Trenton, Lakeshore Emerge with 1-Run Semifinal Wins, Advance to Saturday
By
Tom Kendra
Special for MHSAA.com
June 16, 2022
EAST LANSING – Trenton and Essexville Garber are not used to making long runs in softball.
In fact, most of the players on both teams weren’t even born the last time their schools reached the Softball Semifinals.
The newcomers put on a show Thursday on the state’s biggest stage, with Trenton holding off Garber, 2-1, in a classic pitcher’s duel at sunny, windswept Secchia Stadium.
“We just told them to believe,” said third-year Trenton coach Rick Tanguay. “Believe it’s going to happen and believe you’re going to put the ball in play. I’ve had a lot of these kids since they were 9 or 10 years old, and I’m proud of them.”
Trenton (34-10), which lost in the Division 2 Final in 2005 and had not been back to the Semifinals before this season, will play perennial power Stevensville Lakeshore in Saturday’s 12:30 p.m. championship game. Lakeshore defeated Escanaba, 2-1, in Thursday’s last Semifinal.
The Trojans had to come from behind to advance, after Garber jumped out to a 1-0 lead during the first inning.
Kortney Kotenko, a junior catcher, belted an RBI double to bring the big crowd from Essexville to its feet. The Dukes previously lost in the Class B Final in 1997, but hadn’t been back to the state’s Final Four until Thursday.
Garber would keep that 1-0 lead until the fifth inning, as junior pitcher Sarah Basket kept the Trojans off-balance.
Trenton finally broke through by manufacturing single runs in the fifth and sixth innings. Pinch-runner Jordyn Emery scored on a fielding error in the fifth, then sophomore shortstop London Williams singled to left in the sixth inning to score Maddie Dobbs.
Those two runs would prove to be just enough as Trenton senior pitcher Aila Johnson turned back Garber’s last-chance, seventh-inning rally.
The Dukes put the pressure on, as Basket singled and then Jacqueline Brinkman was hit by a pitch. After a double steal, Garber had runners on second and third with two outs, before Johnson was able to shut the door with a strikeout.
“I have to be confident out there for my team, but that last inning was rough,” Johnson said with a smile. “I was trying to hide it, but I was nervous out there.”
Johnson may have been battling nerves on the inside, but it didn’t show in her stellar performance. The Siena Heights commit finished with just four strikeouts, but she kept the Dukes guessing for most of the game and allowed just four hits and one walk.
Tanguay said it was a classic performance by the battery of Johnson and her senior catcher, Olivia Hickman, who are two of just four seniors on the Trojans’ 16-player roster.
“Aila doesn’t get a lot of love; she doesn’t get a lot of press,” said Tanguay. “She’s not one of the top 10 (ranked) pitchers in the state, but she comes out and she’s a workhorse and she does it.”
Matching her every pitch along the way was Basket, a junior, who finished with a five-hitter, no walks, one earned run and nine strikeouts.
Garber (35-9) is an even younger team than Trenton, with just three seniors on the 16-player roster. The Dukes relied on their stellar junior class to pull out several come-from-behind victories in Districts and Regionals en route to MSU.
“You know, this is the first time we’ve been this far in 25 years – and 25 is a long time,” said second-year Garber coach Chris Kokaly. “Losing by one run is hard because you think about all of the opportunities we had where we just needed a key hit. We’ve been getting those hits all season and today, it just didn’t happen.”
Stevensville Lakeshore 2, Escanaba 1
Lakeshore advanced to the championship game despite having just two hits in the Semifinal, both of them singles.
The Lancers (39-4) played small ball and took advantage of Escanaba miscues to manufacture single runs in the first inning and the sixth inning, and that proved to be just enough.
“The girls believe in their pitchers and their defense,” said 43rd-year Lakeshore coach Denny Dock, who ranks third in state softball history with 1,055 victories. “If we could get our bats out of the deep freeze, we’d be pretty good.”
Lakeshore’s pitching combination of junior Ava Mullen and sophomore Avery Atwood was outstanding, combining on a three-hitter.
Mullen set the tone by getting the first five outs of the game by strikeout. She kept cruising until the top of the sixth inning, when Escanaba used a walk and a solid single to right field by senior Lizzy Silva to tie the game, 1-1. After McKayla Mott singled, Dock decided to make a pitching change – bringing in Atwood with two runners on and two outs.
To say the decision turned out good is an understatement.
Atwood got the next hitter to pop out to the catcher on her first pitch, then struck out the side in the top of the seventh to get the win.
“I knew that Avery would do great, and she did,” said Mullen, who finished with 10 strikeouts. “I’m super proud of this team. We’ve worked on our attitudes and staying positive, and I really think that was a big reason why we won today.”
Gianna Kerschbaum and Gabby Solloway had the lone hits for Lakeshore, which has scored just five runs over its last three games – all wins – including a 2-1 victory over Wayland in the Regional Final and a 1-0 win over Jackson Northwest in Tuesday’s Quarterfinal.
Dock, also the longtime football coach at Lakeshore, has led Lancers softball to seven Finals championships, the most recent in 2015. Lakeshore finished runner-up in Division 2 in 2019.
Escanaba (30-6), which won Division 2 titles in 2018 and 2019 and made the Semifinals for the fifth time in six seasons, was out of sorts from the start Thursday. Mott relieved the starting pitcher after two walks and a wild pitch and threw most of the game, before freshman Grayson LaMarche relieved her in the fifth inning and took the loss.
“When two great teams play it comes down to a couple of plays, and that’s what happened today,” said second-year Escanaba coach Andy Fields. “Overall, this season was a phenomenal ride.”
PHOTOS (Top) Trenton’s Jordyn Emery scores her team’s first run in the fifth inning Thursday. (Middle) A Lakeshore runner gets across the plate just before the tag by Escanaba’s Carney Salo.
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.)