I'm not surprised you haven't heard of Chicago Christian. In 57 years, we've had little football success over the years. We made the quarterfinals once in the playoffs in 2007 and then got whipped by Driscoll Catholic near the end of their 8 years of titles run. We get our football talent mostly from our two feeder schools, and one year it can be very minimal and every so often we get a great class or two. Almost never do good football players outside the two schools choose CCHS for its football program because those good players have Mt. Carmel, Brother Rice, Marist, Providence and St. Rita to choose from if they really want top echelon football private schools.
At one time 50 years ago we had enrollment around 750, now we are at 316. Been declining for years and are continually trying to reverse the decline. As other small private schools know, that is REALLY hard to do. 316 enrollment for a high school with years of declining enrollment is dangerous territory.
The change that propelled us this year was hiring a new coach CJ Cesario at the end of last year and then good assistant coaches. They installed a new competent offense and brought great coaching.
CCHS had a talented Senior class of 13 players this year. Nearly all of them attended one of our two feeder K-8 Christian schools and played together for years. In this way, we really were no different than several of the top 2a schools we played in the playoffs - Maroa-Forsyth, Farmington, & Tri-Valley. All their players are local and come from a centralized source.
We needed a coach to maximize that talent, effort and teamwork. We got one, and he did. We could see our team was different immediately during the first few games of the year - mentally and physically tough, and better tackling. But honestly I never expected or dreamed we would win a State title this year.
