Constantine Follows Slugger on Fast Start
By
Wes Morgan
Special for MHSAA.com
May 11, 2017
By Wes Morgan
Special for Second Half
Kim Maddox has an incredible feel for the game of softball. Growing up with significantly impaired hearing, that’s been a necessity.
Maddox, a junior slugger at Constantine High School who set her school’s season home run record in 2016 with 11 bombs, has already blasted 12 through 23 games this spring in playing a major role in the Falcons’ 22-1 record.
With the aid of cochlear implants she’s had since she was a small child, Maddox can hear, but she has to concentrate more than anyone else on the field. That is just one of many traits Constantine coach Marge Caid said sets her third baseman apart.
“She misses some things, but she does pay attention more than the others,” Caid said.
“I just look at the coach all the time,” Maddox said.
Precision and power are what’s obvious about Maddox, not any kind of disability.
“She is physically probably the strongest player I have ever coached. She has great bat speed, and her technique and her form are textbook. She works very, very hard and she is very dedicated to making sure that swing is perfect.”
Maddox fully expected to have this kind of year individually and as a team.
“We have good hitting, and this is a good team together,” she said. “I love my team. I have hitting lessons and I’ve been practicing and practicing. The biggest thing for me is to relax and then attack the ball.”
Like any good squad, success has been predicated on more than just individual talent. Constantine graduated some extremely skilled and productive players at the end of a 2016 campaign that set a record for wins in a season with a 32-6 record. The Falcons went 12-0 in Southwestern Athletic Conference Valley division play.
The loss of starting catcher Dylan King and hurler Bailey Potter to graduation didn’t slow the Falcons down. They have won 10 straight games since their lone loss of the year to a solid Three Rivers team.
Constantine has outscored opponents 247-29 and won by shutout nine times. In all, Constantine boasts five players hitting over .350, while its pitching has been effective and reliable.
Emily Mallo is 9-0 in the circle with a 0.56 ERA, and Mercedes Cole is 13-1 with a 0.66 ERA. The two combined have allowed 75 hits and 11 earned runs.
“We hit the ball well, which is our biggest strong point,” Caid said, “besides having a bunch of players who have been on the varsity team for quite a while.”
Caid hasn’t submitted information to the Michigan High School Softball Coaches Association for ranking purposes because she wants to see what her team is really made of down the stretch — which includes the toughest opponents of the year.
“We did play Paw Paw and Three Rivers, but other than that, I can’t justify tooting our horn that much,” she said. “We want to make less base-running mistakes, and a couple fielding things we need to work out.
The Falcons have a critical showdown with rival Schoolcraft today, which will likely determine the divisional championship. Schoolcraft is undefeated in Valley play after Monday’s pivotal sweep of Kalamazoo Christian. Both Schoolcraft and Constantine are 8-0.
“The rest of our season is going to be tough,” Caid said. “If we can’t play with these guys, then we’re going to be up a creek when it comes to Districts. We have to play ball and choke it out like we did last year.”
Constantine’s tremendous season in 2016 fizzled out with a Division 3 District Semifinal loss to Bridgman (9-1). This year, the District tournament includes familiar opponents in Galesburg-Augusta, Comstock, Kalamazoo Hackett, Schoolcraft and Parchment.
It certainly has taken a team effort to come back strong again this year and duplicate last year’s regular-season success.
Still, Maddox’s staggering numbers stand out in the crowd, especially considering she has another year of prep ball remaining. Maddox is hitting .589, which isn’t even the best average on the team. Kallie Sears, with 42 hits on the year, is operating at a .592 clip. Maddox was hovering around .700 before struggling at the plate this past weekend.
In 86 plate appearances, she has registered 43 total hits to lead the team. Of those, seven were doubles and three went for triples. She has 53 runs batted in so far and 38 runs scored. She also had a .640 on-base percentage and a 1.260 slugging percentage. Surprisingly, Maddox has been walked just 10 times.
“I hate being walked,” she said.
Wes Morgan has reported for the Kalamazoo Gazette, ESPN and ESPNChicago.com, 247Sports and Blue & Gold Illustrated over the last 12 years and is the publisher of JoeInsider.com. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Constantine players celebrate as Kim Maddox (15) crosses the plate to score a run. (Middle) Maddox eyes an approaching pitch during a game this spring. (Photos courtesy of JoeInsider.com.)
Scislowicz Selected to MHSCA Hall of Fame After Decades Serving in Multiple Sports
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
September 18, 2025
Fran Scislowicz admitted he went back and forth about what to say in his speech as he was inducted into the Michigan High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame on Sunday.
But as the time approached to deliver it, he just harkened back to what was a principal trait during his coaching career: making sure everything was about others and not himself.
“It was a neat experience to be able to say thank you back,” Scislowicz said of what he primarily said in his speech in front of family and friends, including a brother who drove from Colorado for the ceremony. “I can’t find a head coach that doesn’t have that village behind them to support them in so many different ways.”
Scislowicz certainly had a big village throughout a long career in several sports at Rochester Adams. He was the head varsity softball coach for 37 years before retiring from that post in 2024, the head girls basketball coach for 23 years before retiring in 2013, the defensive coordinator on the varsity football team in the late 1980s and early 90s and this season is in his 28th year serving on the chain gang at Adams’ football games.
In this modern age, it’s not easy to find coaches who stick around one school in one sport for a great length of time. It should be noted that the two other coaches from the Detroit area who were inducted Sunday – Troy basketball coach Gary Fralick and Richmond softball coach Howard Stuart – fit that bill perfectly as well.
But having a coach stick around in several sports for such a long time is even rarer, which made Scislowicz an obvious choice to be inducted.
A retired elementary physical education teacher in the Rochester district, Scislowicz developed the dream to teach and coach as a youth while attending practices and games his older brothers were involved in.
“I go, ‘If I could be a physical education teacher during the day and then coach after school, that would be wonderful,’” he said. “I kind of had that passion and idea to do it really young.”
The highlight of his coaching career on the field came during the 1993-94 school year, when both his Adams girls basketball and softball teams made the MHSAA Semifinals. It was the only time those programs made the semifinals during his tenure, and they did so over a span of months.
“I was told back then by some wise, veteran coaches, ‘Fran, you don’t realize how hard it is to do what you just did, and you might never get back,’” he said. “And we didn’t.”
Scislowicz is listed among the state’s winningest coaches on the diamond with a record of 803-487 from 1988-2024. But if his original ambitions had played out, he wouldn’t have had long careers coaching softball and girls basketball at Adams.
While serving as the football team’s defensive coordinator under then-head coach Jack Runchey during the late 1980s and early 90s, he thought he was next in line to become the program’s head coach.
But in 1991, the girls basketball program was a blossoming state power in need of a leader, so Scislowicz gave up football to focus his fall seasons (girls basketball was played during the fall then) on hoops.
More important than his coaching on the court or field was his faith-based mentoring off of it.
Scislowicz to this day is actively involved in the area’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes organization and put together regular meetings before school for students and athletes to attend.
In the end, that’s what he hopes his biggest coaching legacy remains.
“We had a saying that you don’t have to be great to serve, but you have to serve to be great,” he said. “We really tried to give back to kids that way, by serving and doing that way. The wins and losses were going to take care of themselves. It’s the impact of seeing what kids are like at 30, 40 or 50 years old. As I’ve been around one community, trying to be a difference maker is what I enjoy most.”
Keith Dunlap has served in Detroit-area sports media for more than two decades, including as a sportswriter at the Oakland Press from 2001-16 primarily covering high school sports but also college and professional teams. His bylines also have appeared in USA Today, the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Houston Chronicle and the Boston Globe. He served as the administrator for the Oakland Activities Association’s website from 2017-2020. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties.
(Photo courtesy of Fran Scislowicz.)