JACKSON — Nick Wood had an inkling early that something special was afoot for his Durand High School boys bowling team.

It was during tryouts.

“You could just see that these kids were gifted athletically,” said the first-year coach. “They listen well, they took right in and they ran with it.”

Correction: They ran away with it.

On the strength of three freshmen whose experience belies their years, the Durand boys bowling team rolled through match play Friday, sweeping upstart Romulus Summit Academy North in the Division 3 championship, and left Jax 60 with the school’s first Finals trophy in any sport.

“It meant a lot, being the first state title in our school history,” said Noah Wood, the team’s anchor, the coach’s son and one of the three freshmen. “We were grinding all day. We made our makeables like we’re supposed to. All in all, it was a great day.”

After qualifying third with a total of 3,315 for eight Baker and two regular games, the Railroaders lived up to their name by dropping just one Baker game the rest of the way in three best-of-five matches.

That came in the second game of the Quarterfinal against sixth-seed Caro, but Durand won the next two to advance to face second-seed Bronson in the Semifinals. Bronson reached that round by bowling a rare sixth game after tying Olivet 2-2-1 in the best of five and moving on with a 182-167 victory in the deciding sixth game.

Durand won the Semifinal in three straight, including a 154-113 second game that Nick Wood said was the result of the oil pattern “cliffing” and playing extremely difficult for both teams. The Railroaders closed the match out with a 216 in the third game to advance, then took out Summit with games of 176, 226 and 210.

“The kids really kept the ball in front of them and made their spares, and that puts a lot of pressure on your opponents,” Nick Wood said.

Noah Wood, Carson Drury and Logan Loudermilk are all freshmen but have been bowling together since elementary school. Wood and Loudermilk are cousins, and all three have competed in Michigan Junior Masters Association tournaments. The MJMA circuit is known for providing young bowlers the opportunity to compete on difficult patterns and at houses around the state. Noah Wood is a six-time MJMA champion.

“There is a not a better choice of tournaments in all of the states surrounding Michigan that I could have chosen to prepare me for this tournament more than MJMA,” he said.

While the three freshmen carried much of the load, the team would not have won without the contributions of junior Ryan Hunt and seniors Johnathan Munger and Drew Crackel.

“Everyone on the team has a job,” Noah Wood said. “If somebody misses a spare, then somebody goes back up there and gets a strike or leaves a makeable and makes it, that gets us right back on track.”

Summit left Jax 60 with the program’s highest finish at the Finals. The Dragons had finished 10th twice in coach Joe Wrone’s 12 seasons at the helm and had not advanced into the Quarterfinals before Friday.

“We had a sense if we could even get to cut, something could happen,” Wrone said. “They started unloading it in the first game.”

The Dragons qualified eighth with a total of 3,084 and drew top seed Adrian Madison in the Quarterfinals. They won a back-and-forth match that went the distance with Summit throwing 222 and 221 the last two games after being down 2-1.

Summit opened the Semifinal against Croswell-Lexington with a 267 game and won the match 3-1 before the urethane cliff seemed to get to the best of the Dragons in the championship.

Summit graduates Landon Corley, Michi Wilson and Daniel Griffith-Wrone but returns Greyson Wiedling, Addison Wiedling and Gabriel Hensler.

“If you had a Cinderella story for the tournament, these were the guys. They’ve been together for three years,” Wrone said. “They’ve bonded as friends, and they are so tight. The hugging, the crying when they made it, the advancement. They bowl for each other. It’s all team for these guys. The effort they gave was impressive.”

For Nick Wood, the weight of his team’s accomplishment — doing something no other sports team had done in school history — was not lost on him.

“It means way more for our community than it does for me,” he said. “We’re new to the community. These people are diehards, they leave, they come back. This is for Durand.”

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