More than 8,157 applicants — 57.7% of them Black and Hispanic, 15.7% women — have already applied to take Chicago’s first firefighters entrance exam since 2014.

Testifying Friday at City Council budget hearings, Human Resources Commissioner Chris Owen said another 12,638 people have started an application but not finished.

The exam will be only the fourth the department has administered in 44 years.

With additional recruiting events scheduled before the Oct. 17 application deadline, Owen said he’s “pretty sure we’re gonna get closer to the 20,000 number that we typically see” for a Chicago Fire Department entrance exam.

So far, the 8,157 applicants include: 6,747 males (82.7 percent); 1,281 females (15.7 percent) and 129 applicants who did not identify their gender.

The applicant breakdown so far: 2,677 (32.8%) are white; 2,077 are Black (25.4%); 2,632 are Hispanic (32.2%); 113 are Asian-Americans (1.3%).

Ald. Nicole Lee (11th), the first Chinese-American and second Asian American to serve on the council, said she was “really disturbed by the tiny number” of Asian Americans in the applicant pool.

“I’d like to see a bigger, more intentional plan around that. Clearly there are plans in other communities and this one’s obviously been overlooked at this point,” Lee said.

“Very disappointing because we have such a small number of firefighters within the department right now. And we need to be able to recruit new ones — especially with the language-access needs there are across the city.”

Last year, Annette Nance-Holt became the first woman to serve as fire commissioner in the 162-year history of the department.

She promptly vowed to diversify a department with a long, documented history of discrimination through “vigorous recruitment in communities of color,” outreach to high school students in “under-represented communities” and by scheduling an exam no later than early 2022.

Well, better late than never.

The entrance exam will be held in December, with plans for exams to be held every two years after that.

But Owen said the rules have changed to reduce the costs that made more frequent testing too expensive.

Instead of having all applicants take the test, the city will use a lottery to choose 4,500 exam-takers, with 80% of those spots reserved for Chicago residents.

If the lottery doesn’t produce an exam pool with enough city residents, “you start pulling people in and pushing people out who aren’t city residents,” Owen said.

Budget Chair Pat Dowell (3rd) asked what happens if “everybody is male” after the 4,500 test-takers are chosen.

“We’re not explicitly allowed under the law to take that into account,” Owen said. “However, the goal again is to get as much diversity in the applicant pool as we possibly can. And we are seeing better diversity numbers than we have in the past with the recruitment campaign.”

The new approach is expected to save the city $3.5 million, making the ambitious goal of holding a firefighters entrance exam every two years not only realistic, but achievable.

Administering smaller and more frequent tests will also pave the way for the city to “align the size of the applicant pool” to the Chicago Fire Department’s “actual hiring needs,” giving test-takers “more realistic expectations” about if and when they can expect to be hired, Owen said.

“We want to go out as frequently has possible. But, people can say, `You still have thousands and thousands of people on that list.’ We really needed to change this. Getting to a model where we’re posting every two years to keep this list fresh — in order to get there, we needed to [be] testing fewer people,” he said.

But that lottery-first approach did not sit well with Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), chairman of the council’s Committee on Public Safety. He called it “disadvantageous to the Black community and the Latino community.”

“If they signed up for the test, they should be given an opportunity to take the test. Let it be determined whether or not they can be firefighters or EMT’s based on their merit — not based on the lottery,” Taliaferro said.

Otherwise, “that eight-year wait becomes another two years — if the city does follow through on testing in another two years. I even have doubt about that.”

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At several points in “Tiger Style!,” playwright Mike Lew’s satirical portrait of a pair of frustrated, 30-something Chinese American siblings, we hear a particularly galling taunt: “Go back where you came from!”

For Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) and his older sister Jenny (Aurora Adachi-Winter), it’s a pretty nonsensical suggestion. They were born in Southern California, where Lew’s play is set and where Albert and Jenny’s parents also grew up after they emigrated from China as children. They already are where they came from.

Demographically speaking, the audience at a final preview performance of Lew’s play at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre didn’t include many who might have faced that particular provocation. But the crowd seemed to register the phrase when spoken by white characters, much as Albert does: as a perturbing microaggression that he sloughs off rather than make a scene.

The jarring exception comes when it’s invoked by Albert’s work supervisor Melvin (Rammel Chan), who is also Asian American. This instance sent a ripple of gasps through the audience, which was repeated when a panicked Melvin explains that Albert was making him look bad in front of their clueless white coworker.

Lew’s somewhat shaggy script is inspired by these kinds of model-minority inconsistencies. As the play’s title suggests, “Tiger Style!” owes some credit to Amy Chua, the legal scholar and author who popularized the concept of the “tiger mom” a little over a decade ago.

As we meet Albert and Jenny, each is going through a minor identity crisis. Albert, a software developer who’s mostly content to coast through a mid-level career, finds a breaking point when Melvin gives a promotion to the devastatingly mediocre white guy (Garrett Lutz) whom Albert’s constantly covering for.

Jenny has gone the extreme overachiever route — she’s an accomplished doctor “on a highly detailed timetable of how I want to live my life” who nevertheless finds herself being dumped by a dud of a long-term boyfriend (Lutz again) who says she’s too intense and no fun.

Commiserating, Jenny and Albert recall their hyperscheduled childhoods, packed with academic drills and music lessons but low on socializing. Searching for an external force to blame for their current woes — and with systemic racism feeling too big to tackle on an individual level — Albert hits on the idea that their parents should take some flack for their kids’ inability to navigate the adult world.

When the siblings try to confront their parents, though, they find their mom (Deanna Myers) and dad (Chan) pretty unmoved. Did the parents push their kids to achieve tall heights in their youth? Sure, they admit. But that pressure applies only until they’re out of school — whether that’s undergrad or med school — and now, the parents genially insist, their kids’ lives are their own.

Director Brian Balcom is well-attuned to Lew’s heightened comic vibes; Balcom helmed a clever production of Lew’s “Teenage Dick,” a high-school resetting of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” that was set to open at Theater Wit in March 2020 and wound up becoming an early streaming-theater success as the pandemic hit.

Balcom’s cast is admirably in tune for the most part. Pow is an able protagonist, and Chan and Myers do more than their duty in multiple roles. (Myers’s Upper Midwest accent in one scene as a therapist working with a resistant Adachi-Winter is priceless.)

Lew’s script falters a bit in its second act, which has Jenny and Albert attempting to de-immigrate (re-immigrate?) back to China. The playwright’s parallel critiques of his Chinese American characters and China’s wildly repressive government don’t quite add up to a whole argument.

But that’s the paradox of “go back to where you came from” — almost no one who would invoke such an insult actually has the standing to make it.

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DES MOINES, Iowa – Cubs prospect Brennen Davis was widely expected to make his major-league debut this year. Instead, after undergoing back surgery in June, he’s spent the last week of the MLB regular season in the Arizona Fall League, salvaging what he can from a mostly lost year of baseball.

“Kind of upset it happened this year because I had big goals,” Davis said in a conversation with the Sun-Times during the final weeks of the Triple-A season. “But it’s part of life. It’s part of the game. And how you overcome these obstacles is what dictates you as a player.”

Davis has had to shift his thinking on how he defines success. Limited by pain in the first month of the season and then sidelined for three months, Davis posted a .258 batting average in Triple-A, with 10 extra-base hits.

“I have these opportunities to get at-bats, and I’m really looking forward to trying to detach myself from results,” he said, “and really look at the bigger picture and work on what’s going to make me the best player moving forward, and the deficiencies I have as a player, and really put in the stepping stones to have a great offseason and be ready to succeed next year.”

Barring trades or signings, the Cubs have an opening at Davis’ position. Manager David Ross said this week that he’s told Cubs outfielders left and right field are accounted for by Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki, but, “there’s an open spot, and it’s in centerfield.”

Could Davis claim that spot?

“It’s hard to go into spring training giving somebody a job with the adversity he’s been through,” Ross said.

But Ross didn’t rule out Davis playing himself into that role, perhaps after beginning the season in Triple-A.

The adversity Ross alluded to started last spring when Davis felt back discomfort after a lifting session. The outfield prospect brushed it off as normal soreness. But by the time he’d played a few weeks into the Triple-A season, the red-hot pain had traveled down his leg and was so intense that he’d start his day already limping around his hotel room.

“I started getting numbness in my foot,” he said, “and that’s when I was like, I should probably say something and shut it down.”

Doctors originally diagnosed Davis with a herniated disk, and before turning to surgery, they tried an epidural injection in May. It didn’t work, and his back operation in early June revealed why. A vascular malformationpushing on the sciatic nerve was the source of his pain.

“It’s a very relieving feeling because there was nothing wrong with my spine,” Davis said. “And that would have been a much longer rehab process, and it could have lingered down the road.”

The surgery immediately alleviated some of his pain. Since then, building back his strength and managing soreness has been a gradual process. Davis said doctors told him the sciatic nerve would take months to heal completely.

“After my first year, power was part of my game, and right now, it’s just not,” he said. “So, I think this is going to make me a better hitter having to grind for my hits. I can’t just go out there and muscle one out. I have to square baseballs up and hit them the right way, with true backspin and stuff like that, and pick pitches that I can do damage on.”

He expects to get back his old strength and power, and pair them with his new refined approach.

“It’s going to pay off for him in the long-run,” Triple-A Iowa hitting coach Desi Wilson said. “Why? Because in the big-leagues, that’s what all the good hitters do: They have a plan, they have an approach, every single at-bat – against the starters, relievers – and they don’t get away from that.”

Davis has already made a splash in the Arizona Fall League, launching a homer in the Mesa Solar Sox’s second game.

“It’s hard because you have expectations for yourself,” Davis said. “But at the end of the day, it’s about a career, not a year. And I’m happy. I was really happy watching all my friends get opportunities this year, and I wish I was there with them. But I’m sure I will be in the future.”

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The most valuable and devastating weapon a defense can have is an unstoppable pass rush. And even after trading Khalil Mack, the Bears should still be pretty good in that aspect.

They have the franchise’s single-season sack king in defensive end Robert Quinn on one side, and Al-Quadin Muhammad — hand-picked by coach Matt Eberflus from their days together with Colts — opposite him. And they can sprinkle in promising upstart Trevis Gipson, who had seven sacks last season, and rangy rookie Dominique Robinson.

Yet the Bears have just seven sacks in their first four games. Just one of those was by Quinn.

They’re creating pressure on 29.7% of opponents’ passes, which ranks fourth, but rarely taking down the quarterback. Pressures are good, but sacks change games. Sticking an opponent with third-and-16 creates prime time for takeaways.

“It’s really just staying motivated and not getting too discouraged,” Gipson said. “It’s just continuing to work hard. It’s going to click for these guys.”

As always in football, everything is interdependent.

If the Bears tightened up their run defense, for example, one byproduct would be more frequent and more advantageous pass rushing opportunities.

As the Bears have been bulldozed for an NFL-high 183.3 yards rushing per game, they’ve faced the fewest passes in the league. Why drop back against Robert Quinn and throw into a secondary that has safeties Eddie Jackson and Jaquan Brisker scanning for interceptions when running is relatively safe and easy?

“You have to create good situations for them to rush in, which is something we’ve got to do better — and that would tie into the run defense,” Eberflus said. “You get your run defense going and you’re better in first-down efficiency, now you have the right to rush the passer. Now it’s second-and-longer, third-and-longer, and you get the situations that you like.”

Every defense craves obvious passing scenarios, and every offense is desperate to avoid them.

The Bears opponents have had an average of 6.8 yards to go on third downs, which ranks 15th in the NFL. The Bears are allowing 5.5 yards per play on first down and have given up a first down on 26.6% of their first or second downs.

The Giants had five or fewer yards to go on seven of their 15 third downs last week, which eliminated that predictability that a pass rusher wants. They ran on five of those. The Bears’ run defense was so bad that the Giants were able to run for 262 yards and six per carry despite playing without a healthy quarterback.

When a problem like that persists this long, it’s not an aberration. So with this much video of the Bears flailing at running backs, defensive coordinator Alan Williams anticipated that being the Vikings’ plan Sunday.

“They’re gonna come in and say, ‘Hey, they’re coming in our house and we’re gonnaruntheballdowntheirthroat,and then play-action pass and get overtheirhead,'” Williams said. “That’s whatthestats say to do. So we’ll see ifthestats lie or not.”

They usually don’t.

And while the Vikings’ offense hasn’t been remarkable, it has the potential to present a lot of problems.

Running back Dalvin Cook doesn’t have a 100-yard game yet and is averaging a career-low 4.4 yards per carry, but he’s surely looking at this as an opportunity to ignite his season. And the ripple effect of his success would affect the Bears’ other deficiencies and minimize their opportunities to rush Kirk Cousins.

Every quarterback prefers to avoid pressure, but few see their performance swing as wildly as Cousins’. Pro Football Focus rated him the No. 1 clean-pocket passer in the NFL last season, but 17th when pressured.

Which version will the Bears see? That depends, of course, on whether they create pressure. And that depends on whether they can finally stop the run.

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For all the things that are fundamentally wrong with quarterback Justin Fields and his offense, the Bears are one of the best teams in the NFL on opening drives. Only two teams have scored more often on the first possession than the Bears, who have kicked two field goals and scored one touchdown in four games.

Then teams figure the Bears out. Fields knows how to start hot– but he needs to find a way to stay that way.

The Bears have scored 13 points on the first drive — and 51 the rest of the game. They average six yards per play on the first drive — seven if you take out the season-opener played in a monsoon — and only 4.7 the rest of the way.

“That’s this league, right?” offensive coordinator Luke Getsy said. “I can’t tell you how many games that I’ve watched this year that it’s like 7-3 the first two drives and then no one scores until the fourth quarter. These guys are really good, right? And they make it really hard.”

No quarterback makes it look harder than Fields, who ranks last among 32 starters in passer rating, passing yards, completion percentage and sack percentage. He needs to show improvement quickly — and there’s no faster way to do it than to, for the first time this season, take advantage of momentum the Bears gain on the first drive.

“That would be great that you have that,” head coach Matt Eberflus said. “We’re always trying to score a touchdown every single time we touch the ball, of course. We just got to have consistency of execution.”

It hasn’t happened yet. Fields’ passer rating in the first quarter has been brutal this season — 40.4, the worst of any of his four frames.

When Bears coaches talk to Fields about how his development is a process, they use the old saying about how long it takes to eat an elephant. The answer: one bite at a time.

“We’re taking one bite of the elephant all the time,” quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko said. “As things progress, and we keep progressing, those things that go from good to great translate into wins.”

The Bears used to have the opposite problem. Former head coach Matt Nagy schemed touchdowns on three of his first four opening drives in 2018 — and then watched the team go scoreless in 20 of the next 23 opening drives. That prompted legitimate questions about the Nagy’s preparedness.

Getsy, a first-time NFL play-caller, needs to sharpen the ways in which he deals with defensive adjustments after the first drive. It’s one thing to score while using the 15 scripted plays that all offenses prepare in advance–and another to make changes on the fly the rest of the game.

Getsy pointed to the Bears’ lack of red zone success — they’ve scored touchdowns on half their trips, which ranks 23rd in the league — as a reason the team has been stuck in the mud later in the game. Life gets harder inside the 20s.

“A lot of defenses that you play now–[the Vikings are] is one of them– they create that shell defense,” Getsy said. “You’re going to see DBs 20 yards deep and not letting you get behind them.”

Receiver Equanimeous St. Brown, who has the Bears’ only red zone receiving touchdown, chalked up the initial success — and ensuing failure — to execution more than scheme.

“They’re adjusting, we’re adjusting ….” he said. “It’s really up to us. We’re on the field. We’re the ones making plays, not making plays. Every coach has a scheme. The players make it work.”

It’s worked on the first drive. But the Bears — and their quarterback — need more.

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