Beginning Another Tourney Journey
August 8, 2016
Below is the introductory commentary to the MHSAA's spring issue of benchmarks. Histories of MHSAA tournaments published in that issue have been appearing on Second Half every Tuesday and Friday.
By Jack Roberts
MHSAA Executive Director
Concussions and cutbacks. Participation fees and part-time employment. Student safety and specialization. International students and interstate travel. Transfers and trials.
Through a myriad of issues which periodically cloud our mission, the foundation on which the MHSAA was built still shines brightest three times each year: Tournament Time!
It can be daunting and overwhelming to make a living at this business of interscholastic athletics these days, not to mention a tad confusing. Do we need legal degrees? Medical degrees? Business degrees? Marketing degrees? There seems to be no escape from threat of legislative mandates which continually change the landscape of our product and how it’s delivered. Demands pile up, resources dwindle.
Add the daily challenges of scheduling issues, inclement weather and pleasing teenagers and their parents on a daily basis, and it’s easy to lose focus of the primary missions for the MHSAA and its member schools.
And then, scenes like this happen:
• Holly Bullough, a senior cross country runner from Traverse City St. Francis takes her second straight Division 3 championship, winning by 36.4 seconds ... with a stress fracture in her left foot.
• Detroit Martin Luther King QB Armani Posey directs a game-winning drive to give his school the Division 2 football championship ... a drive which started on his own 3-yard line with 37 seconds left and ended with a 40-yard heave to receiver Donnie Corley on the final play of the game.
• Leland sweeps the Class D volleyball title match 3-0 over Battle Creek St. Philip ... ending a string of nine straight titles for St. Phil, the 10th longest national streak in history.
• Davison’s Taylor Davis becomes only the fourth person in MHSAA Girls Bowling history to roll a 300 game in the Singles portion of the tournament ... and the first ever in the championship match.
• The Upper Peninsula’s Hancock HS wins the Division 3 ice hockey title in its first trip to the Final since 2000 ... a trip funded in part from a “Go Fund Me” web page that raised $6,620 from 99 donors in two days.
• Junior Kierra Fletcher of Warren Cousino carries her team to the Class A girls basketball championship with 27 points in the Final ... after scoring 37 of her team’s 60 points in the Semifinals and totaling 198 during eight tournament games.
That’s just a sampling of the magic from last fall and winter.
These moments shine through the current challenges and the unseen future that awaits us as they always have. The uniforms and faces are different, but the tournaments have always yielded the fruits of our labors, and the memories for our mental scrapbooks.
PHOTO: Leland's volleyball team hoists its Class D championship trophy last fall at Kellogg Arena.
Sinishtaj Ready to End School Year by Putting Last Year's Finals Lesson into Play
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
June 4, 2026
School might be over or about to be done around the state, but Warren De La Salle Collegiate junior golfer Julian Sinishtaj hopes to heed one lesson learned a year ago at last year’s Lower Peninsula Division 1 Final.
Heading into this weekend’s championship tournament at Ferris State University’s Katke Golf Course, Sinishtaj reflected on the biggest thing he learned at last year’s Final after completing a 2-under-par round of 69 in a Regional at Twin Lakes on May 27 to qualify for this year’s event individually.
“Just that you’re really never out of it,” Sinishtaj said. “In the beginning of both rounds, I was a couple over (par) through five, six holes. Then I was able to shoot three and one-under. Kind of battled through. This year, I’ve got to get off to a hotter start. I think everybody’s having a good year so far, so (I’m) going to have to go low at states.’”
Sinishtaj is correct that several golfers competing at the event are having good years, but he also is having a strong spring and on the short list of individual contenders.
Named to the all-state Super Team last year as a sophomore, Sinishtaj finished third individually at last year’s Division 1 tournament, just two shots behind champion Ian Masih of Okemos, who was a freshman this year at Grand Valley State.
Sinishtaj hasn’t slumped at all this season, producing four rounds below 70 and winning the title at the Macomb County Championship.
De La Salle head coach Dennis Koch, an alumnus of the school who has coached basketball, football, baseball and golf throughout the Detroit area over the past 21 years, said Sinishtaj measures up to any athlete he’s coached in any of those sports.
“It’s very simple; he has one of the best work ethics I’ve seen in my 21 years of coaching,” Koch said of Sinishtaj, who also is a 3.9-GPA student. “That goes across football, basketball and baseball. He just puts in that much time. There’s not really a formula for it.”
Sinishtaj said since last year’s tournament, he made a change with his putting, and it’s made a world of difference to complement his length off the tee and steady iron play.
“At the end of last year, I changed to a spider (putter), like Scottie Scheffler’s putter,” he said. “I switched to left-hand low. I was right-hand low last year. It’s a little more comfortable.”
Sinishtaj said the golf bug bit him when he was young, as his father introduced him to the game when he was 5 years old, and then he “started taking it seriously around 8 or 9 years old.”
As he grew, his game took off.
“I was pretty small my whole life and never really hit it far,” Sinishtaj said. “I just kind of grew at like 12, 13. I started playing good. I’ve gained probably 20, 30 yards each year consistently from probably age 13 to now.”
As a result, Sinishtaj can regularly move the ball 280-290 yards off the tee, something Koch said was also a priority over the offseason for Sinishtaj in addition to enhancing his putting.
“He said that his emphasis was on ball speed,” Koch said. “He’s been trying to improve his swing speed and hit the ball farther. And if you can hit the ball a little further as a golfer, that makes life a little easier. Think of all the best golfers that hit the ball a mile. Their scores are a little better because they have shorter approaches.”
Sinishtaj will be busy this summer with junior tournaments and likely figuring out college opportunities as he enters his senior year in the fall.
In the meantime, he hopes he can take what he learned at last year’s season-concluding tournament and complete what’s been a little unfinished business on a Katke course with which he’s familiar.
“I don’t think the greens are hard,” Sinishtaj said. “They’re pretty flat and wide. But off of the tee there are a lot of blind shots. Being able to find the right target and commit to those swings will be key.”
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.