Note: Information for this story was provided by Len Scaduto’s family.
Longtime basketball coach Len Scaduto, who led upstart Oak Lawn to a second-place finish at the 1971 IHSA state finals, died on May 13. He was 93.
Scaduto led the Spartans for 29 years (1962-1991), winning 411 games.
After retiring from Oak Lawn, he spent three years as an assistant coach at Division II powerhouse Chaminade in Honolulu and 12 seasons as an administrative assistant at the University of Hawaii.
Scaduto, who was the Spartans’ frosh-soph coach for five seasons before moving up to the varsity, produced 15 winning seasons in a 17-year period at one point during his Oak Lawn run. He won five regional titles.
Scaduto’s 1970-71 Oak Lawn team, which finished 30-3, was led by starters Brett Arnold, Jim Bocinsky, Bob Carr, C.J. Kupec and the late Tom Dubetz. The unranked Spartans fell to powerhouse Thornridge 52-50 in the last one-class state title game.
“We had the hardest road of anyone to get as far as we went,” said C.J. Kupec, who went on to star at Michigan before a pro career that included stops with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets before a long stint playing overseas. “We got used to playing the role of the underdog. We took it game by game. … We just went out and played hard.”
Although unranked, Oak Lawn was soon on everyone’s radar in March of 1971 after defeating defending state champ Lyons 67-61 in a regional final in LaGrange.
The Spartans beat Proviso East 61-58 and St. Patrick 51-48 to capture the Hinsdale Central Sectional. A 66-54 win over New Trier East in a supersectional at Northwestern University’s McGaw Hall punched Oak Lawn’s ticket for an Elite Eight berth.
Oak Lawn beat Benton 71-58 in the quarterfinals and downed Springfield Lanphier 69-65 in the semifinals.
Scaduto always regarded Oak Lawn’s run in ’71 as “a once-in-a-lifetime” experience. “We had to pinch ourselves to believe we were playing for the state championship,” he said in an interview in 2024. “We never saw ourselves getting that far. If we won our regional, we thought we had done our job, as that was as far as we thought our talent could take us.”
Scaduto and Oak Lawn had begun the 1970-71 season with only one returning starter from a team that had gone 20-7 the year before.
Carr was among the key contributors from the 1970-71 team who had to wait his turn. “One of the things I respected was that (Scaduto) always rewarded the seniors who stayed with the program,” Carr said. “I always respected that and the guys ahead of me. That was his philosophy. C.J. (Kupec) was really the only one who played before he was a senior. The rest of us went up through the ranks. It was part of the culture that Len had created.”
Basketball’s popularity multiplied in Oak Lawn in the years before and in the immediate aftermath of the 1971 season.
“Back then, Oak Lawn basketball was just a dynasty — there was a huge tradition,” former player Don Wesselhoff said. “We were really into basketball when we went to Covington (Junior High). We had a good team and had been playing basketball together on the playground for three or four years. Len caught wind of us, and he came and spoke to us about playing at Oak Lawn. We’d never experienced that.”
Over 200 kids began enrolling in Scaduto’s Summer Basketball Camps, while the white T-shirts given to campers displaying the phrase “Future Spartan Basketball Player” became a staple among youth in the community.
Scaduto also set up a youth basketball League in Oak Lawn to promote interest in the sport and his program. The games were played on Saturday mornings at elementary schools in Oak Lawn’s District, with members of Oak Lawn’s varsity team serving as coaches.
“Five different schools fed into Oak Lawn,” Scaduto said in 2024. “If you took the top three players from each school, you would have a heckuva program.”
During his own days as a student-athlete, football had been Scaduto’s best sport. Raised in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, he attended DePaul Academy, where he competed in basketball, football and track. When a knee injury ended his football career at DePaul in the fall of his senior year, he recovered in time to take up boxing for the winter season of 1950. He would advance all the way to the Chicago City Championship, where he suffered his only defeat.
During his grade-school years, Scaduto became a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. His home on Cornelia Avenue was only blocks from Wrigley Field. “When I was in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade, and the Cubs were in town, a group of us would often race to the ballpark after school,” Scaduto said. “We would usually see the last 2½ innings.”
Despite his season-ending injury on the gridiron at DePaul, Scaduto earned a football scholarship to Northern Illinois University. He graduated from NIU in 1954 and spent two years teaching and coaching at Marmion before arriving at Oak Lawn in 1956.
Scaduto retired from Oak Lawn in 1991 and moved to Honolulu. Scaduto’s three years as an assistant coach at Chaminade (1990-1994) were highlighted by upset wins over Providence and Stanford at the 1991 and 1992 Maui Invitational Tournaments, considered among the school’s greatest victories.
During Scaduto’s time at Hawaii, the Rainbow Warriors made NCAA Tournament appearances in 2001 and 2002. Scaduto was an assistant coach at Farrington High School in Honolulu in 2008, when the Governors captured a Hawaii Division II title. He also coached at St. Louis School as well as with the Hawaii Swish, a semipro team, until the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.