Members of the HHS Girls Basketball team pose for a photo. The team had the best season in school history, finishing 4th in state.
HUNTLEY – Huntley may be the only town in Illinois where a 55-plus active adult community and a large high school are very close next-door neighbors. Dozens of homes in the Del Webb community back up to the school’s sports complex or massive parking lots. Some Sun Citians may have grandchildren, nieces or nephews playing sports for the Red Raiders. Writing this story is a form of bridging the generation gap.
In 1999, when the first Sun City homes were rising, there were about 650 students at the high school. But then urban sprawl came to Huntley, and the school’s enrollment exploded. The school quickly became one of the fastest-growing in the Chicago area. In the next 14 years, the enrollment soared to more than 2,500 and is likely to pass 3,000 in the next five years.
One of the most visible parts of this record growth is the increased prominence of the school’s interscholastic sports programs. The Red Raiders are blasting into the world of elite high school competition thanks to a new generation of administrators, coaches, trainers, and athletes with enthusiastic work ethics and dedication.
Case in point: the Red Raider girls’ basketball team surprised the experts this winter with a record-breaking 26-8 season and finished 4th in the state’s Class 4A state tournament. At a school assembly on March 4, the Lady Raiders presented the school with large plaques for regional, sectional, and super-sectional championships and a huge 4th place state trophy. These were the team’s first-ever sectional and super-sectional titles, and they set a school record with 26 wins for the season.
Since 2000, the school’s football, girls’ volleyball (five times), and baseball teams have all reached the state’s final four in post-season tournaments. The north wall of the gym displays dozens of conference, regional, and sectional championships in more than a dozen sports.
The main architect of the girls’ dream season is head coach Steve Raethz, a native of Hoffman Estates who has brought winning and success to the girls’ basketball program. Raethz starred on Hoffman Estates boys’ hoops teams in the early ‘90s, played at St. Norbert’s College in Wisconsin, and decided he wanted to be an educator and coach. The two milestone dates in the girls’ basketball program are Raethz coming on board at the beginning of the 1999-2000 season and Huntley switching to the Fox Valley Conference from the Big Northern in the 2003-04 season because of its swift enrollment growth.
“This year has set the bar very high for the future and expanded everyone’s awareness of the possibilities in athletic competition,” Raethz said. “That is a tremendous legacy for these players to leave, especially our six seniors.”
Most of the key players will return next season to try to take the final steps to a state title. Sisters Ali and Sam Andrews, Kayla Baretto, Bethany Zornow, Britni Siwuda, Jessica Brock, and Rachel Zobott all return next year. Raethz was assisted this season by Phil Leiterman.
“When we left for the final four games at downstate Normal [IL] last week, the entire student body lined the hallways and clapped and cheered for us as we walked the halls on our way to the bus,” Raethz said. “It was a thrilling, special experience for all of us. At the super-sectional game, the Huntley students and fans made it seem like a home game; we got great support from the students and community all season long.”
Haley Ream, the only senior on this year’s team, was prominently vocal throughout the super-sectional game, keeping her teammates focused.
“When I was a sophomore, I admired the teammates who were leaders, and I tried to copy their example this year,” she said.
She hopes to play basketball in college next year but hasn’t decided yet where she will go. She also is a prominent athletic and academic role model. She has been a year-round athlete all of her four years, playing volleyball in the fall, basketball in the winter, and participating in track and field in the spring. Her grade point average is 3.9.
Other seniors completing their basketball careers at Huntley this season are Amanda Kaniewski (another outstanding three-point shooter), Maureen Prerost, Leah Lowenstein, Courtney Feites, and Haley Sabie.
With two freshmen and two juniors on the starting five, this year’s girls’ team was not experienced enough, so the “conventional wisdom” said. The team overcame that mindset with camaraderie and chemistry learned by playing on park district teams since they were six and seven years old.
“I’ve always been tall,” said freshman Ali Andrews, who is 6’-2” now and still growing. “I started playing organized basketball on Huntley Park District teams when I was in first grade.”
Sister Sam, now a six-foot junior, started when she was in second grade. She led the team in scoring this season and was the area’s leading three-point shooter, in addition to serving as co-captain along with Ream.
“We started this season by asking the players to write down their personal goals for the season, which I do every year,” said Raethz. “Then we had meetings where we discussed how the personal goals translated into team goals. The players had the primary input. We figured we could contend for conference and regional championships, and we won one of those and came very close in another. We used that process to help us win the sectional and super-sectional games. We lost our last two games of the regular season, and we used that to re-focus ourselves for the post season. We were third-seeded out of five teams in the regional, and when we won both those games, we knew we could have a great state tournament.”
The Raiders came up short in the final four competition, which included two of the state’s perennial powerhouse teams. But they had fun and enjoyed themselves.
“It was a great learning experience,” several players said as they savored the end of the most exciting four months of their high school careers.
That, of course, is what high school is all about.
