Individual talent didn’t have nearly as much to do with Evanston’s basketball run to the Final Four last year as the team chemistry and connections developed throughout the year by a special group of players.
Friday night in front of a near-capacity crowd at Beardsley Gym, the Wildkits looked like a 2.0 version of that team.
Connecting on a level that was more than enough to take down state-ranked New Trier, the Kits played an almost flawless second half and prevailed 67-59 in a battle of Central Suburban League South division unbeaten teams.
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Answering every New Trier score with a basket of their own, Evanston showed the toughness and character necessary to repeat as division champion and concluded the first half of the conference race with a perfect 5-0 mark while moving to 13-3 overall.
Four Kits --- Timi Ogunsanya with 18 points, Vito Rocca with 17, Dion Lane Jr. with 16 and Ben Ojala with 11 --- scored in double figures for the winners. Evanston totaled 20 assists on 24 made field goals, led by Ojala’s career-high 9 assists.
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New Trier, which was missing leading scorer Christopher Kirkpatrick with a knee injury, got a combined 29 points from Danny Houlihan and Elton Jaegerskog while dropping to 13-4 and 4-1, respectively.
Evanston rose to the occasion just 48 hours after head coach Mike Ellis had suggested there is still a learning curve to having all five starters on the same page at the same time on the court following a victory at Maine South.
Ellis certainly got some answers in that regard Friday. Evanston now leads the all-time rivalry series with 126 wins to 100 for New Trier, and since Ellis became head coach ETHS holds a 24-10 advantage over the Trevians.
That’s a winning percentage of 71 if you can’t do the math.
“New Trier is solid at both ends of the floor. They’re ranked in the state for a reason,” Ellis said. “I thought the strength of our play tonight was definitely our offensive execution. We were definitely connected tonight, and that isn’t just about their skill sets. That connection comes in the unseen moments, at the 6 a.m. shootarounds, the trip to Centralia, walking the halls together, hanging out and having each others’ backs all the time. It reaches far beyond their skill sets.
“You can say that was our best game of 2026.”
The winners had to constantly turn back Trevian thrusts in the second half after building a 23-19 lead by the halftime intermission. Evanston rarely had an “empty” possession in the second half and shot 16-of-22 from the floor over the last two quarters.
The Kits surrendered the lead briefly in the third period, when Houlihan muscled in a shot past junior Tate Schroeder to cap a 7-0 New Trier run that made it 38-36. But Ogunsanya, who was quiet in the first half and attempted just three shots, responded with a pair of 3-pointers --- one from 25 feet --- and Evanston crept back ahead 44-42 by the end of the quarter.
New Trier’s last gasp came with 77 seconds remaining when Houlihan hit a 3-point shot to pull within 61-58. Ogunsanya and Lane Jr. both canned a pair of free throws and Schroeder scored a lay-up off a feed from Rocca to seal the win.
“We can do better defensively, but we still got the job done,” said Rocca. ”Their switches on defense got us a little stagnant (on offense) in the first half, but once we started trusting each other more, we got into our offense and we got some easy baskets.
“We spend a lot of time in the gym together and we know it’s not a one-man show here. We have to trust each other and play hard to get anything done. At the beginning of the season there was not a lot of connecting at the same time. I expected the chemistry to come around and I’m not surprised that it’s happening. Now, we’ve got to keep it rolling.
“I didn’t feel like I did anything special tonight (7-of-10 shooting from the field). Ben (Ojala) is the one who really had a great game. He thrived out there, and he was the player who changed the game for us. He’s a shotmaker, but tonight we needed him to run the offense and he did just that. We don’t win the game without him.”
Ellis agreed.
“Ben missed his first couple of jump shots and I guess he just decided he was going to play more like a point guard,” the coach noted. “He didn’t come in thinking, hey, I’m a scorer, he just did what the team needed.”
