Outstanding medical program drew Bernard Cherestal to SIU

CARBONDALE, Ill. — For Saluki walk-on sophomore Bernard Cherestal, getting to play basketball at Southern Illinois University is an added bonus to the tremendous educational opportunity he is receiving.

His primary reason to attend SIU was to enroll in the University's prestigious medical program. At North Cobb High School in suburban Atlanta, Cherestal posted a 3.96 GPA and scored 1700 on his SAT. As incredible as those academic achievements were, they weren't quite good enough to get him into an Ivy League school. His college research led him to Southern Illinois and its biological sciences program. He plans to become an anesthesiologist after graduation.

How he landed on Southern's basketball roster is a slightly more complicated tale. A wiry 6-foot-8, 185-pound forward, Cherestal had minimal recruiting interest from colleges because of his slender build and modest high school numbers.
That began to change when he participated in an AAU tournament last summer, and one of the coaches asked where he was going to college.

"He just assumed that I had a scholarship somewhere," Cherestal recalled. "When I told them I didn't have a scholarship at all, he looked at me funny. When I told him my GPA and SAT score, he offered to help me look for a school."

Cherestal had some contact with Brown and Cornell, but couldn't quite make the cut academically. Closer to home, both Savannah State and Arkansas Tech offered try-outs, but Cherestal was sold on SIU academically.

The next step for him was to make the basketball team.

"If I didn't show any sign of what I could do for the team, or me being a player they could see potential in, they would have probably let me go," he said.

The audition was a success, and while Cherestal appeared only briefly in two games last season, he was a valuable contributor in practice and hopes to increase his contributions to the team throughout his college career.

Cherestal was born in Brooklyn and lived part of his childhood in Jamaica, Queens. His parents — Yvette and Jean Bernard — immigrated to New York from Haiti, seeking a better standard of living and the opportunity to raise a family. Bernard is the second of three boys in his family. The family now lives near Atlanta, where his dad works for Cisco and his mom works for the Atlanta Public School system.

Many of his relatives are also tall, including his grandmother on his father's side, who was 6-foot-8. Cherestal took an early interest in basketball, but he didn't hit his growth spurt until after his freshman year of high school.

"In ninth grade I was about the same height as everybody else," he recalled. "I got back to school and everybody else was short."

As for his future career as an anesthesiologist, the idea came about literally by accident. During his sophomore year, his finger got stuck in the net, tearing a ligament that required surgery.

"The anesthesiologist was really tall and told me he played basketball," Cherestal explained. "I asked him what his job was, and he said, I'm actually working on you and this is what I do. I looked up what an anesthesiologist makes, and they make good money. After everything he did, I could see myself doing that, too."

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