There’s nothing like the bond that siblings share. No matter the age or gender, having that extra someone in your familial life can make one’s life even more special.

That bond is being shown on the basketball court at North Shore Country Day’s Mac Gymnasium this winter, as Loyola Academy graduate Meghan McKeown joined coach Bruce Blair’s staff to coach the Raiders girls basketball squad, which happens to include her sister Ally.

“To be able to coach your sister in her senior year after all the injuries she’s been through…” Meghan McKeown said. “She’s had to deal with a lot of adversity so it’s more special for me I think than it is for her.”

“It’s so great (to have her here), I mean her and I are really, really close in general so being able to have this connection on the court is really so great,” Ally McKeown said.

To say the McKeowns come from a basketball family would be putting it simply. Meghan was a four-year letterwinner at Flint Hill (Virginia) and Loyola, where she played her final two prep seasons, before heading off to play at Northwestern for her dad.

Joe McKeown, the girls’ father, is currently in his 11th year as head women’s basketball coach at Northwestern University and won his 700th career game Dec. 20, becoming the 13th active coach to hit the mark in NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball and the 23rd all-time in Division I.

But this on-court reunion almost didn’t happen, as Meghan was pursuing a broadcast journalism career that saw her as a weekend sports anchor at WISH-TV in Indianapolis for the past three years.

“I just wanted to pursue different opportunities,” she said. “So for me there’s some opportunities back in Chicago where I could do color commentary for games and I’ve been doing some freelance work for the Big 10 Network during football season. The opportunities in Chicago were worth the risk for me to take.

“The other things on the side I picked up like this have actually made it 100 percent worth it.”

And when a spot on Blair’s staff opened up in the fall, both of them thought bringing Meghan on would be a great idea.

“To have someone like Meghan on our staff is amazing,” Blair said. “The knowledge she brings from playing the game in one of the best college basketball conferences, as well as her other experience through her father and other coaches has been so invaluable for our team.”

After missing part of her sophomore year and her entire junior year to injuries, including three surgeries in four years, Ally is back out on the court as a senior and helping the Raiders to an early 9-2 record and having a breakout campaign in her last year as a Raider.

Having her sister back with her on the court has been great for the younger McKeown, as she’s now able to take all the advice and the experience that her sister has had on the court and transfer it over to her own time on the court.

And there haven’t really been any issues of being too easy or hard on each other on the court as well.

“It was kind of funny,” Ally said. “(During one of our games) she goes, ‘Ally for the love of God, help! Help on ball.’ So it’s definitely different but it’s really fun. It’s brought us closer that’s for sure.

“She wasn’t playing help defense and I was like, ‘For the love of all that’s good in this world, get in the middle and help,’” Meghan said. “And she looked at me like, ‘Please, take it up with Mom.’

“So I did,” the younger McKeown said.

Coaching isn’t as easy as Meghan may have thought it would be, however.

“It’s actually so much harder than I thought it would be. No, dead serious,” she said. “I was talking about it with my dad and I was like, ‘You know as a player when you go over plays you learn it from your position or maybe two positions.’

“But (in coaching) you have to know every single position on the floor and you have to be able to teach it in a way that everyone understands it and that’s a lot easier said than done. I think communicating in an effective way that everybody understands, is the hardest part of coaching and it’s something I’m trying to improve for sure.”

Meghan, who is now a freelance broadcast journalist and has done a lot of work with the Big Ten Network, as well as ESPN+, isn’t sure if she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps or pursue the coaching profession after this year, but knows that the decision to come back has been a great one for her, Ally and the rest of the McKeown family.

“I really love my career in broadcasting. I’m really passionate about it,” she said. “I’m kind of on the brink I think of doing what I actually really want to do with broadcasting. So I love that aspect of it.

“But to be able to coach and like I said, this is so special because I’m coaching my best friend. So for me, I don’t know if this is going to be a forever thing, but for the time being it’s wonderful and I’m just going to enjoy it while it’s here.”