Glory Days with.....Sue Ellett

The 1983-84 sports season was a big one for Dundee-Crown’s Sue Sisler. Sisler not only qualified for the state girls’ golf tournament but also was part of the Chargers’ run downstate in girls’ basketball.

Nowadays, Sisler is known as Sue Ellett after marrying former Larkin star Doug Ellett and has two daughters, Taylor and Connie, who have achieved great times playing girls golf at Hampshire, where Ellett is a math teacher and girls golf coach. I took the opportunity to speak with Ellett about her days in high school and about her life now.

One of the biggest things during the ’83-84 season was the fact that Dundee-Crown was a new consolidated high school as Dundee and Crown High School combined into one after Ellett spent three years at Dundee High School. Ellett said each day during basketball practice turned into a competition between the former opponents now teammates.

“It was strange going to Joe Komaromy’s club and I think we had 11 or 12 seniors and our toughest games were our practices,” Ellett said. “It would basically be Dundee vs. Crown and I think it made us better. We never wanted the season to end and I think we overachieved.”

Ellett added that it was an odd experience during that golf season because Dundee-Crown didn’t have a girls’ golf team in 1983 so Ellett was basically alone as a girl on a boys’ team.

“I was a kid out on an island because I was a girl playing on the boys’ team,” Ellett said. “When the regionals, sectionals and state meet came up, a counselor or assistant principal would just drive me and they would just go stay inside and told me to go play and have fun. I think some of my success came from the fact I’m very competitive and like winning.”

After her Dundee-Crown career ended, Ellett went to Northern Illinois University to play golf and was a four-year letter winner for the Huskies before eventually landing in Hampshire.

Ellett coached the girls’ basketball team for seven years including a second-place finish in her first season in 2003-04 and a 29-2 season in her final year during the 2009-10 season.

For Ellett, this will be her last season coaching girls’ golf after five seasons at the helm while helping to start the program with her daughters including the school’s first sectional berth last season.

After Taylor graduated following last year and went to Northern Illinois herself and with this being Connie’s senior season, the time has come to step away as Hampshire begins play in the Fox Valley Conference this year after leaving the Big Northern Conference.

Ellett is one person who wasn’t in favor of the move and described it as being the young child who doesn’t want to leave everything behind.

“I feel like a little kid whose parents said you’re moving and I’m taking you away from all your friends and all the things you’ve ever known and making you move when you didn’t want to,” Ellett said. “I’m now in a new school where I have no friends, none of the surroundings are familiar and I kind of feel like a fish out of water. “

Ellett continued by saying that it is a new and different experience now facing off in the FVC.

“I go to these Fox Valley matches and I know no one,” Ellett said. “You can’t just walk up and ask ‘hey, how are your kids doing’ like you can in the Big Northern and we’re really going to have to fight to earn any respect from any of those schools where in the Big Northern, I think we all respected each other.”

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