After Leading Glen Lake Girls to Title, Bradford Brings Boys Into Final Week
By
Tom Spencer
Special for MHSAA.com
March 15, 2024
Eight is Enough.
Or is it?
For Jason Bradford growing up on the farm of Arden and Lynn Bradford as one of their eight children, it probably was enough. Bradford’s upbringing may have been slightly similar to “Eight Is Enough,” a comedy-drama television series about a family with eight children that aired on ABC from March of 1977 to May of 1981.
But the show didn’t depict pick-up basketball being played in the barn like it was for Bradford and his siblings. And surely eight would not be enough Regional basketball championships for Jason Bradford, nor enough District titles either.
After leading Maple City Glen Lake to the Division 4 girls basketball championship last year, Bradford stepped down from coaching. At the time his teams had won five Regional and six District titles.
Now his teams have won six Regional and seven District championships. He took over Glen Lake’s boys program during the holiday break this winter as the Lakers were off to a 4-2 start. They finished the season 22-5.
It was the Lakers boys’ first 20-win campaign since the 2018-19 season, and they clinched their first Regional title since 2018.
Glen Lake went 19-5 last year losing to Traverse City St. Francis in the District Final. The season before that ended with a first-round loss to Elk Rapids and 15-6 record.
Bradford led his girls teams four times to the MHSAA Semifinals and almost got their a fifth time this year with the boys. Their run ended Tuesday with a tough loss in the Division 4 Quarterfinals to Mount Pleasant Sacred Heart, 63-51.
“We’re licking the wounds of that one,” he said. “We’ve got to remember to look at the big picture – they are young men becoming men.”
But Bradford already has turned his thoughts to next season and is making plans for summer basketball.
“Having the summer with them if it goes the way we want is going to be huge,” Bradford said. “There are a few things going through my head I can change or adjust.
“We want to continue to build on what our philosophy of what Glen Lake is and my philosophy of what Glen Lake is.”
The Lakers will graduate Cooper Bufalini, Gage Baker, Dylan Cundiff, Tyler Bixby and Jamie Blondia. But they’ll have their top two scorers back, sophomore Jacob Plamondon and junior Benji Allen. Plamondon kicked in almost 20 points per game and led the team in rebounding with more than 10 per contest. Allen averaged more than 11 points per game and led the team in assists.
Glen Lake finished second in the Northwest Conference behind Benzie Central, which was undefeated in league play. The Lakers knocked off league opponents Frankfort in the Division 4 District title match and Buckley in the Regional Semifinal.
The battles with Benzie for the conference title may have been the highlights of the season, Bradford noted. Those were Glen Lake’s only losses in league play, and a share of the title was within their grasp late in the second game with the Huskies.
The Lakers lost 60-51 on their home court in the first meeting but took Benzie to the limit in the rematch before falling, 41-39, on the road.
“We had a lot of great games and a lot of great memories,” Bradford said. “Going for conference it pretty much came down to the last few seconds with lead changes.
“We were up by one point with less than 30 second lefts, and that was the high point,” he continued. “We came up short, but we learned from that game.”
Also among highlights for Bradford this year was the chance to coach against his brother Nathan for the first time in their careers.
The Bradfords started coaching girls varsity basketball 16 years ago, but their teams were in different conferences at the time. Nathan coached the Onekama girls but moved to the boys program before Onekama and Glen Lake had a chance to compete against each other in the Northwest Conference.
The Bradford coaches often talk after their games and learn from one another. They have also seen their parents frequently in the bleachers as they rotate home game sites to see their grandchildren play and their sons coach.
When Onekama and Glen Lake played this year, eight Bradfords were on the rosters as players or coaches. Jason’s son Toby, a freshman, played on the Glen Lake junior varsity team, as Nathan’s son Carson played for the Portagers’ JV squad. The Onekama JV team is coached by another Bradford, Jason and Nathan’s brother Nick. And there were three more Bradfords on the varsity – Nathan’s son Caden and his cousins Luke and Arden.
Glen Lake won both varsity games, 38-36 at Onekama and 61-33 at home.
Jason and his wife Jackie have five children. Their youngest son, Drew, is now a sixth grader at Glen Lake. His oldest son, J.J., is at Michigan Tech and has begun officiating basketball after his senior season at Glen Lake cut short by the pandemic while the Lakers were preparing to play in a 2020 District Final. Daughters Maddie and Grace are playing basketball for Lake Superior State University.
Maddie and Grace were big parts of Glen Lake’s deep postseason runs with Jason as girls coach. With many games played on Saturdays and not conflicting with coaching, Jason, Jackie and the younger boys were able to travel to see the Upper Peninsula’s Lakers play regularly.
This season, the Glen Lake girls – under first-year head coach Brad Fosmore – went 16-8 and won Northwest Conference and District titles before losing a nail-biter, 45-42, to league rival Frankfort in the Regional Semifinal.
“Jason did a good job, and it felt good to carry on the tradition,” said Fosmore, who previously served as a Lakers JV coach. “We took it one game at a time.
“Jason worked hard to build a great girls program,” he continued. “It made it pretty simple because they had that winning tradition and kind of kept it rolling.”
Tom Spencer is a longtime MHSAA-registered basketball and soccer official, and former softball and baseball official, and he also has coached in the northern Lower Peninsula area. He previously has written for the Saginaw News, Bay County Sports Page and Midland Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Manistee, Wexford, Missaukee, Roscommon, Ogemaw, Iosco, Alcona, Oscoda, Crawford, Kalkaska, Grand Traverse, Benzie, Leelanau, Antrim, Otsego, Montmorency, Alpena, Presque Isle, Cheboygan, Charlevoix and Emmet counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Jason Bradford, kneeling, coaches the Maple City Glen Lake boys varsity after taking over the program earlier this season. (Middle) Glen Lake’s Cooper Bufalini (11) pushes the ball upcourt during a 65-49 District Final win over Bellaire. (Below) The Lakers’ Jacob Plamondon (35) makes a strong move to the basket. (Top photo by RD Sports Photo/Rob DeForge, additional photos by Nicole Bixby.)
Harbor Beach Motivated by Past, Focused on Present in Chasing Future Goals
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
February 12, 2025
Andrew Kabban and his Harbor Beach boys basketball teammates know how quickly a good thing can end.
After going 19-3 and dominating the Greater Thumb Conference East a year ago, the Pirates had their bubble burst with a buzzer beater in the Division 4 District Final against Cass City, a team they had defeated by 13 a month earlier.
“We’ve kind of had last year stuck in the back of our minds,” said Kabban, a junior point guard. “We have a lot of returning players, we only lost two guys last year, so we all remember what happened last year. We’ve built on that experience, and we’re trying to use our experience to our advantage.”
That experience has allowed the Pirates to hold onto last year for motivation while focusing on what’s directly in front of them, and it’s working. Heading into Wednesday night, they are 17-1 this season, including a perfect 9-0 in the Big Thumb Conference Black. That includes wins over Division 2 Croswell-Lexington (12-5) and Millington (16-2). Their one setback was a 2-point loss against Yale (18-1), the No. 9 team in Division 2.
Of course, they’ll need to keep doing that into March in order to feel as though they’ve truly grown.
“Even with me, I’m a team captain, and sometimes I can catch myself talking about (a bigger game against) Millington, for instance,” junior Benson Harper said. “I just have to remember that we have to take care of business first and stay focused. If we don’t stay focused, something bad can happen to us.”
It becomes easier to maintain that focus when everyone’s on the same page, and for this version of the Pirates, they’ve had plenty of time playing together to get there.
The majority of the roster – nine players – comes from the junior class, with three seniors joining them. That’s a group that has been playing together since elementary school in multiple sports, and winning plenty along the way.
“We started playing together in second grade,” Harper said. “We’ve just been playing ball together forever. We lost one game in seventh grade, then went undefeated in eighth grade. … We’ve just been winning together, and when you see everybody every single day, you build a bond with them, not even just in sports.”
That consistency spans sports and even the coaching staff. Head coach Ron Wruble is also the defensive coordinator for the football team, and the Pirates were 11-1 this past season and 9-2 the year prior.
“These kids, they’re obviously playing football together and playing basketball now, and most of them hang out together, too,” Wruble said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie in the group, and I think they just enjoy being together.”
There was one season where they weren’t all together, however, as Harper was moved to the varsity squad as a freshman. He wasted no time becoming a go-to option for the Pirates, and earlier this season eclipsed the 1,000-point mark.
“He started for us as a freshman, and you can just see his development over the last three years,” Wruble said. “He’s gotten bigger, stronger – his skill set was at the varsity caliber as a freshman, but it’s just been moving up from there.”
In his first season, however, the Pirates were an uncharacteristic 7-12. Harper was happy to be playing at the varsity level, but certainly missed his classmates.
“It was definitely tough, because I was so young and so used to playing with them,” Harper said. “We had kind of a crappy freshman year, and I wasn’t used to losing. But I was also happy to see them winning (on the junior varsity level), and they dominated, too.”
When they all came together again at the varsity level, the success was almost instant. That came as no surprise to Wruble.
“It’s just the general makeup of the team – there’s a big core of kids that are gym rats,” he said. “They live in the gym and the weight room.”
That’s led to a high level of competition in practice, as Wruble praised the depth of his team. It also has the Pirates dominating against a schedule that was built to prepare them for the postseason.
“We try to schedule teams that are going to be the better programs, and that really helps us in the long run,” Wruble said. “We’re coming through the second time around with our conference opponents, and hopefully we can play well and take care of business there.
“Obviously, our District loss last year was a heartbreaker. We lost the District championship at the buzzer with a 3-point shot, and that’s still sticking in the minds of our kids, and they want to get back there and avenge that then, and hopefully move on from there. But it’s going to be one game at a time, and we even break it down further than that: one play at a time. A play in the first quarter had just as much meaning to the end of the game as a play at the end of the game.”
That message – with the help of past experiences – is coming through loud and clear.
“The goal is to win a District and win a Regional,” Kabban said. “The regional is not out of reach for us. But we have to win the District first. We have to win our league first. But we know that we’re capable of doing whatever we put our minds to.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Harbor Beach’s Benson Harper (10) makes a move in the lane during his team’s Jan. 17 win over Capac. (Middle) Skiler Kruse (4) elevates above surrounding defenders with a shot in the post. (Photos courtesy of the Harbor Beach yearbook staff.)