Pack is Back: Longtime Coach Returns
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
September 18, 2020
MANCHESTER – Ben Pack never stopped being a coach. He just didn’t have a team for the past 18 years.
Pack stepped away as a football coach at Jackson High School in 2002, and other than a brief interim job in 2012, has not been on the sidelines since. But tonight, Pack is Back.
“When I got into coaching in the 1970s it was about the kids,” Pack said. “That’s the same reason I’m coming back.”
Pack was named head coach at Manchester in March. His season begins tonight when the Flying Dutchmen host Addison in a Cascades Conference opener.
It’s been a strange journey over the past few months. After he was hired, he had hoped to get into the Manchester halls and start looking to build the numbers for the Manchester football program, which has been down to around 35-40 players the last couple of seasons.
“When the Manchester job opened up, I applied and was hired in March,” Pack said. “Covid hit a week later. It’s been somewhat of a tailspin since. It’s nothing liked I had planned for.”
Not even the best planners could have predicted what 2020 has been like for high school football. But, when the season was brought back a few weeks ago, Pack and his colleagues from across the state went right to work. It’s a tough time to build a program.
“One of the Achilles we’ve been facing is low participation,” he said. “Trying to get the numbers up when school is not in session is very difficult. The players didn’t know me, I didn’t know them. I didn’t have any of their phone numbers or e-mail addresses. It was a struggle.
“I think if I would have been in the building, we could have resurrected those numbers to 45-50.”
Instead, Manchester is 37 kids strong playing high school football.
“The kids have done a fabulous job,” Pack said. “We’ve had a few hiccups, but we are young. About 30 of our kids have never stepped onto a varsity field. There are some good kids, but they don’t have any experience. I still expect them to do well. We coach them to do well. We’ve gone all in, and they’ve responded.”
Manchester is no stranger to the postseason or success. The Flying Dutchmen made the playoffs every year but once from 2003 to 2015. Last year they went 4-5. Pack is working in a new offense and modified defense as he embarks on his first season leading the program.
“Trying to get everything put into the game plan in eight or nine days is brutal,” he said. “But I love teaching kids the game of football. I love that part.”
Manchester is in Washtenaw County, about 20 miles from Pack’s hometown of Jackson. Pack was a three-sport athlete for Jackson High School before going on to Jackson Community College and, later, Central Michigan University.
He was coaching as soon as he became an adult, first as a volunteer. He was the head coach at Parma Western from 1983-1986, then coached 16 years at Jackson, from 1987 to 2002, leading the school to its first playoff appearances. He came back briefly in 2012 on an interim basis to coach Jackson. He was hired at the last minute, and the team went 0-9.
“The assistant superintendent tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You have the experience. We need you to coach football,’” Pack said. “I did it, but everybody knew it was just for the year. We got through it.”
Pack has a career high school record of 75-119. He also was an assistant coach at Albion College for a short time. His most recent job as an assistant coach was at Parma Western after he retired from the classroom.
“I thought it was a good chance to get back into it,” he said. “I told my wife it was going to confirm if I really wanted to coach again. When you are a coach these days, it’s an all-in commitment. With the time commitment it takes, you really have to want to coach.”
Pack said he gave up coaching because of the opportunity to become an administrator, not because he didn’t have a passion for football.
"It was the right thing to do for my family,” he said. “I had to be a dad. I told my wife when I did it that as soon as I retired, I was going to get back into it.”
Pack said he missed it every day. His comeback begins tonight, but don’t expect a quick exit. He’s waited years to get back on the sidelines and is having a blast doing it.
“When I was out of coaching, I was still a coach,” he said. “I worked at it every single day in hopes that I would position myself to get back into it. I studied film. I was a habitual attender of college practices. I kept working on my playbook and schemes. I never stopped any of that. I worked on those things all of the time.”
Doug Donnelly has served as a sports and news reporter and city editor over 25 years, writing for the Daily Chief-Union in Upper Sandusky, Ohio from 1992-1995, the Monroe Evening News from 1995-2012 and the Adrian Daily Telegram since 2013. He's also written a book on high school basketball in Monroe County and compiles record books for various schools in southeast Michigan. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale, Lenawee and Monroe counties.
PHOTO: Manchester coach Ben Pack watches over his players as they stretch during practice this fall. (Photo by Doug Donnelly.)
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.)