Decades after dominating local basketball courts, Olympian returns to coach

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URBANA — Blake Schilb stood next to his assistant coach, David Sandage, at mid-court at Kenney Gym on the University of Illinois campus as their Uni High players gathered around after Friday evening's practice. One week into their first season leading the high school team, the Rantoul natives are still introducing themselves to the group.

"We're going to have plenty of fun this season," Sandage told them. "You won't find two people who love the game more than us."

More than two decades have passed since Schilb dominated local basketball courts as a high school star, when he left town for New Hampshire's Brewster Academy to rehabilitate a career that had stalled due to suspensions related to underage drinking and an incident in which he was caught stealing DVDs.

In those 21 years, he learned how to handle success and crushing disappointment. He learned how to handle responsibility and how to cope with unimaginable tragedy.

He's two years removed from a career that brought him to heights he only dreamed of as a child, even if those dreams played out in a different way than he expected.

"I wouldn't change anything about the path that I took," he said. "These are some of the things that I tell the kids now. You're going to learn, you're going to make mistakes, and that's fine. Just try not to make the same mistakes over and over. Some mistakes are a blessing in disguise and not really mistakes, just a learning process."

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As a kid, Schilb envisioned himself playing on a different court on the UI campus. He grew up in Champaign's Country Brook Apartments, just miles away from what was then called the Assembly Hall, where the Flyin' Illini thrilled fans on their way to the Final Four. At 10 years old, he stayed in the campus dorms while attending coach Lou Henson's camp.

His college dreams, though, would take a different course.

By the time he was playing for Verdell Jones Jr.'s Ft. Sooy No Limit AAU program the summer before his senior year in 2002, he was fighting to simply earn a Division I offer.

It wasn't his skill or size that kept coaches away. At 6-foot-7, he could "dribble, pass, shoot, he had great feel for the game, and he worked on his game," Jones said.

He fit right in with his talented teammates, which included future Illinois players Brian Randle and Rich McBride along with Shaun Livingston, who would be picked fourth in the 2004 NBA Draft after deciding to forgo his college career.

From an outside perspective, a scholarship offer to Schilb came with concerns. He'd been suspended from Rantoul's team twice for violations related to underage drinking, after which he dropped out of school. He was also caught stealing DVDs, for which he was sentenced to 30 days of community service.

"I think what I had to dismiss was the misnomer that he was a bad kid or something like that," Jones said. "You'll never meet a more pleasurable young man, a more respectful young man, soft-spoken.

"I think at the end of the day, you don't dismiss or cancel a person's future because of decisions they made when they were young."

That school year, Schilb left town for Brewster Academy, a prep school known for producing professional basketball players. The next spring, he committed to play for Loyola University in Chicago.

Quickly, Schilb proved Jones right. He earned a starting spot as a freshman, and his sophomore and junior seasons, he led the team in scoring and earned All-Horizon League first-team honors. That summer, he attended the NBA pre-draft camp, and he said that the Milwaukee Bucks promised to pick him late in the first round. Instead, he elected to go back to college, where he earned all-conference first-team honors again.

When draft night came, his name wasn't called in either round. Angry and disappointed, he fired his agent, a decision that would ultimately set the course for his life and career.

"My (new) agent said, 'Hey, what do you think about Czech Republic?'" Schilb said. "I said, 'Last I knew, it was Czechoslovakia.' But he said, 'Well, we have this team over there that's prestigious in the country. They play all over Europe, and you can get some exposure.' I was like, 'Let's do it.'"

During an up-and-down first season with CEZ Nymburk, he received a shocking call from someone he knew from college. He was notified that he was a father to a newborn baby, and the mother was considering putting the baby up for adoption.

Instead, Schilb elected to keep the baby, named Jadin. After a few months staying with Schilb's mother, he took Jadin to the Czech Republic with him for his second season, along with his mother and his younger brother and sister.

That year, he met his future wife, Barbora, after he saw her attending a game with a teammate's wife. They married in 2012 and eventually had three more kids.

All the while, his career was ascending. After two years in the Czech Republic, he moved to France to play for Elan Chalon. During the 2011-12 season, his third of four years with the team, he was named the league's most valuable foreign player.

In 2014, Schilb received a call from Ronen "Neno" Ginzburg, who had recently been named coach of the Czech Republic's national men's basketball team.

"He said, 'Hey, Blake, I'm going to become coach of the (Czech) national team. You're married to a Czech woman, aren't you?'" he said. "'Have you ever thought about getting dual citizenship?'"

Nine months later, he became a naturalized Czech citizen, eligible to play in EuroBasket for the Czech Republic later that year. Before that, though, he received another life-changing call.

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Schilb jokes that he thought of his younger brother, Tyler Patterson, and Patterson's close friend and neighbor, Sandage, as "young punks" when they were growing up. In retrospect, though, he remembers his brother as his best friend.

While Patterson didn't ascend to the heights his older brother did on the basketball court, he was charting his own course during his young adult life. He attended Full Sail University in Florida, earning a degree in musical engineering, and filled hard drives with music he'd written, which Schilb keeps to this day.

Patterson was in the best shape of his life in April 2015, and back in the area playing for the Danville Riverhawks semi-professional basketball team, when he called Schilb in Paris, where he was playing for Paris Levallois. Patterson complained of back pain, and shortly after, more painful symptoms started to emerge.

As it turned out, he had late-stage renal medullary carcinoma, a rare form of kidney cancer that affects predominantly young African American males with the sickle-cell trait.

After the brothers spent time together, Patterson got married and went away on his honeymoon, and Schilb went to EuroBasket, where he helped the Czech Republic to a seventh-place finish and a spot in the Olympic qualifying tournament.

When Schilb returned home, Patterson's condition was far worse. That summer, Schilb was offered a contract from Galatasaray Odeabank that far exceeded his previous salaries.

"I asked him, 'What do I do? Because I don't know. I don't want to leave and regret leaving,'" Schilb said. "He was like, 'No, you've got to go.' I said, 'OK, but we're going to FaceTime every day.'"

Much of his salary that year, Schilb said, went to experimental trials for his brother. He said one of those trials backfired and caused fluid to accumulate in his brother's heart. Patterson died that December.

"In hindsight now, of course I wouldn't change anything about my career," Schilb said, "but I wish I would've understood certain things about timing and things, and really what's important, things of that nature."

Schilb still listens to those hard drives full of his brother's music, and he's reminded of his brother every time he sees Patterson's daughter, now in the fourth grade.

"She's special," he said. "She reminds me of him a lot, especially his attitude. We called him 'Loco.' He was just crazy, but in a good way. Everybody loved Ty since he was younger. It's in the back of my mind all the time.

"I live life thinking, 'Every day. Enjoy the journey every day. Because you don't know.'"

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Amidst that loss, Schilb kept hitting new milestones in his career.

While the Czech Republic didn't qualify for the Olympics, losing to Serbia in the qualifying tournament, Galatasaray won the 2016 EuroCup. As a 32-year-old, he averaged 12.1 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.7 assists.

In 2019, the Czech Republic qualified for the FIBA World Cup for the first time, where he played against the United States in the group stage, a particularly surreal experience for Schilb.

"I was nervous," Schilb said. "I was singing both national anthems, just wondering how this game was going to go."

Schilb scored just three points in the tournament-opening loss. He bounced back, scoring 22 in a win over Japan and dishing out eight assists in a win over Turkey to advance out of the group stage. The Czech Republic finished seventh to earn a spot in the 2020 Olympic qualification tournament, which was eventually delayed a year.

At the end of one more season in Europe with Champagne Basket, which was shortened by COVID-19, the then-36-year-old Schilb thought his career was over. His family returned to Champaign, where they settled into a house that they had bought five years earlier.

Then, he received another call from Ginzburg, the Czech Republic coach.

"He said, 'Hey, what are you doing?'" he said. "I'm like, 'I'm in Champaign, in Illinois, in the United States.' He was like, 'Well, if you want to play in the (Olympic) qualifications, I suggest you come back in April.'"

Schilb came back for one last competitive basketball experience. It proved well worth it.

Against Canada in the tournament semifinals, Schilb caught fire. Playing against the host team with NBA players up and down the roster, he knocked down seven three-pointers and racked up 31 points and seven assists to lead his team to a 103-101 overtime win. The Czech team beat Greece in the final to qualify for the Olympics.

After beating Iran and losing to France in the Olympic group stage, the Czech Republic played a long-shot, must-win game against the United States. Barring an incredible upset, Schilb knew it would be the final time he'd play professionally.

"I told myself, 'Hey, this is your last game,'" he said. "'Don't leave anything out there. No regrets.'"

Schilb went toe-to-toe with some of the NBA's best players, hitting five three-pointers to finish with a team-leading 17 points in the loss, all the while trading trash talk with Kevin Durant, whom he met during the NBA pre-draft process. Throughout a career in which he always knew, deep down, that he had the talent to play in the NBA, Schilb proved he was up to that standard.

"It was a fantastic way for me to finish my career," he said. "That's the last memory I'll have of playing, as far as my professional career goes, sharing the court with some of the best players in the world, some of the best coaches. ... There's nothing I felt like I could hang my head about."

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Back in Champaign, Schilb turned his attention to coaching during the summer of 2022, creating an East Central Illinois version of Mac Irvin Fire, the Chicago AAU team, along with other coaches. His oldest son, Jadin, now a sophomore at Centennial, played for him.

After interviewing unsuccessfully for the head coaching position at Champaign Central, Schilb planned to coach this season with one of his original mentors and champions, Jones, who is now the coach at Urbana High School.

Jones went so far as to put Schilb in charge of some summer workouts before he was unexpectedly offered the job at Uni High.

"I just kind of watched him, and I thought he was great," Jones said. "I told him working with him would be like working with one of my sons. But there's no way I could stand in the way of him pursuing his dream."

After taking the job, Schilb gave Sandage, his old neighbor from Rantoul, a call.

While they started off in the same place, Sandage, who is five years younger, took a far different path in basketball. While he called the game his "first love," he didn't make Rantoul's team his freshman season. Still, he decided to pursue coaching, first at his former elementary school, St. Malachy in Rantoul. Then he joined Schilb on the local Mac Irvin Fire team two summers ago, followed by a job as an assistant coach at Westmont High School in the Chicago suburbs.

For all of Schilb's basketball knowledge, there was one area in which Sandage was more informed.

"He's very skilled in the game, so I don't know if it was as easy for him at first to understand it when it's harder for someone to play basketball or it's harder to understand it on the level that he understands it," Sandage said. "Now, I think he's developed that patience, but from the outside looking in, I just thought it was funny, because I understood how, as a 14-year-old, it would be difficult to understand the game."

Early in their time at Uni High, both Schilb and Sandage have stressed the possibility of changing the narrative surrounding the program, which hasn't won more than 10 games since the 2017-18 season and is most famous for losing 96 straight games in the 1970s.

"You need to play like there are 3,000 people at the stands," Schilb shouted during practice. "You never know, there might be (large crowds) at your games this year."

Schilb, after all, knows something about turning around a narrative.

"Whether it be on the basketball court or off the court," he said, "I challenge kids to get out of their comfort zone, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and enjoy each day and the journey."