Hope Field at Altgeldt Park, the home football field of Chicago Hope Academy in the Tri-Taylor neighborhood, was abuzz last Friday night. It was the home opener for the scrappy Christian College Prep School, which entered its eleventh year with an enrollment size of 208, its largest to date. Like many high schools, football games are as much a community event as an athletic spectacle, but this seems somehow truer at Hope games. Students stick around all afternoon until kickoff, while parents, friends, and alumni commute from all over—and outside of—the city. To find the field, just look for the giant sign that looms over I-290, just west of the Western Avenue stop, with the word “HOPE,” painted white over a navy blue backdrop.

Across the street is the Quest Center, where Hope plays its basketball games, and another mile south of there, the Cross Country team runs 400-meter repeats on a gravel track at Douglas Park. The school, a renovated Catholic parish purchased from the Archdiocese and other Christian bussinessmen by Hope founder Bob Muzikowski in 2004, sits a half mile from the sign and the field. To be sure, athletics are a vital appendage to Hope’s thriving student body, and that energy was on display Friday night; the football team, led by new Head Coach Matt Kelly, formerly of Southside powerhouse Brother Rice, overtook visiting Lakev view easily at 48-6. But the victory on the field wasn’t the only one; it was happening in the stands, too. Instead of filtering out early as the Eagles began to dominate, the students stayed put in the bleachers along Hope wall, which backs against the darkening skyline, to socialize some more. There’s a lot going on in Chicago on any given Friday night. But for Hope students, their field is the real place to be.