Northern Schools Find Solution in NMFL
September 6, 2019
By Chris Dobrowolski
Special for Second Half
With 17 schools spread across 11 counties, the Northern Michigan Football League has created an indelible footprint since it was born into existence five years ago.
The conference, made up of three divisions of schools in varying size, has been able to sustain and evolve despite an ever-changing football landscape up north that has made for a revolving door of membership from year to year.
“It continues to morph,” said Frankfort athletic director Dave Jackson, the conference’s commissioner and one of the founders of the league.
From the biggest schools in the Legends division — Benzie Central, Boyne City, Cheboygan, Grayling, Kalkaska, Kingsley and Traverse City St. Francis — to the smaller schools in the Leaders (Charlevoix, Elk Rapids, Frankfort, Mancelona and Maple City Glen Lake) and Legacy divisions (Harbor Springs, East Jordan, Inland Lakes, Johannesburg-Lewiston and St. Ignace) the NMFL has provided easy avenues for scheduling as well as good, competitive balance for the programs that call it home.
“The scheduling aspect is where I go back to it,” said Johannesburg-Lewiston football coach and athletic director Joe Smokevitch. “It’s just been huge for us. Going into 2020 and 2021 my schedule is full, basically with teams from within the conference. They’re not all division games. I am crossing over and playing those other schools. It’s really helped with scheduling. Not having to go far away to play somebody. You look at our schedule. We play some quality opponents. I think the conference is very strong from top to bottom.”
The idea for the league was hatched in 2012 between schools in the Lake Michigan and Northwest conferences. Both leagues were seeing problems from smaller schools trying to compete with larger ones, and neither side benefitting from the affiliation. So, the two merged as a 13-team league comprised of two divisions of similar-sized enrollments.
The league has rarely stayed intact from year to year, switching to the three-division alignment with the growth to 20 teams in 2016 when it absorbed the remaining teams in the Ski Valley Conference, as well as withstanding the loss of six schools to 8-player football in the span of four years.
“We’ve taken schools in the league that didn’t last very long,” said Jackson. “We took in Newberry and they lasted just a year, then suddenly they’re 8-man. We took in Gaylord St. Mary. We took in Central Lake. Those teams were just a year or two and suddenly they’re gone. Our constitution calls for a two-year process of getting out, but those teams that had to go 8-man, they’re out for the next year. So, suddenly you’re scrambling again, which is the one thing we were trying to keep from having to do because there is no planning when that last-minute 8-man decision comes along and schools decide to make that plunge. There’s nothing you can really do when a school says they’re going to do that. You can’t say, ‘Well, the constitution says … .’ They’re going to do what they need to do.”
Fortunately for the league, it has been able to find suitable replacements at every turn. In fact, Ogemaw Heights and Sault Ste. Marie are set to join in 2020 to become part of the Legends division, bolstering the league to a robust 19 schools. Kalkaska and Boyne City will slide over to the Leaders division and Frankfort — one of the smallest 11-player football teams in the state — is moving to the Legacy division.
“It made sense to apply,” said Ogemaw Heights athletic director Jon Studley, noting four future conference foes already are on this year’s schedule. “We’re very excited about the opportunity to be a part of that. We’re going to be able to create some rivalries.
“I think fans of northern Michigan football benefit the most. They’re seeing competitive football week in and week out.”
As the NMFL has shown, the quality of football being played within the conference is at a high level, too. At least one team from the league has reached the Semifinal round of the MHSAA playoffs every season. Boyne City was a semifinalist in Division 6 in 2014, while St. Francis has represented the league in the Semifinals in 2015, 2017 and 2018. In 2016 two teams advanced that far — St. Ignace in Division 8 and Maple City Glen Lake in Division 6 — with Glen Lake reaching the Finals before falling to Jackson Lumen Christi 26-14.
“I think we’re really starting to get some respect,” said Glen Lake coach Jerry Angers. “I’ve talked to the teams downstate that we’ve played, they want to come up and play us. They’re not saying, ‘This is going to be an easy game.’ They’re saying, ‘This is going to be a fun game, and they’re going to give us something.’”
There remains the possibility the league will undergo more changes before it more comfortably stabilizes. Some schools have expressed interest in joining, and the threat of losing members to 8-player football remains for a few of the smallest schools. It’s nothing the league hasn’t dealt with before, however. Jackson said it comes down to maintaining a commitment to the schools that are in the conference and carefully examining any growth that could occur.
“We had our big meeting in December, and one thing we talked about is how we have to look out for each other,” said Jackson. “We’re trying to guarantee that the league will provide eight of your nine games. In most cases the league is providing all nine of the games. So, you know you’re going to have somebody to play and you’re not going to have to go looking. There’s a time we may control 11-man football for everything north of Lansing. I don’t know. It continues to grow because teams are looking for that stability and consistency year in and year out, so they know who their games are with and they know who they play.”
Chris Dobrowolski has covered northern Lower Peninsula sports since 1999 at the Ogemaw County Herald, Alpena News, Traverse City Record-Eagle and currently as sports editor at the Antrim Kalkaska Review since 2016. 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, carrying the ball, opened this season with a 40-26 win over Elk Rapids. (Middle) East Jordan got a step on Harbor Springs on this play last week, but the Rams emerged with a slim 34-33 win. (Photos by Sports in Motion.)
Lessons Learned, Goodrich Laughs Last
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
October 25, 2017
The joke wasn’t incredibly original, nor was it incredibly funny, especially if you had any connection to the Goodrich football program.
But when you suffer through a winless season like the Martians did in 2016, people are going to have jokes.
This one was a knock-knock joke, and Owen was at the door. Owen Nine.
Goodrich senior defensive back and captain Ryan Aylmer can at least smile now when he tells it, because with the Martians having just completed an 8-1 regular season, there are no more jokes.
“This year, people go through the school and they talk about who we got next week, and what we’re looking like in the playoffs,” Aylmer said. “Now teachers are talking about the games in school, and I’ve got little kids recognizing who I am. People are back into the program now that we’re succeeding. It feels great, especially after last year when it felt like we were nothing, that forgotten team. But now we’re back in the community.”
This isn’t a story of some moribund program finally finding its way to the postseason. In fact, when Goodrich hosts Pontiac Notre Dame Prep on Friday in the first round of the MHSAA Division 4 playoffs, it will be in a familiar spot.
From 2008 through 2015, Goodrich qualified for the playoffs six times, and had a losing record just once.
The question in Goodrich was how does 0-9 happen?
“That team we had last year, they weren’t an 0-9 team,” Goodrich coach Tom Alward said. “I should have done a better job last year, and we should have won several games. It just didn’t happen. This year, kids are making things happen that we couldn’t make happen last year.”
Alward took over the Goodrich program in 1993, and in 1995 led the Martians to the postseason for the first time ever. His 146 wins since are the most in program history, and he already has been inducted into the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Despite all of that previous success, a moment at the end of last season led Alward to say he had never been more proud of any team he had ever coached.
“After our ninth game last year at St. Johns, when we just got beat 52-0 to finish an 0-9 season, that entire team stayed on the St. Johns football field for probably a half hour, 40 minutes just talking to one another, hugging one another -- they knew it was the end,” Alward said. “They played their tails off all year. I can’t say enough about them. I just feel so bad that they have that 0-9 stigma. I’ve got that stigma myself from when I played at Tampa on the 0-14 team (for the NFL’s Buccaneers in 1976). But I just feel bad, because they didn’t deserve that.”
Alward and his staff didn’t panic and make drastic changes following the winless season, but in his 25th with the Martians, he was able to look at all aspects of the program, including himself, to see where things needed to be different.
“We did exit interviews at the end of last year, because we were concerned about the culture,” Alward said. “We’ve been able to win here for a number of years, and we didn’t want to all of the sudden have kids thinking that they couldn’t win because we went 0-9. We wanted to address that part of it, so we did exit interviews, we did a lot of offseason bonding exercises, team building and all of that stuff. This team is pretty close. We were fortunate to get off to a good start, and the rest has kind of just taken care of itself.”
That bond, players say, is what has sparked the rebound.
“We would go out to dinner together, we would do everything together all summer long,” senior defensive lineman and captain Sebastian Foglio said. “We would work out together, we would push each other. There’s no age, there’s no ‘freshmen get the water,’ none of that stuff. We just came together and did what we had to do. Everybody is close with everybody, nobody dislikes anybody. If we do, we’ll talk and change that.”
And the start, well, it couldn’t have been much better.
In Goodrich’s opening game against Burton Bendle, freshman Tyson Davis returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. It was an immediate announcement that the 2017 season would be different.
“It was a sigh of relief,” Aylmer said. “Last year we scored (66) points all year. Seeing, literally, the first play of the brand new year getting taken back, and scoring (44) points our first game, it was just a sigh of relief getting that out of the way and realizing that we can do that this year.”
Goodrich rolled to a 3-0 start, outscoring opponents by a combined score of 132-12 before falling 20-7 in Week 4 against Genesee Area Conference Red rival Lake Fenton. But a resounding 42-0 win the next week against Otisville-LakeVille started a five-game winning streak to end the regular season for the Martians, who outscored opponents by an average of nearly 26 points on the year.
Suddenly all of the social media chatter from the area was gone, along with the jokes. But the lessons learned from an 0-9 season were not.
“There’s been a chip on our shoulder,” Aylmer said. “It seems like every week these guys last year thought we were bad, or we played them last year and they beat us. We had a chip on our shoulder and everybody has taken it to heart, and it seems like we’ve been fighting every week as an 0-9 team, but we’re really a good team this year.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Goodrich celebrates seeing itself on the playoff bracket during Sunday’s selection show on FOX Sports Detroit. (Middle) Goodrich freshman Tyson Davis contends for a loose ball during the season opener against Burton Bendle; he returned the opening kickoff that game for a touchdown. (Top photo by Paul Costanzo; bottom photo by Terry Lyons.)