- Brian O’Mahoney/for Sun-Times Media
- Pipkins, in a game last month against Huntley in an Elgin tournament. The Bogan junior “has the heart of a lion,” his coach says.
It looked like Luwane Pipkins and his Bogan teammates were in for a long evening Friday in the gym at Harlan, at 96th and Michigan. The Bogan Bengals, one of the city’s top high school basketball teams this season, rely on Pipkins, a skinny 17-year-old guard with a deadly outside jumper. The jumper was not so deadly early in the first quarter: Pipkins missed his first shot—and his next, and his next, and his next.
Nine’s not bad for an entire game for most high school players. It’s hard to rack up big numbers in just 32 minutes.
That didn’t take genius, Coach Goodwin told me. His players often compete in “around-the-world” games in practice, shooting from five spots beyond the arc, working their way from one corner to the other as they hit their shots. As a freshman, Pipkins was regularly making it around the world before the juniors and seniors.
As another Bogan guard prepared to inbound the ball to start the fourth quarter, a Harlan defender leaned all over Pipkins. The ref said something to the defender; meantime, Pipkins, frowning, raised an elbow casually and planted it in the player’s chest, letting him know that if the ref didn’t take care of this, he would. The defender backed away.
Pipkins already has gotten scholarship offers from University of Massachusetts, Valparaiso, University of Illinois at Chicago, Loyola, and Bradley, and a half-dozen other colleges have expressed interest in him. He knows the odds are against him making the NBA, especially given his height. He doubts he’ll get to be more than six-foot-one. “My dad ain’t tall, my mom ain’t tall,” he said. He’d like to be an architect if the NBA doesn’t happen.
