Elmhurst resident Bill Baldridge enjoys success on the local basketball coaching front.
By Mike Miazga
Correspondent
Elmhurst resident Bill Baldridge’s passion for coaching basketball has taken on a somewhat unexpected life its own.
Baldridge is a former high-school basketball coach at Elgin High School (on the staff of IBCA Hall of Famer Jim Harrington) and Elmwood Park High School. He had a decade-plus run at the high-school level before stopping to coach his children.
“I started coaching younger kids and some of the parents would ask if I could privately train their kids. This was about five years ago,” he said.
One thing has led to another and Baldridge now enjoys conducting camps and individual training through his Hoops Intensity Training organization.
“Things have gotten much bigger,” he said. “It’s kind of taken on a life of its own. I used to do a lot of work out of the Oak Brook Park District and if I didn’t have a Hoops Intensity shirt on, people would ask who I was and said they liked what I was doing. I’m very happy with the growth of the company. I spend a lot of time on practice plans. The goal is to develop kids.”
Baldridge also coaches a U15 travel team, which includes his son Jack Baldridge, who recently completed his freshman year at York High School. Baldridge previously coached in the well-known Illinois Wolves travel program.
“I had to move out of the Wolves out of necessity with everything else going on,” said Baldridge, a special education teacher at Elmwood Park High School. “With the coaching and training I’m doing, I needed to dictate my own schedule.”
Baldridge noted his travel team features players from all over the northern part of Illinois. Baldridge emphasizes the importance of his players receiving plenty of playing time on the travel circuit.
“What I tried to do instead of carrying 10 guys, I reached out to six families and we go with seven players,” he said. “I didn’t want parents going to all these events out of state and not get to see their kids play. Sometimes it can be trying when we get in foul trouble or when we play three games in a day. We’re developing these older kids. If you are at the U9 or U10 level, having 10 kids is no problem. As they get older and you start traveling all around, you want these parents to be able to see their children play.”
Baldridge’s team has been playing in the NY2LA league, where it had a 7-1 record through late last week with the only loss to a Top 20-ranked team on a buzzer-beater. The team was 18-3 overall. Baldridge’s team has played in key tournaments in Dallas and Minnesota in April, as well as another in Fort Wayne. It also has numerous July events scheduled, including stops in Milwaukee and Kansas City.
“We want to make sure we’re playing in all five NCAA live periods (recruiting),” said Baldridge, whose daughter, Abby, recently was part of an Eclipse club soccer team that took second in the nation (his other daughter, Lizzie, is part of the Elmhurst Airborne basketball club). “There are two live periods in April and three more in July.”
Baldridge, who runs his Hoops Intensity Training out of Immanuel Lutheran’s gym in Elmhurst, also helps out the Elmhurst Airborne travel program with its training and coach mentoring.
“Most of my training deals with kids in Elmhurst,” he said. “I do train some elite girls. We get kids coming from different parts of the area. I love working with the kids in Elmhurst. The people in Elmhurst are great. Elmhurst kids are great. They work hard. We have five camps scheduled this summer that will attract a lot of Elmhurst kids. I take great pride in doing this.”
