Howell Names Field for Longtime Leader
August 30, 2018
By Tim Robinson
Special for Second Half
If you got the impression that John Dukes has been around Howell football forever, you wouldn’t be far off.
His association with the program began before high school.
“When I was a kid, I used to live near Page Field (Howell’s former athletic complex), and I would go out and watch football practice,” Dukes said. “I was at practice all the time, and the coach said, ‘If you’re going to be here all the time, you may as well get some water for the boys while they’re practicing.’”
That was in 1963, when the Highlanders went 9-0.
A little more than 55 years later, Dukes will be honored tonight when the field at Howell’s Memorial Stadium will be named John Dukes Field.
Howell football coach Aaron Metz began the drive to name the field after Dukes when it was determined the old turf, installed in 2004, needed to be replaced.
“We have a commitment award named for John,” he said. “If you play football for four years, you get the John Dukes Commitment Award. We put a committee together with people who have been around Howell for a long time, and when you ask anybody, they say there’s not a person more deserving than John Dukes.
“So I ran it up the ladder to the athletic director and superintendent, and, to be honest, it was a pretty easy process because no one could find anything bad about John,” Metz added. “We’re excited to have the opportunity to do it.”
Dukes was a three-year varsity player at Howell and then played at Alma College, where his teams won three league championships.
With the exception of six years at Hartland coaching under his son, Marcus, John Dukes has been affiliated with Howell football for 46 years, including 25 as the head coach.
After graduating from Alma in 1972, Dukes got a teaching job at Howell and was an assistant freshman coach for a season and a varsity assistant for two before taking over as head coach at age 25.
“My philosophy at the time was I wanted to help the kids enjoy playing football and help them to be successful at it,” he recalled. “The previous three years our record wasn’t very good. That was one of my objectives, was to make it fun.”
He then talked about his first season with a little self-deprecation, a common thread in most conversations with Dukes.
“I remember my first game,” he said. “Because I played defense in college (Dukes was a linebacker), I thought we were going to be a really good defensive team. We played Fenton in my first game, and we lost 32-19, so my defensive prowess wasn’t good at the time.”
The Highlanders lost six of their first seven games that season, but won the last two and went 8-1 three seasons later.
In all, Howell had winning records in 15 of his 25 seasons, but one group of players stood out for an entirely different reason.
“We had a period of time (1989 and 1990) where we weren’t very good, and we lost 17 games in a row,” he said. “But those kids were wonderful kids to coach. They came to practice with energy all the time, and from a coaching standpoint, it was wonderful to coach them during the week. Now, Fridays were a different story, because we didn’t play very well on Fridays, ever.
“But the real thing that stands out with that group was the very last game of their senior year we beat (Waterford Kettering), and you’d have thought we’d won the Super Bowl,” Dukes continued. “Those kids who were seniors, that was their first football victory in high school. It was an amazing time. We had several teams with good players, and I really enjoyed coaching them, too, and I don’t want to leave them out. But that really stood out in my mind, in that they came out to work every day.
“Over a period of time of losing that many games, sometimes, it’s not fun and it’s not fun for them or the coaches. But we had a very enjoyable time over that two-year period, regardless of the fact we didn’t win any games.”
His perspective is consistent with the principles by which he ran his program.
“These weren’t original to me,” he says, “but the three things I always told our kids was your faith should be your number one priority, your family should be your number two priority. Football, when school hadn’t started, should be number three. And when school started, school became three and football became number four. We tried to base everything we did on these priorities in our lives. Sometimes those things cross over and mix and match. When they do, then you have to step back and say what is really important here?”
Dukes resigned after the 1999 season.
“There were a lot of things and I don’t know if anything in particular,” he said of his decision. “I had been doing it for 25 years, and we had a string of years where we were 6-3. So we were OK, but I felt it was time to be done with it.”
His self-imposed exile lasted one season. He had a couple of stints as an assistant coach when he finally decided to retire for good in 2006.
“No sooner had I done that, my son (Marcus) called me up and said he just got the Hartland job,” Dukes recalled. “He said, ‘Dad, you have to come here and help.’ So I went there for six years. Then he resigned, and I thought I was going to be done again.”
After another stint as a Howell assistant, John Dukes took the last two years off before agreeing to rejoin the program as a junior varsity assistant this season, as the offensive coordinator.
As it turns out, one grandson, Jackson Dukes, plays on the Howell JV, and John Dukes also is helping coach another grandson, Colin Lassey, on his junior football team.
“When Jackson gets home, I ask him, ‘Did you get yelled at by Grandpa today?” Josh Dukes says. “And when he says yes, I say, ‘Good. You should be getting yelled at.’ So nothing has changed in the 30 years since high school.”
Josh Dukes, the oldest of John Dukes’ three children, joined Marcus in playing football for their father.
“There was never an expectation that we had to be this or that,” Josh Dukes said of himself, his brother and sister, Carrie. “Now maybe he was a little harder on me, but that’s something we were thankful for. I’d rather him be harder on me than any kid on the field, because then the other kids left me alone. They knew it was the same for everyone across the board. He wasn’t going to take it easy on me, my brother or my sister.”
John Dukes coached his daughter, Carrie, when she played middle school basketball.
“The first time he coached me, he came home to my mom and said, ‘I don’t know how people do this,’” she recalled. “‘They’re all crying, half of them don’t think I like them. I don’t know how to do this with girls. It’s a totally different ballgame.’ But he was a great coach. I know some people don’t like their parents coaching them, but I loved having him coach.”
Like her brothers, Carrie Lassey stayed involved with sports. She is now the athletic director at St. Joseph Catholic School in Howell.
“He coached my freshman team a couple of years ago,” she said. “It was third and fourth-grade girls. It’s amazing. He can coach pretty much anybody.”
Indeed, Dukes also coached baseball and wrestling at the varsity level at Howell, and, for a couple of weeks, filled in as a competitive cheer coach when the Highlanders had a temporary vacancy.
“I was more a supervisor,” he said, but serving that role illustrated his commitment to the athletic program as a whole. He was needed, and he stepped in.
Having stopped and started his career so many times, Dukes, now 68, laughs when asked about what he will do when he retires in the distant future.
“I’m sure he’ll be coaching when he’s in his 90s. Maybe triple digits,” jokes Bill Murray, the former Brighton coach who matched up with Dukes’ teams during the second half of Dukes’ Howell tenure. “The guy loves the game, he’s out there and he has a lot to offer. His teams were always well-prepared, they played great defense, were fundamentally sound and when you went nose-to-nose, they were consistent as to what they were going to do. It was a matter of whether you could stop them or not.”
Dukes still keeps up with the Howell varsity, still offers advice when asked, and still enjoys the competition.
“For me, as a head coach, it’s great having a coach (on staff) who has been there and done it to talk to and mentor, even me,” Metz said. “What makes a successful coach, I don’t think, changes, whether it’s been 50 or 100 years ago to the current day. He steered the ship to have an outstanding record (130-95) and also have a huge impact on kids in our community.”
“When people talk to me about my dad, they say he was a dad to them, or like a second dad,” Josh Dukes added. “Or, ‘I wanted to be a teacher because of him.’ These are the things that for us,” referring to his siblings, “is the most impressive part. The kids of players he’s coached, or the grandkids.”
Dukes has the unusual distinction of having coached more congressmen (Mike Rogers and Mark Schauer, who started on the offensive line for Dukes in the late 1970s) than pro football players (Jon Mack, who played for the Michigan Panthers of the USFL in 1984).
John Dukes will give a short speech before tonight’s ceremony, which will take place before Howell’s home opener against Plymouth.
“They’ve given me five minutes, but it will probably be shorter because they want to get the game started on time,” he joked.
“It’s an incredible honor,” Josh Dukes said. “Everyone in our family feels the same way. I don’t think he ever went into this with any intentions of being singled out. It’s a great lesson for our community and our athletes, to see what hard work and effort and care for your community can do, you know?”
During the ceremony, the letters “John Dukes Field,” which were sewn into the artificial turf in Howell’s Vegas Gold, will be unveiled.
“Aaron showed it to me last week when they were putting it in,” John Dukes said, then joked, “I thought (the lettering) was going to be a little trademark sign (sized), and my goodness, it’s bigger than the numbers. It’s a little bit ostentatious for me, I think; wow, that’s quite a tribute. I’m very humbled by it and honored by it and very appreciative of what people have done to make this happen.”
A few days later, Dukes posed for a picture next to his name on the field and chatted with a reporter as they left the stadium.
Then, he turned a corner to the JV football office and kept walking.
Before he became a living legend, John Dukes was a football coach, and there’s a game coming up and his team to prepare.
PHOTOS: (Top) Howell coach John Dukes celebrates his team’s 38-0 playoff victory over Wayne Memorial in 1992. (Middle) Dukes, during the 1991 season. (Below) Dukes stands next to the lettering that will be unveiled Thursday when the school’s field is named in his honor. (Photos taken or collected by Tim Robinson.)
Ida Builds Greatest Season 'Brick by Brick'
By
Chip Mundy
Special for Second Half
November 5, 2015
By Chip Mundy
Special for Second Half
IDA – As the greatest football season in Ida High School history rolls into the second week of the MHSAA playoffs, it could be said that winning isn’t even the best thing the Bluestreaks have done this year.
Winning certainly hasn’t been the most important thing they did this season.
With the community strongly backing the program throughout its undefeated season to date, which continues tonight in a Division 5 District Final at home against Dearborn Heights Robichaud, the team has given back – while building a collection of memories they will cherish no matter how long this history-making trip rolls on.
From hosting a fundraiser that hit much closer to home than they anticipated, to welcoming back a beloved member of the program after a health scare – and all while putting together the most successful run in school history – Ida has had a season to remember, even as it works to add more moments before the run is done.
Supporting a new teammate
The regular-season finale was designated as a fundraiser for childhood cancer awareness, and the game against rival Erie-Mason raised more than $4,000 for the St. Baldrick's Foundation, a private institution in California that gives grants to children who are battling cancer.
“I had seen something on Facebook and looked into it and decided that we needed to do something other than just get ready for football games,” Ida coach Tom Walentowski said. “We scheduled our Game 9 as a gold-out game with one of our rivals, Erie-Mason, and we raised money for childhood cancer awareness. The kids got big into that.”
Unknown at the time of the decision to raise funds for childhood cancer awareness, Chloe Arnold, a 5-year-old resident of the Ida community, was battling leukemia.
The close-knit Bluestreaks had room in their hearts to join another team. They joined Team Chloe. And in the regular-season finale, Team Chloe also was able to raise money through sales of merchandise.
One unique item was a helmet that had an Ida decal on one side and an Erie-Mason decal on the other. Players from both teams signed the helmets, which then were donated to Team Chloe for a silent auction that raised $665. A total of $2,315.42 was raised that night for Team Chloe.
“Gold is the color for cancer childhood awareness, and gold is in our school colors and it’s also in Erie-Mason’s school colors, so that’s why we decided that would be the game to do the gold-out,” Walentowski said. “We sold over 500 T-shirts. The kids were really into it.”
The greatest season
Entering the 2011 season, Ida had made the playoffs just three times and finished a regular season undefeated just once – in 1971. The Bluestreaks suddenly have made making the postseason a habit, going 6-3 before losing in the first round in 2011, just missing the postseason at 5-4 in 2012 and then returning to the playoffs each of the past three seasons. Last year, the team finished 8-3, tying the program record for victories with its most since 1991.
That is quite a turnaround for a program that had just three winning seasons from 1999-2010. The reversal of fortunes has been impressive. Prior to 2013, Ida had never scored more than 259 points in a season. The Bluestreaks scored 346 in 2013 and 349 in 2014, and they already have scored 428 this year.
This isn’t just an offensive juggernaut, either. Ida has allowed only 87 points through 10 games.
When asked what has made the difference, Walentowski opened the door to the weight room, where the players were busy doing their lifting on a Monday afternoon, and simply said, “These guys.”
Ida steamrolled its first seven opponents by a combined score of 310-40. Then, in the eighth week, Ida was tested. The Bluestreaks trailed Hillsdale 7-0 at halftime and pulled out a 20-17 victory in double overtime.
“I think when you come out at halftime and you’re down 7-0 and you win the game, obviously that helps your confidence,” Walentowski said. “They never got rattled, they just went about their game.
“When you do that, it just reaffirms to them that you just keep playing your game and things will be fine.”
Ida completed the perfect regular season with a 63-7 victory over Erie-Mason and then won its first playoff game 35-23 over Ann Arbor Father Gabriel Richard. It was just the second home playoff game in school history, and tonight’s game will be the third.
“I love hearing all of our fans roar when we get a first down or a touchdown,” senior quarterback David Kolakowski said.
Needless to say, the Ida community has gotten behind the winning football team in a big way.
“We hear from a lot of coaches from other teams that they have never known a football team that had such a good community like we do,” senior guard/linebacker Mike Zlonkovicz said. “We drove into town on playoff day, and there was the score from every game on the light posts.
“It was really touching to see that. We’re not only representing the entire school but the entire town.”
The Bluestreaks run an odd-front defense and an offense that so heavily relies on the running game that Walentowski said the old saying of “three yards and a cloud of dust” offense applies to this team in phrase only.
“We don’t like three yards, though,” he said. “We prefer to average eight or nine.”
Ida boasts a pair of 1,000-yard running backs in Eric Bugg and Nick Levicki. Bugg broke the single-season rushing record and also has scored the most touchdowns in school history. Levicki is second on the all-time touchdown list.
“Eric is, I guess for lack of a better term, he’s the poster boy of this team,” Walentowski said. “He is really a good young man. He’s a 3.5 student, he’s solid in the classroom, he’s a great citizen, he’s humble, he just works hard. He doesn’t particularly care for all the fanfare.”
Bugg said the pressure from last season’s success weighed on his mind this season.
“I didn’t know how to live up to it since we did so well last year,” he said. “We’re just trying to beat how we progressed last year, and so far we have.
“We have to get past districts and keep doing what we’re doing.”
Brick by brick
Defensive line coach Gary Deland delivers a motivating speech prior to every game. His topic this week was “brick by brick.” The players listen to him, and that message had extra importance because Deland is experiencing it in his personal life.
Midway through the season, Deland had to undergo emergency triple-bypass heart surgery, but he is back on the sidelines coaching the team and progressively getting better from week to week. In his words, he is improving brick by brick.
“He didn’t know it at the time, but in the first half of our first game against Jefferson, he was having a heart attack,” Walentowski said of Deland. “He got through the game and said his chest was bothering him, but he thought it was indigestion.
“A couple of weeks later it was still kind of bothering him on and off, and he said he should get it checked. We were getting ready to play Blissfield, which was Game 4, and he went to the hospital on Wednesday morning, and they said you’re not leaving, you are having open-heart surgery Thursday morning.”
A week after triple-bypass heart surgery, Deland was back, giving a motivational speech to the players.
“It was a great talk,” Walentowski said. “He has quite a personality, and the kids love him. For us, it was like we hadn’t better screw anything up before Coach D gets back here. I think we all had that attitude.
“The following week, he was back on the sidelines.”
It seemed like nothing was going to keep Deland from returning to his boys.
“It was a blur,” Deland said. “I was less than a few weeks out of surgery, and I was back on the sidelines. My doctor did not approve, but he knew I was going to be on the sidelines and he wasn’t going to be able to stop me.
“I was there; I was with my team. These are a great group of kids. They work hard, and they deserve everything the coaching staff can give them, and that’s why I wanted to be there for them. They have been there for this school and this community all year long.”
Although Deland said he blocks out thinking about his health on the sidelines, the players remain very aware of it.
“The kids have gone out of their way to protect me on the sidelines,” he said. “When a play is coming out of bounds, I have to get out of the way. I cannot get run over. So they do protect me on the sidelines so I don’t get run over by any play out of bounds.
“The doctor doesn’t want me to get too excited, and I try not to. Each week I can feel the momentum of my strength coming back, and I get a little more vocal and a little more animated on the sidelines.
“I have a passion for football, and the kids know it. They know I can blow up at any time, or I can be the grandfather for them.”
And, every week, he is the motivator with his speeches.
“From that very first practice in the summer to the last game as a senior, everything is built brick by brick,” Deland said. “I can draw a correlation between that and my recovery, what I’ve gone through. It’s the same thing. It’s brick by brick.
“You might take two steps forward, and you think you’re getting on to where you want to be as a team, and I might be getting on to how I want to feel, and the next thing you take that giant step backwards. You don’t feel so great, or all of a sudden you were praised by the coach the day before and now you’re screwing up every which way.
“But you’re still going forward, and that is how I paint my recovery, brick by brick, the same as this team. They will progress in the season and the playoffs brick by brick.”
Nobody knows how the season will end, but it already is the greatest football season in school history. The Bluestreaks are giving back to the community with their work for childhood cancer awareness, and they are banding together to win football games.
It is the time of their young lives.
“Being a quarterback was not always my intention,” Kolakowski said. “I was a wide receiver, but in my JV season I had to play quarterback. Then, in the playoff game, I was like, ‘It would be so sweet to be able to run this offense,’ and now I’m getting to live out my dream, which is awesome.”
It is a season that has been building, excuse the expression, brick by brick.
“I think these guys have had a lot of goals,” Walentowski said. “Six of the seniors were with us as sophomores, and there were two freshmen who were with us back then, so those eight kids, they’re still here, and they’ve been building every year.
“They expected to work hard and do well, and that’s what they’re doing. They don’t just like to play football, they like to play football together. There’s a big difference.”
Chip Mundy served as sports editor at the Brooklyn Exponent and Albion Recorder from 1980-86, and then as a reporter and later copy editor at the Jackson Citizen-Patriot from 1986-2011. He also co-authored Michigan Sports Trivia. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale, Lenawee and Monroe counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Ida running back Nick Levicki attempts to run through tacklers during his team's win over Ann Arbor Gabriel Richard last week. (Middle) Head coach Tom Walentowski, far left, and assistant Gary Deland talk things over with the team looking on. (Below) Fans hung a sign supporting Deland upon his return. (Top and middle photos by Ray Leighton. Bottom photo by Kim Farver.)