By Jeremy Mullman
Young is already wearing Northwest-ern’s colors, a baggy purple-and-black parka covering his six-one, 180-pound frame, an Adidas Big Ten gym bag at his feet. He’s the first black Chicago high schooler to accept a basketball scholarship to Northwestern since Art Aaron of Saint Ignatius in 1980. In two decades Northwestern has landed only five basketball players from Chicago, three white and two black. The black players were both second-generation Northwestern students, one of whom had attended a Virginia boarding school.
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Melda Potts, Northwestern’s coordinator of African-American outreach, has been waiting for someone like Jitim Young to come along ever since she got to Northwestern a year ago. She plans to ask him to participate in the school’s “ambassadors” program, which sends successful students back to their high schools for recruiting. “[If Young succeeds at Northwestern,] NU wouldn’t be something foreign,” she explains. “Sometimes I go out to schools where people don’t know where we are, or if they can afford to come here. But it is obtainable, and he could show them that.”
Potts’s mission is to rebuild the bridges between Northwestern and minority students in Chicago, especially those at Catholic schools, who tend to be better prepared for college. Many of the high school students she meets think of Northwestern as “an excellent school, hard to get into, and really expensive.” But that’s only if they think of it at all.
O’Neill courted him with doctored videotapes. “I’d get a movie, and he’d put his face in it and be saying, ‘Jitim, we need you,’ or something like that,” Young recalls. “There was one where he was James Bond–but with Coach O’Neill’s head, right? I mean, he had a suit on and a couple of girls.” In another sequence, cribbed from the Chris O’Donnell comedy The Bachelor, O’Neill was a tuxedo-clad groom being chased through the streets of San Francisco by thousands of screaming women.
Scott Bogumil, Young’s head coach at Gordon Tech, can’t understand why the Wildcats aren’t a winning team. “Coaches around here have always seen Northwestern as this diamond in the rough,” he says. “Every time we go to the team camps, the coaches sit around and talk about it, and we’re just baffled by it. I think it’s just a matter of breaking through there, and then that will become one of the best jobs in the country.”
Young, Northwestern’s headline newcomer in a year of departures, never wavered in his commitment. “He understood that we were getting better players than we were losing,” says O’Neill. For his part, Young isn’t bothered by O’Neill’s reputation. “He’s tough, yeah. But, coming from around here–I mean, it doesn’t get any tougher. I’m not used to having things given to me, you know. I’m a pretty tough kid myself.”
