La Lumiere joins National Interscholastic Basketball Conference
As announced on May 24 on ESPN, La Lumiere School is joining a handful of high schools around the country to form the National Interscholastic Basketball Conference (NIBC). In addition to games against local and regional schools, the Lakers will solidify a national schedule, formalizing a trend over the past decade of competing against the highest level of talent at invitational tournaments.
“[Formally creating this conference] really started because of COVID,” said Head Coach Pat Holmes. “Last fall we were having a very hard time finding teams who were willing to submit to all the precautions and rigorous testing protocols our entire school required to keep our community safe. I reached out to some of the coaches at schools we’ve played at national tournaments and we worked together to put together a schedule for this past season—it ended up being the strongest slate of competition we had ever faced.”
Making it happen necessitated frequent communication between each school’s head basketball coach and head of school. A byproduct of the time spent as a group on Zoom was the realization that working together long term might make a lot of sense.
“The biggest selling point to me was the shared oversight and commitment to play against other schools with serious academic programs,” reflected Adam Kronk, La Lumiere’s Head of School. “Each year we see more and more ‘pop-up schools’ out there where it appears the only priority is basketball. Our program is about a lot more than that.”
Next year there will be former La Lumiere players on the rosters of Auburn, Baylor, Brown, Harvard, Kansas, Miami of Ohio, Minnesota, Purdue, SMU, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara. Current student athletes at La Lumiere hold offers from distinguished universities including Harvard, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Stanford, Virginia, and Yale.
“For years now, we’ve been the team in the GEICO [National Tournament] program with our student athletes in coat and tie. We want to win just as badly as the next team, but it’s no secret that we intend on continuing to be the strongest squad on the floor academically,” explained Holmes. “That takes an incredible amount of discipline and we’re really proud of it.”
The NIBC will bring with it more exposure on television, as well as increased attendance at home games in the historic Marsch Gymnasium. “If it gets more folks to come to campus, or even to land on our website, it’s a win,” according to Kronk. “Maybe basketball is what gets someone to know our name, but it’s our mission that they’ll fall in love with. Excellence in every endeavor and a continued commitment to the formation of the whole person—that’s our goal.”