Gaffney Returns to Basketball Court for Opening Night, Continuing Incredible Recovery
By
Tom Spencer
Special for MHSAA.com
December 5, 2025
Joe Gaffney was in a familiar spot Tuesday night when Charlevoix opened the basketball season at home against Ellsworth.
The all-state guard was in the starting line-up.
But as the game was wrapping up, the four-year starter was in an unfamiliar spot.
“He was the loudest one on the bench cheering,” said Charlevoix coach Anthony Troshak. “He was coaching, giving out reminders and that's awesome for a kid that normally, in the last three years, he's out there in crunch time. Instead, he's still like, ‘Hey, I can make an impact,’ and that was a really awesome thing to see.”
The fact Gaffney was in the game at all is arguably a miracle. Gaffney nearly lost his life this spring. He was in a car crash along with the entire Charlevoix boys golf team and coach Doug Drenth.
The team was on its way to spend the night at Crystal Mountain, returning from the first day of a two-day tournament at Arcadia Bluffs. Emergency personnel transported Gaffney, his coach and the entire golf team to Munson Medical Center. Gaffney sustained a ruptured diaphragm and shattered pelvis.
Gaffney had emergency surgery to repair his diaphragm April 27 and underwent a nine-hour surgery the next day. Munson Orthopedic Institute surgeons Michael McDonald and Matthew Schuch placed 76 screws in his pelvis and femur.
“The trauma team and the general surgeons are the ones who repaired his diaphragm, and they're the ones that saved his life – that wasn’t me,” Dr. McDonald pointed out. “Joe’s done a lot of hard work. All credit to him, because it's tough to go through what he went through and come to where he has.”
Gaffney spent nine days in Munson’s Intensive Care Unit and then stayed in Munson’s Mary Free Bed rehab facility until May 9. He was non-weight bearing until July 9.
Many wondered if Gaffney would ever get back on the basketball court. Few thought it would be as early as the opening night win over Ellsworth. Gaffney played just more than two quarters and hit two of three shots from 3-point land. He also contributed two rebounds before sitting out the Rayders’ all-out press in the fourth quarter – but instead led the bench’s support.
“That’s the type of person he is,” Troshak said. “He's one of the most, if not the most determined individuals I've ever come across.”
The crash and initial rehabilitation left Troshak thinking he’d likely have his star guard available only for something like a Senior Night appearance. But incredible community and medical support, and Gaffney’s hard work gradually changed Troshak’s hope.
“In the summer, I thought it might be maybe in January or February, and maybe a couple of minutes here and there,” Troshak said. “I never dreamed it would be game one – that's just how hard he's worked.”
Gaffney never lost sight of getting back on the court. He started physical therapy and occupational therapy in Traverse City three days a week until July and then transitioned closer to home for therapy in Charlevoix.
Gaffney was walking with a cane when he left Aug. 1 with his parents, Aaron and Karrie, for the Barwis Sports Performance Center in Deerfield Beach, Fla. He underwent therapy five days a week in Florida before returning to Charlevoix on Sept. 22.
His parents took turns flying back and forth to Florida every two weeks. They carried with them tremendous community support and prayers. When he left Florida Gaffney was able to jog about 100 yards. Therapy continued in Charlevoix, along with a home exercise program from Barwis.
“I had full confidence I would play again, and I didn't know exactly when,” Gaffney said. “As the season got closer, that date when I thought I could play got earlier and earlier until it was the first game. I really had confidence that this was going to happen very early on.”
Gaffney was aware of the tremendous support the community was providing him and the entire golf team. But his awareness was heightened further when he realized starters would soon be introduced and the national anthem was playing Tuesday night.
“I've heard the hundreds if not thousands of prayers for the whole golf team and everything and all the letters,” Gaffney said. “I could really feel all the prayers and just everything people had done. And, I would say the moment, the game meant a lot more to everybody watching than it did to me.”
The Charlevoix gym was filled with supporters bearing signs for Gaffney. The team – except Gaffney – wore “Team Joe” warm-up T-shirts. Gaffney wore a “Team Doug” warm-up T-shirt in honor of his golf coach Doug Drenth, who spent months recovering in the hospital and also was in the crowd for the first basketball game.
At least one supporter was unable to attend the game. Logistic problems prevented Dr. McDonald from fulfilling his intent to make the trip from Traverse City. The surgeon is amazed, but not surprised Gaffney returned for opening night.
“I think most probably would not have been able to do that,” McDonald said. “I think he put in the work, and he really had good community support that allowed him to do that. I think it's very, very impressive.”
Aaron Gaffney – who serves as superintendent for Ellsworth Community School – had thoughts on his mind from early conversations with McDonald as he watched his son get emotional before the contest. Seven months ago, Gaffney acknowledged, he didn’t think he’d see his son play basketball again. He also noted he never saw his son cry during those same seven months – until the tip-off neared.
“It was just great to see him back out there,” Aaron Gaffney said. “My wife asked the surgeon if he was ever going to walk again. He said, ‘Yeah, he's going to walk again.’ I asked him if he would ever play golf again, and the surgeon said, ‘Maybe.’ And then I asked him if he would ever run again, and he said, ‘Maybe.’”
The Gaffneys got answers Tuesday night as the Rayders started the season on a winning note. Talan Jacobs led Charlevoix with 12 points. Carter Greenacre added 11. Jason McNamara scored nine, and Peter Yanchulis chipped in seven.
Moments before the game, Gaffney returned a good luck charm his basketball coach had given him at a breakfast meeting as he was headed for Florida. It was bracelet bearing the words “Never Give Up.”
It was a gift Troshak’s brother had given him as he battled to recover from an eye injury he suffered while playing college basketball.
“I told Joe, ‘I want you to give this back to me when you check into a game, because in high school basketball you can’t wear bracelets,’” Troshak recalled.
Gaffney played Tuesday with empathy for the fans in attendance. The accident taught him more about the hard things going on in people's lives.
“The people there I could tell were there to support me, but there were probably people in that gym tonight that knew somebody or know somebody going through something themselves that was just as hard or harder than what I went through,” Gaffney said. “If people in the world can give them half the love or a quarter of the support that I got, I think that would just make this world a better place.”
Now that he is back on the court, the 1,000-point career milestone lies just ahead for Gaffney – he scored 952 heading into this weekend’s Will Lynch Invitational at Benzie Central. He’s happy about that but is more focused on his newer role. He is the only starter back from last year’s 16-8 team.
“That (1,000-point club) would definitely be a nice bonus, but I'm really just focused, trying to do my best to leave all the sophomores we have on the team with a little taste of what Charlevoix basketball is and what it feels like to win and what it feels like to be on the basketball team. I'm not the same player I was a year ago, but I can help mentor and lead these younger guys to be very successful when they become seniors.”
McDonald did watch a live stream of Tuesday night’s game. He’s making plans to attend another game this season.
Perhaps it will be the game Gaffney enters the 1,000-point club.
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) Charlevoix’s Joe Gaffney elevates on a jumpshot Tuesday in his team’s season opener against Ellsworth. (Middle) Gaffney works to get past an Ellsworth defender. (Below) Gaffney is interviewed by a local TV station after his return to the court. (Photos by In Motion Images.)
'Who Will Cheer for the Nimrods?' Peterson IV, Watersmeet Found Fans Worldwide
By
Jason Juno
Special for MHSAA.com
July 15, 2025
WATERSMEET — George Peterson IV talks to a lot of people through his job as a police officer in the Green Bay, Wis., area. When some of those folks are headed up north for the weekend, he tells them he’s from the Upper Peninsula.
Many are expecting to hear about one of the bigger towns located a couple of hours drive from Green Bay, like Iron Mountain or Escanaba. But they usually know his hometown, too.
“There’s more people than I would have thought know exactly – ‘Oh Watersmeet, the Nimrods,’” Peterson said.
Some surely know the tiny town because it’s not light years away from Green Bay – only about three hours. But Watersmeet’s dot on the map got a little bigger when Peterson was in school two decades ago, thanks to a run of media exposure that all started with an ESPN commercial that wondered: Without sports, who would cheer for the Nimrods?
Peterson and his teammates can look back on a high school sports experience unlike pretty much anyone else’s, which included the popular ESPN commercial, an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, and an eight-part miniseries and media exposure from print and television outlets throughout the country. All because of their quirky nickname that has come to be an insult but was chosen because the biblical figure Nimrod was a mighty hunter, and hunting is a big deal in the U.P.
That era also coincided with the best basketball Watersmeet has ever seen. The 2004-05 team, with Peterson was a junior, won its only MHSAA Regional championship and only U.P. small-school team of the year award.
“Great memories from that year,” Peterson said.
The first moments he mentions from his time in high school sports as a aren’t of going to Hollywood – although that certainly came up later – or of being on ESPN. He instead recalled the camaraderie with his teammates, the bus rides, and proving people wrong even in elementary school that Watersmeet could be good.
“The Watersmeet Nimrods weren't supposed to be good,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to win elementary tournaments; we were supposed to fall apart.”
They definitely didn’t do that, as one of the smallest high schools in the state enjoyed instead an unforgettable three-year run.
The cameras first showed up when Peterson was a sophomore. ESPN staff came to get footage early that season, during a December 2003 game against rival Bessemer. The cameras didn’t faze the Nimrods, who upset the rival Speedboys that night; Peterson remembers Bessemer putting 100 on them later that season.
No one told the Nimrods when the commercials were going to air. Then one came on one night when Peterson was watching ESPN.
“That was really cool, just little surprises you weren’t expecting,” Peterson said.
Watersmeet was featured in major newspapers, “CBS Sunday Morning” came to town, and Nimrods merchandise flew off the shelves.
They were even on “The Tonight Show.”
“I would say Jay Leno was probably the coolest experience,” Peterson said. “A small-town kid from Watersmeet, all of us that went, getting treated like we were important, something that a lot of people don’t get to experience. They flew us out, we had limos, we had a hotel right down the road – I think it was a Hilton.”
After the national attention died down during their very successful 2004-05 year – which included the run to the Class D Quarterfinals – the cameras were back for Peterson’s senior year. This time it was the Sundance Channel for an eight-part miniseries about life in his team’s small town.
Those cameras were around that entire season. But if something came up along the way – and it did – the team could just ask the filmmakers to go away while they hashed it out privately. Peterson said they didn’t pressure him to do anything, and the staff members were great to he and his teammates, while doing what they could to make them feel comfortable.
The buzz for the miniseries wasn’t quite the same as for the commercials. But Peterson enjoyed going to a screening ahead of its debut in Madison, Wis. And he can look back on scenes with his late grandfather.
“Now I can show my kids when they get older,” he said.
The basketball part of Peterson’s high school days was a pretty big deal as well.
Growing up, Peterson’s dad George Peterson III took him to the Regionals in Marquette each year. Rooting for area teams like Ewen-Trout Creek kept the fire going.
“I’d go back home, I’d shoot hoops and play ball,” Peterson IV said.
As he and his teammates entered in high school, the Nimrods finished well under .500 his freshman year. The next year, they flipped their regular-season record to 14-6, which included the early season upset of rival Bessemer with ESPN’s cameras recording commercial material.
“And then we were kind of like, ‘OK, we got something here,’” Peterson said.
They went to Michigan Tech’s basketball camp the following summer and won pretty much every game, including against the U.P.’s big schools like Marquette and Iron Mountain.
The Nimrods also won constantly early in the 2004-05 season – until Baraga gave them another piece of humble pie. But that proved to be a quick bump in the road. They won their District tournament at home and then both Regional games by double figures.
Watersmeet then lost a heartbreaker in overtime in the Quarterfinal against Posen, but it didn’t diminish what they had accomplished.
For Peterson, he got to do it with his dad coaching, his brother Jordan playing with him and the whole community cheering for them. He still remembers the bus ride home and the reception they got going through Bruce Crossing, part of the E-TC school district.
“We got to experience something we never got to experience before,” Peterson said. “That was probably one of, if not my favorite, moments from my junior year.”
He learned a lot of lessons from that time in his life — just from playing sports but also from playing for his dad and with the kind of spotlight most small-school athletes don’t see.
“Being an athlete and working in law enforcement, a lot of the lessons learned go hand-in-hand with my profession, because you have to be teachable, you have to be coachable and you have to take the losses,” Peterson said. “Obviously in sports, every time you step foot on the court, we didn’t win. There’s some things in life that you don’t get what you want, but you just learn you gotta work harder for it and strive to be better. That helps me in my profession.”
His dad, who recently retired from coaching boys basketball after walking the sideline for more than three decades, taught his son many things like humility, how to be respectful, patience, and how to respond when things don’t work out.
“That doesn’t mean the door’s closed; you just gotta find a whole different way to get what you want,” Peterson IV said. “I remind myself of that every day when I’m at work.”
As for being in the spotlight, he took valuable lessons from that as well.
“It’s helped me learn to take a step back and not get too excited about certain things,” he said. “Like when I’m around a crowd or when I have stuff going on, like board meetings, or we just have a crowd where people could be mad or people could be in support. It’s helped me to learn to take a step back and mentally just prepare, take that deep breath and everything seems to run smooth.”
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PHOTOS (Top) At left, George Peterson IV (12) puts up a jumper playing for Watersmeet in 2004. At right, Peterson holds his son George V while pictured with wife Elise and daughter Braelynn. (Middle) This Ironwood Daily Globe photo from 2007 shows Peterson talking with “Nimrod Nation” director Brett Morgan. (Past photos by Jason Juno; current photos courtesy of the Peterson family.)