Jackson Area Efforts Net New Officials
February 16, 2016
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
Recruitment of new high school officials to eventually take the reins from those currently conducting MHSAA events is a challenge faced all over Michigan.
The Jackson Area Officials Association is working to restock its ranks by recruiting directly from local schools and developing them with help from veteran mentors.
Eight new officials – ages 15 to 24 – who worked a series of youth and middle school games together earlier this month, are among those who have been introduced through a program that begins with a meeting at the end of the high school basketball season between JAOA official Bill Walker and local athletic directors, coaches, fellow officials and other young adults he’s made contact with over the course of a season. From that meeting, Walker builds a list of potential candidates to become officials and then invites them to the annual JAOA Legacy Camp in June.
The camp includes two days of scrimmages between local teams, plus classroom and mechanics teaching. Similar to the MHSAA Legacy program, new officials are paired with veterans, and clinicians evaluate their work during scrimmage play. Walker then keeps in touch with the new officials during the rest of the summer, plugging them in for local youth tournaments and scrimmages, and uses as many as possible while assigning officials for youth tournaments over the winter.
All eight officials who worked the event this month are part of the JAOA legacy partnering, and some of the group already are working games at the junior varsity level – with one, a 19-year-old, recently completing his first varsity game. They come from a variety of Jackson-area schools – Parma Western, Napoleon, Jackson Christian, Michigan Center, Concord and East Jackson. Walker said the recruiting effort has a 60 percent success rate so far. (This June’s legacy camp will be the third.)
“By next season, all (eight) will be official MHSAA registered officials,” he said, noting most currently are registered. “It’s great to have these schools support this program. We all benefit from added, good officiating.”
Passing it forward
Our Battle of the Fans trip to Charlotte on Friday included a conversation about a Feb. 2 game between the Orioles and Mason, which has a pair of athletes fighting cancer. The Charlotte student section dressed in blue that night in support of junior Storm Miller, and during halftime passed buckets to raise money for Miller’s GoFundMe account set up to help pay for his care.
Mason, in turn, provided support Friday to an Owosso alum, 2012 graduate Cody Greger, who remains hospitalized at University of Michigan’s hospital with injuries sustained during a house fire in November. Fans and students collected donations to assist Greger’s family with his care.
“This event was yet another example of the values that school sports teach young people,” Owosso athletic director Dallas Lintner wrote on the school’s website. “And it stands as a testament of the integrity of the young adults that represent our schools and the (Capital Area Activities Conference.)."
100 years of hoops
A decade before the formation of the Michigan High School Athletic Association, Eastern Michigan University – then known as Michigan State Normal College – hosted what is believed to be the first organized high school basketball tournament in state history.
EMU will celebrate this anniversary Saturday in conjunction with the Eagles men’s basketball game against Toledo. Game time is noon at EMU’s Convocation Center, and during a break in play the athletic department will recognize the 12 schools that took part in that 1916 tournament – Marine City, Dundee, Milan, Mancelona, Farmington, Elkton, Royal Oak, Middleville, Lansing, Mount Clemens, Wayne and Saline.
More history, courtesy of EMU:
The game of basketball was developed by James Naismith in 1891 at Springfield College in Massachusetts. As a means of promoting the game throughout the country, physical education professor and EMU's first athletic director Wilber Bowen asked his good friend Naismith to bring the game to the Michigan State Normal College (now known as Eastern Michigan University).
The first basketball game west of the Allegheny Mountains was played at Michigan Normal in 1894 to recognize the new physical education program and to dedicate the new gymnasium on campus.
Then in 1916, Bowen, along with instructors Elmer Mitchell and Lloyd Olds (who was also credited with the introduction of the striped referee jersey), organized the first high school basketball tournament in Michigan. A total of 300 invitations were sent out to all Class B schools in the state. Twelve schools responded, and the first high school boys tournament was held on the Ypsilanti-based campus on March 23-25, 1916.
Entrance to the tournament was free and (the event was) played at the Michigan State Normal School Gymnasium. However, expenses related to transportation, room, and board had to be provided by the participating schools. The MSNC's Physical Education Department made it easier for schools to participate by making arrangements with local residents to provide food at 20 to 25 cents a meal and lodging at 25 cents a night for each player.
That first tournament saw Marine City defeat Dundee in the championship game, 23-22.
The winning team was awarded a silver shield mounted on an oak base. Second prize was a silver cup, and the third place team received a banner. Individual participation awards to all players were also provided. The Ypsilanti Press at the time felt the Normal School "went first class with the awards."
For tickets to Saturday’s game and event, which will be followed by the EMU women’s team taking on Northern Illinois, call the EMU Ticket Office at (734) 487-2282 or visit EMUEagles.com/tickets.
Following up
• Second Half’s Chip Mundy this fall wrote a story on the emergence of Ida’s football team on the way to making the Division 5 Semifinals and finishing its best season ever. A theme of that story was Ida’s philosophy of building “brick by brick,” coined by defensive line coach Gary Deland, who himself was building back after emergency triple-bypass heart surgery.
“From that very first practice in the summer to the last game as a senior, everything is built brick by brick,” Deland said for that story. “I can draw a correlation between that and my recovery, what I’ve gone through. It’s the same thing. It’s brick by brick.”
Kim Farver sent along this photo of Deland holding up a brick after the team’s 43-20 Regional Final win over Buchanan.
• We released the last batch of this year’s MHSAA-Farm Bureau Insurance Scholar-Athlete Award winners today, and one of the highlights during the 27 years of the contest came two years ago when we caught up with some of our winners from the first 25 years – including Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook-Kingswood’s Abby Cohen, who has gone on to co-found a company and help develop a smartphone application, Wing, to help asthma patients monitor their lung function.
Here’s a look at a video describing the technology she’s helped create:
Cass Tech Hopes PSL City Championship Next Step in Emergence as Diamond Contender
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
May 30, 2025
DETROIT — Juan Torres said it was a completely different feeling walking the halls of Detroit Cass Tech last week.
A junior baseball player for the Technicians, Torres knows full well to what extent Cass Tech is a football school, especially since it won the Division 1 title in the fall and produces Division I college talent every year.
But after Cass Tech won the Detroit Public School League baseball city championship on May 19, there was plenty of pride and attention paid to what the school had achieved on the diamond.
“It’s pretty tough because we are a football school,” Torres said. “Being able to show up to school (the day after) and to say that we won something, it felt really good. We can compete. That was a really good feeling.”
For Cass Tech head coach Melvin Jackson, earning a 6-1 win over Detroit Western in the PSL final at Comerica Park was a moment he had waited for and built toward since taking over the program eight years ago.
Western had won the last 15 PSL championships and in general has been the gold standard for baseball in the league. But Cass Tech has been inching closer in recent years.
Last year, the Technicians beat out Western out for a PSL division title, but lost to the Cowboys in the playoff championship game.
Cass Tech wasn’t denied this year, with starting pitcher Kyle Terry pitching 5 2/3 innings and Jordan Spencer registering the last four outs to start a jubilant celebration.
The offense was keyed by Torres, who had three hits and three RBI.
“This year, I kind of felt like we were ready,” Jackson said. “They have been really hungry for this moment.”
While rivals, Jackson said the reason he wanted to defeat Western was because the Cowboys had been an inspiration and measuring stick for his program.
Jackson and Cass Tech hope topping Western for the PSL title can be a sign of continued growth for high school baseball in the city.
“You want to bring baseball back, and these are the things that will help bring baseball back to another level in the city,” he said.
Cass Tech and other programs in the city face challenges that many suburban schools do not. Cass Tech technically has a home field on Belle Isle, but just about every nonleague game is played away on someone else’s field.
Detroit Edison, the Division 3 runner-up three years ago and a semifinalist last year, is in a similar boat having to play most of its games on the road and conduct practices on the school’s turf football field.
“When you go out to some of those schools and you see those kinds of facilities, it makes you think, ‘What if?’” Jackson said.
But much like Edison, Cass Tech forges on and makes the best of it. Just like Western was an inspiration to get to the top of the PSL, what Edison has done is motivating the Technicians to make a deep run in the MHSAA Tournament.
“We want to build a program like theirs,” Torres said. “We want to build toward something where we can compete every year and be in those important games.”
Jackson insists that his team can achieve things this year beyond the PSL title.
Cass Tech could very well run into Western again today since they are in the same District, and Jackson feels winning that bracket could be a great springboard for his team.
“There’s more baseball to play,” he said. “If we can get past them, the sky is the limit. The kids I have right now, my seniors and my juniors, they are hungry.”
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 Detroit Cass Tech’s baseball program takes a post-championship photo after winning the Detroit Public School League city title. (Photo courtesy of Cass Tech coach Melvin Jackson.)