Lincoln coach Neil Alexander, coaching his 49th season, closes in on Gene Pingatore's all-time wins record

As coach Neil Alexander wrapped up the first couple of weeks of his 49th season as a high school basketball head coach this past weekend, he didn’t give any thought to what the four wins his Lincoln Railsplitters have secured this season really meant.

“It’s a number,” Alexander said. “I’m not looking at it one way or another.”

The number he was asked about and was responding to? 1,000.

The 4-1 record thus far means the Railers are off to a solid start in this 2025-26 season. But in the big picture of the long, tradition-rich history of high school basketball in this state, those four victories mean he’s that much closer to the hard to fathom and extremely rare number: 1,000 coaching wins.

For basketball fans around the state and, specifically, the Chicago area, that far-fetched number is reserved for one — the late, great Gene Pingatore, the state’s all-time winningest coach with 1,035 career wins at famed St. Joseph. But Alexander is closing in on a mark that no one really believed would ever be broken.

“If it happens, it happens,” Alexander said of reaching the milestone and potentially surpassing Pingatore’s win total. “If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

Alexander currently sits with a career record of 982-440, just 18 wins from 1,000 and only 54 from breaking Pingatore’s mark.

What would 1,000 wins mean?

When talking with Alexander — and those closest to him — there is zero reason not to believe he really doesn’t care or think of the landmark moments he’s approaching. Listening to the veteran coach, who is also the school’s athletic director, there is legitimate sincerity in the reasons he coaches and continues to after five decades.

However, those around him are much more in tune with the watershed moments ahead and more excited for Alexander about the accomplishments he’s quickly approaching.

Assistant coach and Lincoln native Eric Ewald has been on Alexander’s staff for 28 years. He’s one of four assistants who have played in Alexander’s system as players. Ewald continuously used the word “proud” to describe his time at Lincoln and coaching with Alexander. He says he’s proud to be a part of what Alexander has built and to have played a part in his story that continues to evolve after all these years.

“I haven’t really stopped and wrapped my brain around the fact that he may very well be the winningest coach in Illinois high school basketball history,” Ewald pointed out. “I never even gave it much of a thought through the years, but now it’s becoming a reality. To have his name up there with the other greats, the Gene Pingatores and other coaching legends, ones we respected, talked about and admired all those years? I am pretty thankful that I’ve been a part of that.”

The coaching bug was clearly instilled in Alexander’s two sons, Geoff and Gregg, who both played for their dad at Lincoln. Geoff is currently an assistant coach on Brad Underwood’s staff at Illinois, while Gregg has been on his dad’s staff at Lincoln since 2005 and is the current sophomore coach.

Does the record-breaking win total get brought up in closed family circles and basketball discussions?

“Not from him, not from him,” Geoff said. “It does not get brought up by him ever. Is it talked about or is it brought up amongst us in our house? Yes. Mostly from me. But I really don’t think he cares.”

The motivation for a legendary 71-year-old coach

So what energizes and motivates a coach at his age who has accomplished just about everything a coach can? After all, Alexander has won 20-plus games 25 times in his career with 19 regional championships and five sectional titles. He’s taken four teams to the State Finals with his 2014 team finishing second in state.

For starters, Lincoln is a different place for a high school basketball coach. While high school basketball has changed so much in so many different places, from corruption and commercialization to players seeking supposed greener pastures via a prep school or transfer, a basketball wholesome still remains in Lincoln.

It’s a surefire basketball town where coaching legends like Duncan Reid and Loren Wallace led teams to the IHSA State Finals. It’s where 20-win seasons and regional titles have been commonplace for 80 years — a staggering 56 regional championships, to be exact, since 1940.

Alexander arrived in Lincoln in 1990 and says after five or six years there he knew he had found a pretty special place. He says he loved being around kids that wanted to do the things — “The right things,” he says — that it takes to win. There was a formula established at Lincoln, due to past great coaches, and Alexander simply tweaked and added to it, he says.

Alexander states he never has to worry about chasing kids down to get them in the gym or to work on their games.

“If you tell our kids the gym is open at 8, they are here at 7:45,” Alexander said.

In conversation he repeats over and over again how good Lincoln High School has been for him.

“I’ve enjoyed my time here,” he says. “We have had great kids. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m still in it. Our kids are still great kids. They work hard, play hard and accept the system.”

Then there is the obvious love for the game that still permeates in Alexander.

Geoff has been a full-time coach in the college ranks for 22 years. He’s been around fervent coaches whose livelihoods depend on wins and losses, whose professional careers are shaped entirely by being coaches. Thus, the intensity and zeal for the sport can and must be extreme. But no one surpasses the connection he’s seen between his dad and the sport.

“He has an unbelievable passion for the game,” Geoff said. “His love for basketball is at the highest level. You talk to him and his mind is consumed with the game, consumed with getting better. Finding ways to be better motivates him.”

Whether it’s in the offseason, at practice or the grind of a 30-plus game schedule, Gregg watches his dad every day and absorbs anything he can. He says he’s still learning from him as a coach, and it’s been “really cool being around him, sitting right next to him on the bench.” He sees firsthand what drives his dad.

“He truly cares about the kids,” said Gregg, Lincoln’s all-time leading scorer who went on to play four years at Illinois State. “I mean that’s where it starts. He likes the interaction with them. He likes to go to practice every day. Even at his age, he loves the summers and the camps with the kids.”

The latter — the countless and added hours and what has become the grind of the offseason — is one big reason why so many younger coaches get out of coaching earlier than ever before.

Meanwhile, Alexander remains the biggest bargain in coaching. He wins 20-plus games virtually every year, develops players, molds young men with life lessons and still has a burning passion for the sport while doing it all for a measly high school coaching stipend.

It’s easy to think of Alexander as the coach whose players will even hear his voice far from the basketball court and long after they’ve left Lincoln High School.

“You think about the amount of kids he’s impacted over 45 or 50 years of coaching,” Geoff pointed out. “He demanded from his kids. He coached them hard. And years and years later there is an appreciation from those kids he coached 30 or 40 years ago who still come back. The appreciation they show? That means a lot to him.”

Although Alexander admits he delegates more than before with such a veteran and cohesive coaching staff — one, he says, is paramount to his own success and partly why he keeps coming to the gym and blowing the whistle — the competition and will to win remain prevalent.

The approach of the legendary coach hasn’t changed a whole lot. Maybe not quite the same as 20 or 30 years ago because of changes in society, but he drives a team with tenacity taken from five decades on the job. There is an understanding that as soon as compromise and concession reach Roy S. Anderson Gym in Lincoln, it’s a loss.

“Back when I played, the man would get into you,” said Geoff, who starred for his dad at Lincoln in the mid-1990s. “That was his brand. He would get you uncomfortable, just to get you to play harder than you’ve ever played. In that realm, he has backed off of that a little.”

He still loses sleep over being too worked up about practice. Forget Hudl and scouting from video, the current and preferred choice for most coaches in preparation for the next opponent; the Lincoln head coach still gets in the car on a cold, winter night to scout in person with his staff.

“His work ethic is second to none,” Ewald said. “He crosses all his T’s and dots all his I’s. He hates the thought of going into a game unprepared. He can’t stand the thought of playing a team he hasn’t prepared his team to play. He takes that upon his shoulders and feels responsible to his team to make sure they are prepared.”

But the intricacies of coaching, specifically the details of building each team, is very much front and center in driving him from year to year.

“He’s locked in every year with the same bark, the same approach,” Ewald said. “He sees and loves the challenge of building a team, loves seeing what each team can become. He has an innate desire to see how good he can build a team.”

Adds Gregg, “He has the numbers and all that, but he’s driven by competing, scouting, molding our teams together. There is a lot we do that’s the same, but there are a lot of things he adapts to with different kids and takes that as a challenge. He is open to new ideas.”

But for how much longer?

There isn't much talk on the topic of retirement just yet. But how much longer will Alexander, who turns 71 later this month, continue coaching? Will it be long enough to catch Pingatore? A typical 22-win season this year will get Alexander to 1,000 wins and, in reality, two great seasons will push him past Pingatore and into coaching lore. Otherwise it would have to wait until the 2027-2028 season when he turns 73.

Alexander brushes off the topic himself, though he does provide some clichés when it comes to answering the question of how long? But again, they seem to ring true for him when he says it.

“I haven’t really thought ahead,” he said. “I take it a day at a time. You’re not guaranteed tomorrow, so that’s how I’ve approached life and what we do.”

There are signs in the conversation, however, that make you believe he’s not giving it up just yet. And it’s a rule change that seems to be yet another source of inspiration.

“I do want to coach a year or two with the shot clock,” Alexander said of the rule that will be fully implemented in the 2026-27 season. “Even though we have been using it a bit — I think we played eight games with it last season and this year I think 10 — I am just curious as to what it’s going to do to our defense. What type of adjustments will we have to make with it?”

Another rule change roughly 40 years ago — the addition of the three-point line — was another spark for him as a coach. The patented and massively effective ball press zone defense of Lincoln had to adjust.

“The biggest change in my career was the three-point line,” Alexander said. “We had to extend our defense, because as time went on you get and see better shooters. They went from shooting 19 feet, nine inches to 22 or 23 feet. So it really extended our defense. That’s an adjustment we’ve had to make more than anything else.”

This is a basketball coach whose basketball mind simply doesn’t seem to shut off. After 50 years of coaching he’s excited and energized by rule changes and looking forward to how it will impact his own coaching, already strategizing what it will look like a year from now.

“With the staff I have and the kids I coach, it’s a pretty terrific situation,” Alexander said. “And Lincoln High School has been very, very good to me. I’m lucky.”

Yes, it will be sooner than later. But he certainly doesn’t sound like a coach who is stepping away in the immediate future.

“What is it that drives a coach that’s been doing it so long?” Ewald said. “It’s a great question. But you look at the greats in college basketball — Rick Pitino, Knight, Dean Smith, coach Krzyzewski — and you wonder: What keeps these legends going?”

Whatever it is or continues to be, it’s part of why they — and Neil Alexander — are in a very select group of bonafide coaching legends in the sport.