Fresh from Cancer Fight, Disbrow Returns to Coaching Ready to Continue 'Winning the Day'
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
September 16, 2026
Nikki Disbrow grabbed her keys and started to get into the family vehicle to pick up her son from a summer 7-on-7 practice. Her husband, Sand Creek football coach Sid Disbrow, told her he wanted to come, too.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You can barely walk.”
Sid, who had just returned home from surgery to have a tumor removed while battling colorectal cancer for the second time in three years, wasn’t having it. He got in the vehicle.
When Nikki arrived at the field, Sid opened the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
Sid, unrelenting, got out of the car and began making his way to the field.
“She was kind of my walker,” he said. “I couldn’t walk on my own, but I needed to address the kids. I needed to be out there. I needed to show them that it’s about winning the day, because you never know what might happen.”
Disbrow, 49, has been coach for just about 30 years. It’s part of who he is in the Sand Creek school district and community. He’s been an assistant football coach, youth baseball and softball coach, varsity boys and middle school basketball coach. He’s detailed, organized, loves the competition and thrives on being around kids.
Last year around the eighth or ninth week of the football season, he began noticing the symptoms of the cancer he had chemotherapy and radiation to treat a couple years prior. He finished the season, knowing middle school basketball was getting ready to start.
Within a week of finding out the cancer had indeed returned, he was able to get everything scheduled and begin chemotherapy. He was getting treated at Flower Hospital in Sylvania, Ohio, about 45 minutes from Sand Creek.
“They would give me the last appointment of the day so I could get there after school,” he said. “They were great to work with.”
It wasn’t easy trying to maintain a rigorous coaching schedule while fighting cancer.
“There are no rules in cancer. You don’t get to do as you wish. Chemotherapy is real,” Disbrow said.
He wasn’t deterred. He coached the entire middle school basketball season – which ended around Christmas. Some days, he was exhausted. Still, quitting wasn’t an option.
“I wanted to be out there for my son and all of the other kids that I’ve been coaching all the way through,” he said. “That was important to me. That was my driving force.”
Not long after basketball season ended, he began eight weeks of radiation. It ended just in time for him to coach his son’s baseball team.
After that season ended, something still wasn’t right. Doctors found a tumor, although they weren’t sure if it was shrinking or growing. They gave him an option – surgery to remove it or wait a few months, get tested again. At that point, if it returned, it meant starting chemotherapy and radiation all over again. He checked the calendar.
“I thought about football season,” he said. “My son is on JV this year. That’s not something I want to miss.”
He went in for surgery and had the tumor successfully removed. Doctors found out later it was indeed cancerous and growing.
“I made the right decision,” he said.
He was recovering from that round of surgery when he made it onto the football field to talk to the Aggies players. The football field is more than a place for Disbrow to forget all about cancer and focus on the lives of the young men on the field. It’s a place him and Nikki, a former varsity volleyball coach at Sand Creek herself, got married.
“It’s probably the first time there was a wedding on the football field, and probably the last time,” he said.
On Aug. 3 – one week before two-a-days started for Sand Creek – he found out the cancer was in remission. He was back with the team when practice began.
“I brought my lawn chair with me,” he said. “There were some days where I just didn’t have the strength.”
Through it all, he’s endured, never wavering.
“The credit goes to God,” he said. “I don’t see how people go through something like this without their faith. I owe it all to Him. He’s given me this chance to continue to teach and coach. I don’t take that lightly.”
Sand Creek varsity football coach Derek Hewitt said seeing Disbrow come back to practice after all he went through was inspiring. Disbrow coaches special teams, the quarterbacks and helps Hewitt with the offense. On most Fridays he’s in the coach’s box.
“It’s great to have him back out there,” Hewitt said. “He’s not the scout team quarterback anymore, but he’s there, every day. It’s great for me to have him by my side.”
One thing Disbrow is not planning to do is stop coaching. In fact, he’s going to be even busier. He was recently named the school’s junior varsity boys basketball head coach.
“Coaching really kept me going through all of this,” he said. “The kids have been great through it all.”
The father of four is from Morenci, the neighboring town to the south and heated rival of Sand Creek, which he admits caused some angst when he moved from coaching football at his alma mater to Sand Creek.
He was part of the 1995 Morenci football team that played for a Class C championship in the Pontiac Silverdome, graduating in 1996. He was a sophomore at Adrian College when a Morenci coach asked him to join that coaching staff. A couple years later he began coaching at Sand Creek.
Now, he, his wife and four kids are engrained in the Aggies community.
“I wasn’t one of those people who got into teaching because I wanted to coach,” he said. “I wanted to be a teacher, to be around young people and help them. Coaching was something I loved once I started doing it. It’s who we are now as a family. It’s part of our lives.”
Doug Donnelly has served as a news and sports reporter at the Adrian Daily Telegram and the Monroe News for 30 years, including 10 years as city editor in Monroe. He's written a book on high school basketball in Monroe County and compiles record books for various schools in southeast Michigan. He is now publisher and editor of The Blissfield Advance, a weekly newspaper. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale, Lenawee and Monroe counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Sand Creek assistant football coach Sid Disbrow mans the headset while on the sideline during a game. (Middle) Disbrow lays in a hospital bed while receiving care in 2023. (Below) Disbrow stands for a photo with wife Nikki last fall. (Top photo by Becky Serin. Hospital and family photos courtesy of the Disbrow family.)
Driven by 2022 Semifinal Loss, GR Catholic Central Reclaims Top Spot in D5
By
Tom Kendra
Special for MHSAA.com
November 26, 2023
DETROIT – Corunna coach Steve Herrick’s final words at the postgame press conference pretty much summed up his team’s struggles in Sunday’s Division 5 title game.
“It’s tough to prepare for a team like Grand Rapids Catholic Central,” explained Herrick, whose school was playing at the Finals for the first time.
“We took care of preparing for their receivers and linemen pretty well, but No. 7 and No. 23 were hard for us to mimic at practice. We don’t have anyone like them.”
With that, Herrick and his players exited the interview area just as GRCC’s No. 7, senior quarterback Connor Wolf, and No. 23, senior running back Kellen Russell-Dixon, squeezed past them, the stars of the Cougars’ 21-7 victory.
Wolf scored all three touchdowns for GRCC, on a pair of 1-yard runs in the second quarter and a 10-yard burst in the fourth quarter, as the Cougars won their eighth Finals title in 10 championship game appearances.
Russell-Dixon didn’t get in the end zone, but was the game’s leading rusher with 20 carries for 133 yards, to go with two receptions for 19 yards.
Both senior leaders said it was a devastating loss to eventual champion Gladwin in last year’s Semifinal, 28-21, which fueled the team’s desire to get back to the mountaintop.
“That loss last year showed us we still had so much work to do to be our best,” said Wolf, who completed 10-of-22 passes for 82 yards and rushed 11 times for 78 yards and the three scores.
Added Russell-Dixon: “I remember watching the Division 5 championship game on TV last year, and just thinking about how we had it in our hands and we weren’t focused and we let it slip away.”
GRCC, which finished 13-1 after a season-opening home loss to powerhouse Chicago Loyola, was focused and prepared Sunday, mixing up the pass and run exquisitely to take a 14-0 halftime lead.
Corunna, also 13-1, averaged more than 41 points per game coming in, but struggled in the first half against the experienced Cougars.
“I felt like they were more physical than us,” said Corunna senior quarterback and defensive back Wyatt Bower. “I felt like all year we didn’t get the respect we deserved, but we battled those guys in the second half.”
The Cavaliers did exactly what they had to do coming out of halftime, taking the third-quarter kickoff and marching 67 yards in 14 plays, capped with a 7-yard burst up the middle by Bower on a 4th-and-goal play, that cut the lead to 14-7.
That score brought a sizable group of black-and-gold clad fans from Corunna, a community of about 4,000 people between Lansing and Flint, to its feet.
However, that turned out to be as close as Corunna would get against a quick and hard-hitting GRCC defense.
The Cougars added an insurance touchdown in the fourth quarter after a short punt gave them the ball at Corunna’s 35-yard line. Eight plays later (six of those runs by Russell-Dixon), Wolf took it the final 10 yards to ice the win.
“It never gets old,” explained 12th-year GRCC coach Todd Kolster, who has guided the Cougars to titles in four of the past five years and six of the last eight. “One of the things I cherish the most from the Finals is the team photo we take down on the field. I never get in those photos. Then when I get a moment, I can look at all those kids who worked so hard and gave so much.”
GRCC, which held a 315-239 edge in total yardage, made Corunna work for every yard Sunday.
Senior linebacker Austin Baxter (6-foot, 185 pounds) set the tone for the Cougars’ defense with eight tackles. Adam Whalen and Derek Weiss made six tackles apiece, and Mill Coleman III added five tackles and the game-clinching interception in the end zone with five minutes remaining.
Wolf said family ties drive the Cougars’ year-in, year-out success – the connections to both his football brothers and his actual biological family.
“My dad, grandparents, uncles, they all went to Catholic Central,” said Wolf, a 6-3 dual threat QB who passed for more than 2,500 yards with 23 TD passes and only two interceptions. “This means a lot to all of us, to continue the Cougar tradition.”
Corunna, which was led all season by Wyatt Bower and his identical twin brother, Tarick (one of his favorite receiving targets), got a strong final game from senior fullback/linebacker Jaden Edington, who made a game-high 10 tackles and rushed 14 times for 70 yards.
The Bower twins, sprinters who helped Corunna win the Lower Peninsula Division 2 Track & Field championship last spring, finished their football careers in style. Wyatt completed 6-of-16 passes for 123 yards, no touchdowns and one interception, while making eight tackles on defense. Tarick made two catches for 69 yards.
Kaden Cowdrey and Dayne Zeeman each made eight tackles for the Cavaliers.
PHOTOS (Top) Grand Rapids Catholic Central’s Kellen Russell-Dixon (23) prepares for contact with Corunna’s Kaden Cowdrey (8) during Sunday’s Division 5 Final. (Middle) The Cavaliers’ Wyatt Bower (4) and Dayne Zeeman work to bring down GRCC’s Lucas Thelen short of the goal line. (Below) Brayden Sweeney (6) and Derek Weiss (30) wrap up Corunna’s Parker Isham. (Photos by Hockey Weekly Action Photos.)