Oscoda Teams Rise From Past to Perfection
February 8, 2019
By Chris Dobrowolski
Special for Second Half
OSCODA — The tide has turned in Oscoda.
After struggling year after year in boys and girls basketball, the Owls are enjoying quite a turnaround on the hardcourt this winter as both teams enter the final month of the regular season undefeated — just one of two schools in the state to be collectively unbeaten in boys and girls hoops.
The boys team boasts a record of 15-0 and is 9-0 in the North Star League Big Dipper division, while the girls squad has cruised to a 12-0 mark, including going 5-0 in league play.
It hasn’t always been that way, however.
“There’s a lot of years where we really struggled,” said Oscoda varsity boys basketball coach Seth Alda, a 2003 graduate of the school who is in his seventh year at the helm. “It wasn’t that long ago. There were a lot of years where we not only struggled but a lot of teams beat us by quite a bit.”
The boys team has reached a stretch where it has failed to win a league championship in 27 years or District title in 18 straight seasons, while the girls program became infamous for having lost 89 consecutive games at one point.
“We went almost four and a half years without winning a game,” said Oscoda varsity girls basketball coach Mark Toppi, who took over the girls program four years ago. “They had only had a couple wins in the past three years before I took the job.”
The Owls had been caught in a rut for most of the last few decades, partly due to a precipitous decline in the school’s enrollment after Wurtsmith Air Force Base was decommissioned in 1993. As families left the area, Oscoda became a shell of itself. At one time Class B playing within the North East Michigan Conference, the school was unable to remain competitive with its league rivals as its student population was slashed in half. It eventually made sense to leave the NEMC, and Oscoda toiled as an independent before finding a landing spot in the Huron Shores Conference, which eventually morphed into a reconfigured North Star League in 2014.
Things began to trend in the Owls’ favor last season as a group of talented and ambitious athletes started making their mark. It’s a core of players who have gotten better by working hard, dedicating themselves, including honing their games and picking up additional competition on local travel teams.
“We kind of saw it coming,” said Alda. “Last year we were 14-8, which was our first winning season in 15 years. We returned a lot of players off that team. Last year we were young, and this year we’re still young. We have a lot coming back next year too.”
The Owls’ main core consists of juniors Brayden Mallak, Gabe Kellstrom, Devin Thomas and Chance Kruse, as well as sophomores Owen Franklin and Gavin Lueck.
“We’re guard-oriented,” said Alda. “We like to get up and down the court. We press. We shoot a lot of threes. Typically, we go four out and one in — four guards and one post player. We like to push the tempo. We like to increase possessions. We’ve got three kids (Mallak, Kellstrom and Franklin) who are shooting over 35 percent — a couple of them over 40 — from the 3-point line.”
The girls team managed to come up with 13 wins a year ago despite not having a senior on the roster. That was part of the ascent from three victories in Toppi’s first season, to seven wins two years ago. The 13-9 record in 2017-18 earned Toppi the Associated Press’ Class C Coach of the Year Award.
With all that returning experience from the best girls team Oscoda had seen in years, the Owls were primed for an even better season.
“I could tell we were going to have a good year, just because of all the work they put in over the summer,” said Toppi. “We had a lot of success (last summer). We play up all the time whenever we go to team camps. We always try to play Class B or Class A schools. We take a lot of beatings in the summer. This year was the first year that we were winning against some of those schools. That was a nice sign. I try to tell them, ‘If we’re losing by 15 to a Class A school, that’s not bad.’ This year we were beating some of them.”
The Oscoda girls team has a bit more experience than the boys, with senior Katelyn Etherton in her fourth year as a starting guard. She reached the 1,000-point mark in her career earlier this year. Junior post player Lauren Langley is another key veteran who teams with Etherton, and each average close to 17 points per game. Sophomore Macy Kellstrom leads the team in steals and assists as the point guard, and classmate Izzy Hulverson is averaging a double-double in points and rebounds.
The problem the girls team has discovered is it isn’t getting pushed by the teams on its schedule. The Owls are winning by an average of 34 points per game. A 41-25 win over Tawas was the closest to date. Toppi hopes not having a close game during the regular season won’t hurt the Owls when they get to the postseason. For now, he’s just focused on getting the Owls ready for a tournament run.
“I’m just trying to get them to play hard and practice hard,” he said. “I don’t want them to look at the schedule. We’re still trying to get competition in practice and get better every day.”
The boys games have been a little less one-sided, particularly two clashes against league rival Mio. Oscoda beat the Thunderbolts both times, but one was a seven-point win in a back-and-forth game a week ago and the other was a 35-33 nail-biter earlier this season that wasn’t decided until Mallak drove the length of the court and scored on a buzzer beater.
The buzz has caught up to the Owls as the wins have continued to pile up for both teams.
“Around the school I feel like everybody’s wearing Oscoda across their chest a lot more proudly than what it was a while ago,” said Franklin. “Wherever you go, people know who you are now.
“Every practice Mr. Alda talks to us about how we could be the first in so many years to do this (or that). Early in the year we were 8-0 and he was like, ‘You’ve got a chance to go 9-0. That hasn’t happened in 30 years. He talks to us a lot about making history.”
The struggles the school endured in basketball are not forgotten, but both teams are doing their part to make better memories on the court. The girls already snapped a 48-game losing streak to nearby rival Tawas, and the boys swept the Braves for the first time in 20 years. The boys team is also close to ending that elusive conference championship drought, and both teams have their eyes on earning some District tournament hardware.
“I keep talking about how exciting it is when you get to tournament time, if you can make a run,” said Alda, who was a freshman on Oscoda’s last basketball Regional champion in 2000. “This is just a really cool thing to be a part of.”
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) Lauren Langley, left, and Brayden Mallak have been key to Oscoda’s perfect starts; Mallak here hits the game-winning shot against Mio. (Middle) Katelyn Etherton beats everyone to the basket during a win over Lincoln Alcona. (Below) The Owls celebrate that Mio victory Dec. 13. (Photos courtesy of the Oscoda girls and boys basketball programs.)
Harbor Beach Motivated by Past, Focused on Present in Chasing Future Goals
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
February 12, 2025
Andrew Kabban and his Harbor Beach boys basketball teammates know how quickly a good thing can end.
After going 19-3 and dominating the Greater Thumb Conference East a year ago, the Pirates had their bubble burst with a buzzer beater in the Division 4 District Final against Cass City, a team they had defeated by 13 a month earlier.
“We’ve kind of had last year stuck in the back of our minds,” said Kabban, a junior point guard. “We have a lot of returning players, we only lost two guys last year, so we all remember what happened last year. We’ve built on that experience, and we’re trying to use our experience to our advantage.”
That experience has allowed the Pirates to hold onto last year for motivation while focusing on what’s directly in front of them, and it’s working. Heading into Wednesday night, they are 17-1 this season, including a perfect 9-0 in the Big Thumb Conference Black. That includes wins over Division 2 Croswell-Lexington (12-5) and Millington (16-2). Their one setback was a 2-point loss against Yale (18-1), the No. 9 team in Division 2.
Of course, they’ll need to keep doing that into March in order to feel as though they’ve truly grown.
“Even with me, I’m a team captain, and sometimes I can catch myself talking about (a bigger game against) Millington, for instance,” junior Benson Harper said. “I just have to remember that we have to take care of business first and stay focused. If we don’t stay focused, something bad can happen to us.”
It becomes easier to maintain that focus when everyone’s on the same page, and for this version of the Pirates, they’ve had plenty of time playing together to get there.
The majority of the roster – nine players – comes from the junior class, with three seniors joining them. That’s a group that has been playing together since elementary school in multiple sports, and winning plenty along the way.
“We started playing together in second grade,” Harper said. “We’ve just been playing ball together forever. We lost one game in seventh grade, then went undefeated in eighth grade. … We’ve just been winning together, and when you see everybody every single day, you build a bond with them, not even just in sports.”
That consistency spans sports and even the coaching staff. Head coach Ron Wruble is also the defensive coordinator for the football team, and the Pirates were 11-1 this past season and 9-2 the year prior.
“These kids, they’re obviously playing football together and playing basketball now, and most of them hang out together, too,” Wruble said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie in the group, and I think they just enjoy being together.”
There was one season where they weren’t all together, however, as Harper was moved to the varsity squad as a freshman. He wasted no time becoming a go-to option for the Pirates, and earlier this season eclipsed the 1,000-point mark.
“He started for us as a freshman, and you can just see his development over the last three years,” Wruble said. “He’s gotten bigger, stronger – his skill set was at the varsity caliber as a freshman, but it’s just been moving up from there.”
In his first season, however, the Pirates were an uncharacteristic 7-12. Harper was happy to be playing at the varsity level, but certainly missed his classmates.
“It was definitely tough, because I was so young and so used to playing with them,” Harper said. “We had kind of a crappy freshman year, and I wasn’t used to losing. But I was also happy to see them winning (on the junior varsity level), and they dominated, too.”
When they all came together again at the varsity level, the success was almost instant. That came as no surprise to Wruble.
“It’s just the general makeup of the team – there’s a big core of kids that are gym rats,” he said. “They live in the gym and the weight room.”
That’s led to a high level of competition in practice, as Wruble praised the depth of his team. It also has the Pirates dominating against a schedule that was built to prepare them for the postseason.
“We try to schedule teams that are going to be the better programs, and that really helps us in the long run,” Wruble said. “We’re coming through the second time around with our conference opponents, and hopefully we can play well and take care of business there.
“Obviously, our District loss last year was a heartbreaker. We lost the District championship at the buzzer with a 3-point shot, and that’s still sticking in the minds of our kids, and they want to get back there and avenge that then, and hopefully move on from there. But it’s going to be one game at a time, and we even break it down further than that: one play at a time. A play in the first quarter had just as much meaning to the end of the game as a play at the end of the game.”
That message – with the help of past experiences – is coming through loud and clear.
“The goal is to win a District and win a Regional,” Kabban said. “The regional is not out of reach for us. But we have to win the District first. We have to win our league first. But we know that we’re capable of doing whatever we put our minds to.”
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) Harbor Beach’s Benson Harper (10) makes a move in the lane during his team’s Jan. 17 win over Capac. (Middle) Skiler Kruse (4) elevates above surrounding defenders with a shot in the post. (Photos courtesy of the Harbor Beach yearbook staff.)