school closed its doors.
“I went to the parking lot and cried,” McCarthy said. “I loved that school. They were all for each other.”
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All his teams were. Win or lose, that was a Jack McCarthy hallmark.
“I respected the players at Belvidere,” said McCarthy, 74, who now lives with his sister in Orland Park after having some health problems in recent years. “They gave me everything they had. They don’t get paid. They aren’t pros. But they dive on the floor. That’s how much they want to win.
“I loved coaching at Belvidere.”
Matt Trowbridge: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com; @matttrowbridge
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: IBCA honors Belvidere, South Beloit coach Jack McCarthy, Peter Scalia
