Caledonia Football Set to Open Season by Welcoming Fans to New Home
By
Ron Pesch
MHSAA historian
August 25, 2025
Community banter dated back to April 1948, or before. Caledonia football followers were anxious for “an athletic plant of their own.” Members of the local Commercial Club were pushing to build a true place to call home.
At the time, home games were played on a clearing at Lakeside, a local county park in the heart of the village near Emmons Lake. Thanks to the success of the team and the popularity of games, locals felt the Scotties had outgrown the site.
Members of the Class C Bar-Ken-All league, coach Thornton K. Auwater’s squads started to win consistently, grabbing conference championships in 1945, 1946 and 1947. The league began in 1937 with the school as a charter member, along with Byron Center, Hopkins, Kelloggsville, Martin, and Wayland.
The Club proposed building a lighted field to the PTA with the thought that it could be done for between $12,000 and $15,000. According to an article in the area newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, “It is expected the money will be raised by the sale of bonds locally.”
In 1949, a design was approved. However, in hopes of significantly lowering the cost, the plan was for volunteers to assist in the layout and construction of the site. According to the Press in April 1950, the race was on to finish the project before the arrival of the upcoming season:
“Sod, trucks, and tractors for the job have been donated by local residents. It is estimated that at least 100 more volunteers will be required to complete the field in time for regular season play.”
Auwater’s crew was expected to do well during the fall of 1950. The football team had fallen to Kelloggsville, 19-0, in the second game of the 1949 season, and the defeat meant the Scotties finished second in the league standings to the Rockets. But, of particular note, in the games that followed, Caledonia’s defense was flawless, shutting out its final six opponents. By all measures, it was an exciting time.
Come the new school year, and thanks to the efforts by the community, the field was ready for the team’s nonconference season home opener with Grant on Sept. 15.
Changes
The 1935 season was Caledonia’s first playing football, marking this as the school’s 91st year on the gridiron. Since the fall of 1970, the team has competed in the Ottawa-Kent Conference, and in 2016, moved to the league’s Red division.
Prior to the 1970s, the Scottish terrier – a breed of dog popularly known as the Scottie, originally bred to hunt vermin – was Caledonia High School’s mascot. Around 1974, students decided to change the nickname to the Fighting Scots – depicted by a Scottish warrior dressed in the school colors of purple and gold.
Fast forward to this 2025-26 school year and Caledonia is Class A and among the largest 65 high schools in the state based on enrollment. And 75 years after unveiling their first true home field, Caledonia Community Schools is debuting the team’s reimagined home.
Approved bond issues from 2020 and 2023 have funded the latest updates and renovations to the site. “Preserving the heritage” of the district, a synthetic turf system was added to the current site in 2023. This season, heated team rooms, updated seating, concessions, and restrooms will be unveiled.
For fans, the curtain opens Thursday when the team squares off against Holy Names Catholic from Windsor, Ontario.
“This stadium tells the story of Caledonia. It is a story of community, tradition, and pride,” said Kelly Clark, community and public relations coordinator for the district. “As we celebrate 75 years, we honor those who built the foundation and look forward to the next generation writing their own chapter on this field.”
A souvenir dedication program will be distributed at the home opener. Within, special thanks are extended to many who have helped bring the story to life: “We are especially grateful for the work Steve Poll has done to uncover and preserve so much of this history so that our community can fully appreciate the legacy we carry forward.”
Poll, himself, was a graduate of Grand Rapids South Christian. His dad, Gordon Poll, played right tackle and was a co-captain as a senior on the 1950 Caledonia team.
“He was not one to live in the past,” recalled Steve Poll, “so unless we were at a football game and something triggered a thought, he didn't talk much about the 1950 team accomplishments. … I met one of his teammates at my dad’s funeral, who shared a few things (with me). I intended to interview him (however) he passed away before that happened. I finally decided to dig in and find what I could.”
Poll captured details from old newspaper articles, photos, and memorabilia. “I started investigating before I knew anything about the current rebuild of the stadium,” he said.
Also planned for the celebration is a three-minute video featuring interviews with players – present and past – including a member of the 1950 team who recalled players laying sod on the field at their first practice that season.
MHSAA Executive Director Mark Uyl, a 1992 Caledonia graduate, will speak at the event.
A season to remember
“Grant High’s fighting team almost spoiled the dedication of a new lighted football field … last night,” reported the Press when covering the first game of the 1950 season, “throwing a real scare into the bigger, highly favored Caledonia High team before tumbling, 6 to 0.” A 30-yard pass from Bob Higley to Don Moffatt was the game’s only score.
In hindsight, it was perhaps the biggest play of the year.
A true stadium dedication ceremony was planned for the second game of the season. Among those scheduled to attend and speak were Caledonia Schools Superintendent Andrew B. Cherpes, Board of Education President Orlo Good, Village President Stan Stawski, and Coach Auwater. Also planning to make the trip from Washington was U.S. congressman Gerald R. Ford, Jr., who held Michigan’s 5th district seat in the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, due to scheduling issues, Ford was unable to attend but did send a telegram to explain his absence and, within, congratulated the community on its outstanding achievement. (Uyl will read the content during this year’s celebration.)
The opponent was Middleville. For several years, the teams had scheduled a two-game nonleague “home-and-home” rivalry series. That continued in 1950, but this time, the Trojans were now members of the Bar-Ken-All. (Kelloggsville had left the league after the 1949-50 school year. The conference expanded, adding Middleville and Delton. To allow time for scheduling transition, the 1950 opening contest of the series did not count in the league standings.)
The Scotties emerged with another slim 7-0 win. According to the Kalamazoo Gazette, the result of the game “only added fuel to the rivalry which will reach a heated state at Middleville in a regular conference game Oct. 20.”
Caledonia plowed through the remaining games. Martin fell 27-0, Coopersville was trounced, 40-0, and Byron Center was easily defeated, 27-0. The highly-anticipated rematch with Middleville was close for the first half, as Caledonia clutched to a thin 7-0 lead at the break. It turned into a rout as “the Scotties flashed a passing attack that netted three more TDs and a 26-0 win.”
Wayland was disposed of 28-0, giving the Scotties possession of the “Cowbell Trophy” donated two years previous by a Wayland merchant. Then the team completely overwhelmed Hopkins in the season’s finale, 73-0. That margin was the state’s largest of the season, according to Dick Kishpaugh of Kalamazoo, who assembled season-ending totals for consumption by the state’s media. The Scotties were also statewide news as one of 26 teams that had posted unbeaten and untied marks on the year. Caledonia was one of just two to finish the year unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon. Garden City had done the same but had played just six games.
Although not rediscovered until recently, the team’s streak of 14 consecutive shutouts with no tie games included (six to end 1949, and eight in 1950) ranks second in the MHSAA football record book, just a single game behind North Muskegon teams that straddled three seasons, 1940-42.
Dedicated to a super volunteer
Besides location, one other item remains unchanged at the “athletic plant” in Caledonia.
“Even though his children go to school in Middleville,” noted the Press back in 1950, Ralph E. Myers thought of Caledonia as “his town.” A member of the Commercial Club Committee that helped plan the project, he followed through as the site’s dedicated lead volunteer, working with others “to get the job done,” according to a community newsletter.
In July 1954, at age 46, Myers died tragically in an automobile accident. His wife, Henrietta, had died a year before. They left behind three daughters. That fall, Caledonia christened the site as Ralph E. Myers Athletic Field.
Over the years, proposals were made to rename the place in honor of others, but Caledonia Community School stood behind the original decision. In September 1998, after a $1.9 million renovation for football and track & field, the site was rededicated with new signage as Ralph E. Myers Memorial Stadium.
With the latest efforts by all involved to capture the stories and communicate the legacy, future students will have the opportunity to easily understand and appreciate the stadium’s humble beginnings and the importance of all, then and now, who pitched in to create a place to call home.
PHOTOS (Top) A sign welcomes visitors to Caledonia’s home field in 1954. (Middle) The 1950 Scotties: Back row William Price, Walter Jousma, Jack Moreland, Peterson, Harvey Jacobsen, Allan Vander Laan, Forrest Clark, Gerritt Nordhof, Arthur Benedict, Larry Schroder, Larry Lind, Donald Williams (Manager). Third row Assistant Coach Wisner, Donald Moffatt, Ramon Schantz, Bob Cisler, Bob Higley, Merle Maier, Wallace Lotterman, Bob Schultz, James Fitzsimmons, Fred Darling, Vern Kayser, Coach Thornton Auwater. Second Row Elmer Velthouse, Bernard Kilmartin, Donald Braendle, Louis Bellgraph, Marvin Eldridge, Allyn Niles, James Porritt, Benjamin Miller, Bill Jousma, Gordon Poll. First Row Gary Cherpes, Joseph Sleeman, Harold Olthouse, Rod Campbell, Garrit Keizer, Carl Yonkers, Clyde Barrett, James Ayers, Hosmer Parks. Not pictured Arnold Benedict, Bob Workman.
Writer-Turned-Coach Enjoys Debut
November 3, 2016
By Dennis Grall
Special for Second Half
ESCANABA — Sam Eggleston has seen high school football from two drastically different viewpoints. Now, even though he is an unpaid volunteer, he enjoys being on the sideline as a coach.
Eggleston just completed his first season as a high school head coach, with Eben Superior Central winning its final three games to finish 4-5 in 8-player football. The Cougars were among the first teams in the state to join the 8-player format in 2010, their first year of football.
Eggleston was a sportswriter before becoming a coach, giving him different perspectives to watching the same event.
The 1998 Rock Mid Peninsula High School graduate worked at newspapers in Escanaba, Kenai, Alaska; Northville and Novi, and Marquette before becoming a freelance writer and website blog editor in 2008. He started the writing phase of his career in 2000 with the Daily Press in Escanaba, under my direction.
He served as a volunteer assistant football coach in Northville, then moved back to the Upper Peninsula and became a volunteer coach at his alma mater in 2011 when the Wolverines went to 8-player football. He joined Superior Central in 2014 and spent two seasons as a volunteer aide until landing the head job just two weeks before the 2016 preseason began.
“In both careers … you took a shot on me and I ran with it, and the same with coaching; they gave me a shot and I’ve run with it as best I can,” he said.
In addition to his unpaid position at Superior Central, in rural Alger County, Eggleston is responsible for fundraising for the self-funded football program, a major priority for his offseason.
“My coaching is over (for the season) now and the majority of my time will be spent on raising funds so we can get new helmets, get new pads to replace ones that are broke, spending money we don’t have so we’ve got to make that up now,” he said. “We have to win now to have successful fundraisers.”
As a sportswriter, Eggleston would simply switch gears and move on to coverage of the next athletic season, for instance once fall sports moved into winter. He also never had to worry about how coaches managed off-field X’s and O’s once their seasons concluded.
Life was totally different as a reporter. “I had a different approach, different viewpoint, different mindset to a game as a writer,” said Eggleston, who still has the heft of when he was a lineman but now looks like a lumberjack with his bushy beard and build.
“Now I have to worry about every kid and every position,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t even see the end result of the play because I’m watching the line play. I don’t even know how well my running back did until I see where they moved the stick.”
He may also be working on an injured player while the game goes on, trying to make play calls and other decisions at the same time.
As a sportswriter, he would be jotting down notes between plays or perhaps checking the result of a picture he took of the previous snap, totally unaware the coach was monitoring several assignments.
“I look back at the writer I was and as a coach now, and I would hate the type of writer I was,” he said.
Eggleston would analyze why a coach would switch to running a sweep rather than the counter that had been working, all while the coach may be working on an injured player that caused a change in offensive plans.
“As a writer I never had the insight to see everything. I just saw the overall game and kept track of every yard,” he said. “As a coach I can’t even tell if the play went five yards because I have three plays stacked up as the game goes on.”
While he was writing sports in the metro Detroit area, his weekly paper often covered games also being covered by the Detroit Free Press or the Oakland Press, with those stories appearing the next day. Eggleston’s story would appear maybe five days later, after everyone knew what happened.
“I had to come in with a different angle. I tried to be a little more analytical and focus on strategy versus the flourish and try to get the meat of the game rather than get to the flowery parts,” he recalled. “I tried to take a different approach and make my stuff more interesting.”
His style apparently worked as the paper received several journalism awards and subscriptions remained strong.
Writing also provided some interesting backdrops. He had to use small charter planes to see some games in Alaska, or get to Nome to handle features about the Iditarod sled dog race.
He recalls covering a high school hockey game on an outdoor rink in Alaska and said “it was the first time I saw wind shear affect a hockey game.”
Eggleston also covered a football game where a kicker booted the ball off the uprights, then off a fence, and it bounced into the ocean in Homer.
He reported on a murder trial at that paper, where he would work the news desk in the morning, take time off and then handle sports at night. “It was super stressful,” he said.
Now walking the sidelines as a coach, he said “it definitely does feel like I’ve seen both sides of the coin, and I understand both sides of them better.”
He remembers just giving “little more rounded answers and (to) give both sides of the story” in postgame interviews. “A lot of coaches give canned answers. I try to be a little more in-depth and help try to write the story.”
In his early days as a sportswriter, he said “I would see the game unfold and see the pressures and why a coach would make a decision to go for it (on fourth down). I was a bit more critical of the coach and their decision,” he said, adding “I would probably have been a little more biting about it when I wrote the story.”
He admits in those days “I thought I knew everything there was to know about football. I played it,” he said. “I always approached the game like I was the professional and knew everything about the game. Now as a coach there are a host of responsibilities during every game. I am in completely different waters now. The hardest thing is keeping the kids pointed in the right direction as things go wrong.
“You’ve got the entire team and you’ve got to keep moving in a positive direction, keep the focus going forward. Forget the last play and work on the next one and get the kids to buy into that philosophy.”
He also compares his first writing assignment at the Daily Press with his first game this season at Ontonagon. “I did a (men’s baseball) story about the Escanaba Polecats, and you read my first line and said, ‘Did Yoda write this?’ I thought, oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
The Cougars lost their opener this fall 36-8, and Eggleston said “after being an assistant for four years, I still wasn’t prepared going into that Ontonagon game. We lost, and as I look back, if we played them right now I think we would beat them.
“I had no clue coming into that first game and didn’t have any idea how to get us back on track.”
He eventually figured enough out to finish 4-5 and found plenty of ways to enjoy being a coach.
Eggleston tries to eat lunch with his players every day, and he pays for his own meal.
“I want a family environment there; we all sit at the same table,” he said. “What I get back is relationships I never had before. I feel like I have 21 kids, and I love every minute of it.”
Denny Grall retired in 2012 after 39 years at the Escanaba Daily Press and four at the Green Bay Press-Gazette, plus 15 months for WLST radio in Escanaba; he served as the Daily Press sports editor from 1970-80 and again from 1984-2012. Grall was inducted into the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 and serves as its executive secretary. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for the Upper Peninsula.
PHOTOS: (Top) Eben Junction Superior Central football coach Sam Eggleston speaks with some of his players during a game this season. (Middle) Eggleston monitors the action on the field. (Photos by Dennis Grall.)