Warren’s Ryan, Sean Kennedy: Brothers in arms

When the Kennedy family of Gurnee converted its basement den into a bedroom, Ryan Kennedy knew he had hit pay dirt.

The Warren senior pitcher got his own room, tucked far away from the hustle and bustle of everyday family life up on the top two floors.

“It’s cool to be way down in the basement,” said Kennedy, one of four children in the family. “I like having my own space down there.”

Kennedy is trying to relish it while he still can.

Soon, he will have to leave the peace and privacy of his man cave and move into a much smaller room. And he’ll have to share it with his older brother, Sean.

No, Ryan isn’t being punished for anything. He didn’t lose his “cool room” privileges.

Ryan, who has done nothing but make his parents proud this spring by leading Warren to a 16-9 record as its ace pitcher, is making the move by choice.

In fact, he’s looking forward to it.

He and Sean will be roommates next fall at Valparaiso University, where both will be competing to fit into the pitching rotation of the baseball team there.

For the Kennedy family, to have both Ryan and Sean pitching at the same Division I school, and rooming together no less, is a dream come true.

“My whole family is loving this,” Ryan said. “My Mom (Karen) and Dad (Jim) love the idea that they can go to one place to watch us both play. And it will be easy for my grandparents to watch us play. This couldn’t have worked out better for our family.

“It’s just funny that this wasn’t planned at all, and that it really started off as a joke.”

No one took the idea very seriously at first.

After all, when Ryan visited and committed to Valparaiso last summer, Sean already had a college, and a team. In Florida.

But fate was working behind the scenes to bring the two brothers back together.

“Sean thought he’d be OK going far away from home,” Ryan said. “But I think he got a little homesick.”

That was only part of it.

Two years ago, after a standout career for the Blue Devils, Sean, a hard-throwing lefty, enrolled at the University of Jacksonville. As a freshman last spring, he saw all kinds of action on the mound, mostly as a reliever.

He figured that he was faring about as well as a rookie could.

But then at the end of the season, some of his classmates and closest friends on the team started transferring for various reasons. Four fellow pitchers from the freshman class suddenly were gone.

Sean was alarmed.

Then, when Sean went home for summer break, fate made another move.

While pitching during a travel game, he felt pain near his elbow and pulled himself from the mound.

Eventually, Sean learned that he had torn his triceps muscle. For the next few weeks all he could think about was how thankful he was to be working through his challenging rehab surrounded by family and friends at home, not alone in Florida.

“That got me thinking about a lot of things,” Sean said. “I was already having some issues with the academics at Jacksonville because I wasn’t really feeling like I was challenged there. I had also decided that I wanted to go into pre-med and the program at Jacksonville really wasn’t what I was looking for.

“I had never really thought about transferring before. But being home, being hurt and thinking more about my academics, I started to give it some thought.”

(Foreshadowing: Valparaiso has a very well respected pre-med program.)

At around the same time Sean got hurt, Ryan was wowing scouts at travel baseball tournaments around the country. He played particularly well at a late summer tournament in Indianapolis, showing off the craftiness that has made him one of the toughest pitchers in the North Suburban Conference.

With a fastball that tops off at about 88 mph, Ryan doesn’t always burn batters with his velocity. But he has made a living at using his repertoire of finely tuned off-speed pitches to keep them off balance and guessing.

“It’s so nice when a pitcher can throw all three of his pitches for strikes,” Warren coach Clint Smothers said of Ryan, who plays shortstop when he’s not pitching. “You don’t have to worry about walks, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things with Ryan.

“Ryan is also such a competitor. You know he’s going to be ready to go any time he’s on the mound.

This season, Ryan is 5-2 on the mound with a 2.90 ERA. He’s given up just 15 walks in 38 innings. At the plate, he’s been just as valuable, maintaining a .446 batting average.

His numbers over the summer were just as good, if not better.

“Our travel team was playing this really good team while we were in Indy and we won and I did well,” Ryan said. “That’s the first time the Valpo coach saw me pitch. He said he just fell in love with the way I pitch and that I would be a good fit there.

“Within a few weeks, they had me on their campus and were offering me a spot on the team.”

Sean went with Ryan on his trip.

Ironically, it wasn’t the first time Sean was looking at Valparaiso with a critical eye. He had been recruited by the coaches there when he was in high school.

He liked Valpo back then, but the idea of playing in Florida intrigued him. Valpo lost out.

And yet, that wasn’t even the worst of the hurt for the Valpo coaches. That next spring, Valpo wound up playing Jacksonville and Sean took the mound.

He helped Jacksonville defeat Valparaiso.

But all was forgotten when the Kennedys arrived on campus for Ryan’s visit. Ryan and his family, including Sean, got Valparaiso’s version of the royal treatment.

“Right way, I just knew I loved Valpo,” Ryan said. “It feels really friendly there. I loved the campus and the people and the coaches and the facilities. I could tell Sean liked it a lot, too.

“I remember they took us to the football game and we were all having fun and my Dad started joking about getting Sean to come to Valpo, too.”

The response the Kennedys got was no laughing matter. The Valparaiso coaches were very matter of fact.

“The coaches told us that they were so happy we brought that up because they were actually thinking the same thing,” Ryan said. “They were serious about it. They thought it would be great if Sean could come there.”

With the school year about to start, Sean went back to Jacksonville so that he could better make a decision about what to do: stay or go.

When he came home at Thanksgiving, he decided that he was ready to transfer to Valparaiso for the second semester. But he wanted to check with someone first.

“I wanted to make sure that it was OK with Ryan,” Sean said. “Going to Valpo made a lot of sense to me, but I didn’t want to take anything away from him. Valpo was his school first. If he didn’t want me to go to the same school, then I would have looked somewhere else.”

No need for that. Ryan was down with the idea back when his dad was first joking about it.

“Of course I was OK with it,” Ryan said. “Sean and I are really close, closer than most brothers. I thought it would be really fun to be on the same team as him again. We’ll be able to help each other out and lift each other up.”

The brothers have experience in that department.

They got to play for one year together at Warren, when Sean was a senior and Ryan was a sophomore. Because Sean sat out this spring due to his injury and transfer, they’ll have another three years on the diamond together.

“We’re really excited about this opportunity,” Ryan said. “Not a lot of people get to play college sports with their brother. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun and hopefully we can both go on to the next level together.”

pbabcock@dailyherald.com