Battle of the Fans: Blue Crew Legacy
February 18, 2012
PETOSKEY -- Directly across the gym from the Petoskey student cheering section Friday, a toddler played on the first row of bleachers.
He wasn’t paying much attention to the Northmen’s boys basketball game against West Branch Ogemaw Heights. But he was wearing a blue T-shirt that read “Future Blue Crew” -- guaranteeing he will be soon enough.
At Petoskey High, a Class A school in a town where families have lived for generations, kids grow up aspiring not just to be the athletes playing for championships -- but also the Blue Crew members cheering them on.
While the other cheering section finalists in this season’s MHSAA “Battle of the Fans” contest were officially organized, for the most part, over the last year or two, Petoskey’s Blue Crew is nearing a decade as a constant at its school’s athletic events -- and a source of community pride.
“It’s such a legacy. Eighth grade, you’re looking forward to to being even involved in the Blue Crew, ... and now that we’re all seniors, everyone is listening to us, and we just want our teams to do well,” Petoskey senior Hayley Fettig said. “That’s a big part of it. We’re here to support our teams and cheer for our teams, and be a team ourselves.”
Petoskey was the fifth and final stop on the Battle of the Fans tour to find Michigan’s top student cheering section. Over the last five weeks, MHSAA staff and members of its Student Advisory Council also visited Frankenmuth, Reese, Grand Rapids Christian and Rockford. MHSAA-produced videos of all five finalists have been posted on the MHSAAsports YouTube page. Online voting will take place Monday-Thursday on the MHSAA Facebook page (you must “like” our page to vote). The winner will be announced Friday.
For most of its basketball history, Petoskey played in its old Central Gymnasium, an arena straight from the movie “Hoosiers” which seats about 1,500 fans and turned into a giant tunnel of cheers and shouts for every home game. But late in the fall of 2002, the newly-built high school opened a much larger gym that not only holds more fans, but also is more cavernous.
A bigger room meant a need for bigger spirit. And that sparked the Blue Crew, the brain child of members of the student council, some of whose names are still thrown around the halls to this day -- although the current seniors were in elementary school when it all began.
About 140 students piled into a “whited out” Blue Crew on Friday, plus 60 more in the jazz band that plays every home game and easily could be confused for one at the college level. To the left of the Crew sat about 50 more students not yet in high school. All sub-high school students are known as “Future Blue Crew,” while teachers are “Old-School Blue Crew.”
The Blue Crew often stands larger than it did Friday -- but on this night, the junior varsity and freshman basketball teams were playing simultaneously at other sites, and the hockey team was on the road. Petoskey’s Big North Conference foes are spread throughout the northern third of the Lower Peninsula, but the Blue Crew is known for making hours-long trips and constant support.
Members of the student council still play a big part. Those 12 students, plus 10 more take a one-hour leadership class taught by former girls varsity coach Matt Tamm. His classroom is a hall of memories itself, with photos of teams going back decades. Taking up center spot on a main wall is the original Blue Crew banner including its mission and three directives for generations to come.
“When I was younger, the older kids always told us, ‘You have to watch how we do this so when you’re older, you can do it how we did it,’ senior Brad Berkau said.
“You begin to learn when you’re younger what we do and how to go about cheering the right away. Not just boasting about our team, but not putting down the other ones too,” senior Nick Godfrey added.
That “right way” includes refusing to cheer negatively. Petoskey athletic director Gary Hice said it’s been four or five years since he’s had to tell the Crew that one of its cheers was crossing the line. Counselor Karen Starkey, who helps by coordinating parents to cheer with the students, said she hasn’t seen the Blue Crew respond to an opposing cheering section’s negative chant in at least two years.
Instead, the Crew pours its energy into more memorable ventures.
Starkey was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2011, and her first chemotherapy treatment was on a game night.
She showed up in white, anticipating a white out. Instead, she found the entire Blue Crew in pink -- before receiving a group hug from the 200 or so students there supporting her as well.
“Those are the things these guys just jump out and do,” Starkey said. “It’s so not necessary, but it was just so cool.”
PHOTOS courtesy of Larry Tracy and CMA Action Photography.
25 Years Later, Scholar Athletes Shine On
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
October 3, 2013
Jennifer Bissell and Scott Kieser had ideas how their futures might unfold when they stepped onto the Pontiac Silverdome turf to accept the inaugural Michigan High School Athletic Association Scholar-Athlete awards on Nov. 25, 1989.
Bissell’s bio in the MHSAA Football Finals program mentioned the Vestaburg senior planned to attend Grand Valley State University and study broadcasting and public relations. Kieser, a senior at Unionville-Sebewaing, was set to attend Michigan Tech University and major in secondary education.
Inevitably when high school students are deciding on careers, some of those plans changed.
Kieser’s didn’t much; he did attend Michigan Tech, and after considering engineering during his first year stuck with education and is now a teacher and coach at Bay City Western High School. Bissell – now Dr. Jennifer Forrest – ended up with destinations different, nearby and then afar. She attended Central Michigan University on her way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon in Durango, Colo.
But the impact of high school sports – and what it meant to be named the MHSAA’s first Scholar Athletes – is not lost on either nearly a quarter century later.
“I vaguely remember ... watching the game from the booth, going out onto the field and the announcement,” Forrest recalled this week. “(But) I was very honored to get that award. It looked at both how well you did in school and participation in sports.”
“To walk on the field, shake Mr. (Jack) Roberts’ hand, see the award, it was a great honor,” Kieser said. “I was very lucky to have a lot of coaches in high school that inspired me and made me enjoy the learning in the classroom and all of the great life lessons I learned on the field, the basketball court and those arenas.”
The MHSAA has been fortunate as well to have Farm Bureau Insurance as its sponsor for all 24 years of the Scholar-Athlete Award. The program has evolved substantially from 1989-90 – when two students were recognized during the fall, winter and spring seasons – to this winter’s 25th celebration, during which Farm Bureau will award $1,000 scholarships to 32 student athletes based on their achievements both academic and athletic.
Each month building up to March's presentation, Second Half will catch up with some of the hundreds who have earned Scholar-Athlete Awards.
Now both 40 years old, the first winners certainly fit the bill. Forrest was a three-sport athlete participating in cross country, volleyball and softball and was president of Vestaburg’s student council. Kieser was co-captain of USA’s football and basketball teams, vice-president of his school’s student council and a member of the Tuscola County Leadership Forum.
And they’ve made good on the promise they showed and the awards they received as their futures lay ahead of them that Thanksgiving weekend.
Lists of exceptional accomplishments
The record board at Vestaburg High School still lists “J. Bissell” for fastest 5K time – at least one sign that Forrest’s legacy lives on in her little hometown.
One of her two older siblings still live there, her sister-in-law is a teacher at the high school and her niece Jaycee cracks up when people occasionally think the name on the leaderboard is hers.
During her days walking those same school halls, Forrest never pictured herself in an operating room. In fact, she never wanted to picture the possibility.
Forrest babysat for a doctor while in high school and decided she wanted no part of the doctor lifestyle with its unpredictable schedule and 80-hour work weeks. But she was interested in physical therapy, and despite her early leanings toward studying communications settled on CMU and its sports medicine program.
She spent three hours in the CMU training room most afternoons her freshman year, helping with the gymnastics and track and field teams among others. As a sophomore she worked in a physical therapy office, which she found to be a little monotonous – and so she started considering that occupation she figured was out of the question only a few years before.
Forrest did end up in medical school, at Wayne State University, but figured she’d become an emergency room doctor and definitely never a surgeon. And then she changed her mind on that one too – Forrest ended up going into orthopedic surgery, did a residency at University of California-Irvine, married another doctor from northern California and eventually ended up in Durango – a destination that seems meant to be for a family that loves biking and snow sports.
Each Memorial weekend Forrest races in the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, which pits competitors against a steam engine traveling 50 miles (and climbing 5,500 feet) from Durango to Silverton.
“Partly because of my background in sports, I gravitated toward sports-related injuries,” Forrest said. “I enjoyed being in sports in high school, and I’m still a road cyclist, still into sports myself.”
Forrest’s bio now on the Animas Orthopedic Associates website lists her as practicing general orthopedics with special interests in arthritis management, joint replacement surgery, hand surgery, pediatric orthopedics and orthopedics trauma.
She and her husband have three daughters ages 6-9 who also are active athletically, and they make the trip back to Michigan at least once every few summers.
While her continued appearance on the Vestaburg record book surprised Forrest at first, her name also appears on another impressive list – among the CMU Admissions Office’s “notable CMU alumni” alongside CBS sportscaster Dick Enberg, various NFL and NBA players and the author of “Marley & Me.”
“I don’t think of myself as that,” Forrest said.
“I really liked science and medicine, and in the long run it all worked out fine.”
Back to school to make a difference
Kieser remembers being in sixth and seventh grade and dreaming of being on the varsity football and basketball teams. When he got his chance, he understood the importance of setting the right example for the younger hopefuls looking up to him.
He continued to do the same at Michigan Tech and has made guiding young athletes and students his life’s work at Bay City Western.
Kieser was the starting quarterback at Michigan Tech in 1993 and 1995 (missing 1994 with a broken foot) and was ranked among the top 50 nationally in Division 2 for total offense per game and passing efficiency. He decided to go out for the basketball team as a junior and started as a senior while earning the team’s scholastic achievement award with a 3.65 grade-point average while studying mathematics.
He also received both teams’ sportsmanship award, and was recognized by Burger King during his senior year as a Burger King National Scholar Athlete Award winner (the announcement appeared during the broadcast of the University of Michigan/Notre Dame game that fall). Tech’s football program received $25,000 for that accomplishment, and a scholarship in Kieser’s name is given to this day to an incoming freshman football player.
“Now that I reflect on it, that honor I won in high school really motivated me to continue that through college,” he said.
And beyond. Kieser teaches calculus and geometry at Bay City Western and is the junior varsity football coach. He hired in at the school right out of college in 1996 both as a teacher and the boys basketball varsity coach, a post he manned for seven seasons. All told, he’s coached some sport – track and field, soccer, baseball, football, basketball – at the high school, middle school or youth levels every year since he graduated at Tech.
He did consider engineering and the heftier paycheck that likely would’ve followed. But, “as I got a little bit older, I realized ... you’re not working for money (as a teacher). You’re working to help kids become the best they can be. Playing sports in college helped me mature, and I wanted to help as many other kids as possible reach their potential.”
He tries to teach his players to have pride in doing things the right away, respecting their opponents and the officials even despite the heated situations that arise in every game – the lessons he learned growing up across Saginaw Bay.
“I feel like the luckiest person in the world teaching and coaching and being involved I athletics,” Kieser said, “trying to encourage more kids to get involved, go out for a sport, do the best they can in the classroom, being the best they can be.”
PHOTO: MHSAA Executive Director Jack Roberts (far left) presents Scott Kieser with his Scholar-Athlete Award in 1989 at the Pontiac Silverdome, while Jennifer Bissell receives hers from Larry Thomas, the then-executive vice president of Farm Bureau Insurance.