Basketball coach recovering after shooting outside tournament at St. Sabina Church

As 2026 begins, Chicago reported a historic drop in shootings and homicides, even as the city struggles with hundreds injured by gunfire each year.

Among the past year’s victims is, Gentry Hunt, a basketball coach who was shot on Sunday outside St. Sabina Church in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.

“I was lying there in the pavement, with my head in the dirt, and they were pressing on my chest,” Hunt remembered.

The basketball coach began the new year grateful for life – just days after he was shot.

“I could kind of feel that, that quick tear through my flesh,” he said.

Hunt is a volunteer basketball coach at East-West University and hosts basketball clinics for Chicago teens.

On Sunday, he was walking into a tournament at St. Sabina when a fight spilled outside and someone in the crowd started firing. Chicago police said three people were hit and have since released photos of two men wanted in connection with the shooting.

The incident was one of the city’s last shootings of the year, which saw a major decline in gun violence overall.

Shootings and homicides dropped 30% but are still leaving hundreds of victims caught in the crossfire.

“It’s in everyone’s backyard,” he said.

The coach said the bullet barely missed his lung and tore through his camp jersey.

“The shirt has all the signatures of all my former sixth- and seventh-grade students,” he said.

On Friday, Gentry plans to meet with his students to share a real life example of gratitude and how fragile life can be.

“You don’t really understand how easy it is to push a button and end a life,” he said. “A simple flick of your finger that ends a life.”