TheWriteReferee

EXTRA! EXTRA! Tiny Acorns, Mighty Oaks & Knotable Knights

Author's Note: This is an Extra! edition of the two-part series 53 Years Later, A Rivalry Revealed, detailing the story of one seemingly innocuous high school football game played between two communities with little in common on October 14, 1955. The original edition ran at The Oakland Press and BLOG CENTRAL.

ROYAL OAK -- 53 years ago it was the place to move to, this Royal Oak, Michigan. It had a movie theater with a brightly-lit marquee and the Farmer's Market was the place to be on a Saturday morning. A Friday night win got a player a free Saturday trim at the barber shop. Fish 'n chip dinners at the local diner and phone numbers that began with LI or MI exchanges. Woodward Avenue was best cruised with a four-seat Chevrolet Bel Air or a convertible Ford Thunderbird by kids fashioned in letter sweaters and crew cuts.

In 1955, Royal Oak was teeming with families forged from the post-World War II baby boomers. The city's school board approved a second high school, the uproar over its name a Royal Oak argument second to none. It was determined that Royal Oak High would be renamed for Congressmen George A. Dondero and be called the Oaks, and the new school would be christened for School Board President Clarence M. Kimball under the theme of Knights. Royal Oak's annual Thanksgiving Day tilt with Birmingham would be replaced by the Oak Stump Game between Kimball and Dondero.

A rivalry was born and dividing lines had been drawn. but in '55, Royal Oak was still a one-team town. From the '55 Royal Oak roster that night was one Darrell Harper, a gifted, fleet-footed halfback who was a consensus All-South Oakland County pick. Harper would go on to be a starter at the University of Michigan and earn three varsity football letters, first under Coach Bennie Oosterbaan and then Chalmers 'Bump' Elliott. Harper played with Michigan greats Ron Kramer and Don Dufek, and was followed to Michigan by Dondero's Bill Hornbeck and Kimball's Wally and John Gabler, Dick Ries and Craig Kirby. Harper later became the head coach for the Chargers of Southfield Lathrup High.

Royal Oak was coached in '55 by Jim Manilla, who won the last five Birmingham - Royal Oak Turkey Day games by a combined count of 105-26. Manilla hung up his whistle and knickers following the '56 campaign to accept the district's athletic director post. His first order of business was to appoint two varsity football coaches. Ivy Loftin took the reins at Dondero, going 151-79-8 in 27 seasons. Prentice 'Pin' Ryan accepted the job at Kimball, going 48-16-5 in eight seasons. Paul Temerian was tabbed to replace Ryan at Kimball in '65 when Ryan took an assistant coaching position at the University of Iowa. Temerian went 131-39-1 in 19 seasons. Assistants under Manilla in '55, Loftin and Temerian both retired in 1983 when they were inducted into the inaugural class of inductees of the Michigan High School Football Coaches Hall Of Fame.

The three coaches (Loftin, Ryan, Temerian) combined to win 330 varsity games, 26 league titles and earned 12 appearances in the season-ending Associated Press Top 10 poll, but it would be an unheralded halfback and assistant coach who would make the most significant mark in Michigan's sports annals from the Monroe - Royal Oak game of '55.

Herb Deromedi.

An Acorn in '55, Deromedi wore No. 29 while playing his senior season behind Harper and halfback Ralph Forbes during a 7-2 campaign. Deromedi would accompany Harper to Michigan as a common student, roommates for each other's freshman year. As a U-M senior, Deromedi earned a position under Jack Stovall at Ann Arbor's University High. He followed that with a stint at Byron High.

In 1964 Deromedi returned to his Royal Oak roots at Kimball as assistant to Ryan with Temerian, who had coached Deromedi in the same role in '55. After a 7-1-1 mark in '64 that landed Kimball a league title and the AP's 10th spot, Kimball marched to a 9-0 showing in '65, Temerian's first as head coach. The Knights were rewarded with a 4th place spot in the AP. Deromedi and his sister, Sue, then a Kimball cheerleader, are pictured here after Kimball pasted Dondero 33-0 at Kimball Stadium.

Opening with two consecutive losses in '66, Kimball's Knights rallied to a 6-2-1 mark in winning the Southeastern Michigan Association (SMA) title. Deromedi helped Kimball thwart his former school, Dondero, from winning the state championship by tying the No. 1 Oaks (8-0-1 in '66 / 5th AP) in front of 10,000 at Cass Field. The '66 game was perhaps the most memorable game of the series. After a potential winning score by Dondero had been called back late in the final stanza thanks to an assisting the runner call, Kimball thundered to Dondero's eight-yard line when the referee's gun sounded the end of a 14-14 thriller.

The gunshot that ended Dondero's state title dreams also ended Deromedi's high school coaching career. Roy Kramer, who had spent a night in Grand Rapids at a coaches clinic talking football and diagramming plays on a blackboard with the young Kimball assistant that summer, was named head football coach at Central Michigan University in 1967. The first person he called to join him was Deromedi. No one knew it then but the young man, who had played behind Harper and Forbes in high school, who never played a down of college football, had earned the break in a career that would lead to making him dean of the Mid-American Conference, a conference that arguably has the best lineage of legendary college football coaches.

After 10 years as faithful assistant, Deromedi was named CMU head coach when Kramer moved on to Vanderbilt University as athletic director. Deromedi won three MAC titles and lead the Chippewas to back-to-back victories over Michigan State in 1990 and 1991, the only losses the Spartans have ever suffered in MAC tilts.

Deromedi's Chippewas were an amazing 25-4-1 versus in-state rivals Eastern and Western Michigan. His 110-55-10 record, including the 110 wins overall and 90 wins in the competitive MAC are best for any MAC coach in either category. The legendary coach followed Monroe's Dick Waters and Royal Oak's Jim Manilla and Pin Ryan when he hung up his whistle and clipboard for CMU's athletic director post in 1994. Deromedi retired from CMU in 2006 and was inducted into the college football Hall Of Fame, located in South Bend, Indiana, in 2007.

October 14, 1955 was just one high school football game between the city high schools of two towns separated by 61 miles. Monroe, almost exclusively rural compared to today and removed form the big city like TV's Mayberry was removed from the real world. Royal Oak, emerging as a suburban nesting spot, with top-down cruisers and car hop service at restaurants and filling stations. Mt. Pleasant, still 20 years from Division-I football, then a sleepy, suitcase college town for teachers.

The Monroe - Royal Oak football game was played among hundreds of other games locally and thousands nationally, but it produced emerging story lines and leaders who created memories in three separate Michigan communities for several generations to come.

(Original game report courtesy The Daily Tribune of October 15, 1955; picture courtesy 1965 Royal Oak Kimball High School Lancer yearbook)

53 Years Later, Lost Program Reveals Rivals, Part II

Author's Note: This is the second part of a two-part series on the stories behind the names of the men who played in the Monroe - Royal Oak high school football game on October 14th, 1955. The original copy ran yesterday at The Oakland Press and BLOG CENTRAL. Royal Oak's Acorns defeated Monroe 34-6. A newly-added 'bonus' to the series comes out Saturday morning at the Oakland Press site and Sunday at this site!

MONROE -- Few, if any four-page game programs at all, from the high school SockHop era come with as many decorated story lines as Monroe's encounter with the visiting Royal Oak High Acorns in October of 1955. Certainly few games as one-sided as this one contain as many colorful characters on both sides of the gridiron. Monroe's sideline is filled with homespun stories of favorite sons, hometown coaches and one Eugene 'Red' Davis, a man so revered in Monroe his memory eternally fills the hearts of so many Trojan faithful. Royal Oak, by contrast, is a tale of established leaders, a lineage of sweet fruit from the wide-branched tree of success. They young men and boys that played under them went on to be the foundation of one town's success and one college's rise to prominence.

The only player to score for Monroe that night? Richard 'Bud' Jeric, No. 46, who ran in from four yards out after Royal Oak fumbled and Monroe recovered at the Acorn 32-yard line. It took 10 plays for the Trojans to score in the 3rd quarter, already trailing 21-0. Jeric went on to play at Western Michigan University and would return in the late 1960s to become Monroe's varsity football coach. One of his players was a young man named John Ray, now better known as Dr. John F. Ray, Monroe Athletic Director. Also playing for Monroe that night was Ron Gruber, No. 48, who's family owned Gruber Grocery Store, later sold to Food Towne Stores. Harry Herkimer, No. 50, was a tackle in '55 and now owns Herkimer Radio, a store specializing in two-way and short cell equipment.

Monroe's Athletic Director in '55 was Dick Waters, also the Monroe varsity track coach, for whom the Dick Waters Relays are named for. Monroe also named the school's pool for Waters, who ironically, couldn't swim. Head coach for the Trojans in '55 was Cleo Winchell, who was also a high school math teacher. It would be safe to assume Winchell enjoyed X's and O's no matter if they were of the algebraic or off-tackle variety, before and after the day's final school bell. Winchell passed away in the final days of 2007. Paul Wilder was also an assistant football coach and served as the school's baseball coach for many years later on, including when Ray played for the Trojans. Wilder passed away five years ago.

And then there was Eugene 'Red' Davis, listed as an assistant coach in the '55 program but clearly a man who was an icon in the Monroe athletic annuls for many years after his coaching days ended. Ole' Red Davis enjoyed a pipe from time to time, and was never at a loss for a few feet of homespun yarn. When he wasn't on the gridiron, he was the Trojan varsity baseball coach and served as the school's athletic director for many years, including the years Ray attended Monroe, from 1967-1970.

Ray recalls the Grosse Pointe football game of 1954, when Monroe traveled up to what is now Grosse Pointe South and came up on the short end of a hard-fought 12-7 decision. After the game, the Grosse Pointe students decided it was time to mix it up with the downtrodden visitors from Monroe, until Red Davis entered the fray. "He came up on this ruckus and said, 'Now listen here, I can't take all ya' on at once, but I'll take on every one of ya' one at a time -- now who wants to go first?' That was the end of that right then and there," Ray recalls with a chuckle.

One of the players Davis coached on his baseball teams was Dean Duffey, who in '55 was voted Monroe's Most Valuable Player in that spring campaign. Exactly 50 years later, Duffey's son, Dustin, would follow in his father's footsteps, earning the honor of Monroe's Most Valuable Player.

Monroe is all about its' favorite sons, but like any school, there are those who have left Monroe to fill other positions at other schools. One such name that comes to mind is Charlie Jestice, a native son of Oklahoma and Monroe assistant coach who applied for the school's head coaching position but was passed over. John Ray offered his opinion: "Maybe it was his country-western drawl that some had trouble understanding, but he left Monroe and took the job at Dearborn Fordson and hated Monroe for the rest of his life," Ray told me. "I do know he was inducted in an Oklahoma Hall-Of-Fame recently that he and (former Fordson head coach) Jeff Stergalas attended together." Obviously the seeds of the Fordson-Monroe rivalry have been well-planted over the years. When Monroe's football job opened this past fall, it was rumored Stergalas could become Monroe's new leader, which would have stoked that game's flame even more.

One man who left the Trojan fold from the '55 Royal Oak - Monroe game was Trojan assistant football coach Vince Sigren. Two years after the Acorns thumped Monroe in '55, Sigren was named varsity basketball coach at the newly-opened Royal Oak Kimball, stocked with half of the players that had been Acorns two years earlier. Sigren would hold the Kimball post for seven years, going 40-71 with a district title in 1961 before ceding control of Kimball to Dave Gunther before the start of the 1964-65 season.

One of Sigren's players in the 1959-60 campaign was a junior named John Scott Cameron, who also played for Prentice 'Pin' Ryan in football.

The author knows Cameron by a different name: Dad.

BONUS: Check back in two days for the Royal Oak side of the story, including how two assistant coaches became bitter rivals and how the last man standing became a Central Michigan University legend.

53 Years Later, Lost Program Reveals Rivals, Part I

Author's Note: This is the first of a two-part story that was first published in yesterday's syndicated version of  TheWriteReferee.com, found at The Oakland Press and BLOG CENTRAL. On October 14, 1955, Head Coach Jim Manilla and the Royal Oak High Acorns traveled down to Monroe High School for another Friday night under the lights....

MONROE -- If you noticed the dateline, you already know Oakland County's prep sports scene has few ties to Monroe, Michigan, but that wasn't always the case. And as it relates to high school football, the 1955 game between the host Monroe Trojans and the Acrons of Royal Oak High reveals the story of rivalries since lost and a platform for so much Michigan sports history.

Why the Royal Oak - Monroe game of 1955? I came across an eBay listing for the program featured in picture above. I bid on and won the program's auction and decided this would be a fun, internal fact-finding mission. What I found was a significant piece of local and statewide history, hidden neatly in a garden variety, four-page, high school sockhop-era program.

The victory on this night went to Royal Oak's Acorns by a 34-6 count. The win put Royal Oak in a three-way tie for second place in the now-defunct Border Cities League (BCL) with Grosse Pointe and Wyandotte, thanks to Wynadotte's 17-0 blanking of the Pointers. That left the Tractors of Dearborn Fordson atop the BCL, a league former Royal Oak resident and Detroit Tiger broadcaster Paul Carey called "the best league in the state, hands down" in a recent 2008 interview. Royal Oak got a pair of touchdowns each from halfback Ralph Forbes and tailback Darrell Harper. Oakland County residents will recall that Harper went on to star at the University of Michigan and later returned to south Oakland County as head coach of Southfield Lathrup's gridders. Harper passed away late in 2007.

Also of note is Royal Oak's No. 29, Herb Deromedi, who played but wasn't mentioned in the game's recap found in The Daily Tribune. Royal Oak's Jerry Snider netted Royal Oak's last score, 37-yard touchdown. Monroe's Richard 'Bud' Jeric notched Monroe's lone tally. Joe Vestrand also earned praise for Royal Oak.

The Tractors would best Royal Oak for the BCL title in '55 with an 8-1 slate, one game better than Royal Oak's 7-2 ledger. Fordson earned a No. 8 ranking in the Associated Press season-ending state poll. Birmingham High, now called Birmingham Seaholm, took the state's No. 5 spot with an 8-1 mark, including a perfect 5-0 mark as champions of the Eastern Michigan League (EML). Ann Arbor High, better known today as Ann Arbor Pioneer, was the top-ranked team in the AP poll with an 8-0 record. Lincoln Park's Railsplitters earned the state's No. 9  slot to round out teams from the metropolitan Detroit area.

Royal Oak was a perfect 4-0 in '55 against their Oakland County counterparts. The Acorns ran around Hazel Park's Vikings 25-7, blanked Ferndale's Eagles 20-0 and earned a 26-2 decision of Pontiac High's Chiefs at Wisner Stadium. Finally, in their annual Turkey Day game, Royal Oak survived a gritty showing by then-undefeated Birmingham in the last Thanksgiving Day affair played at Maple Field, 27-20. Birmingham was coached by Vince Secontine, whose son Marc operates The Varsity Shop, a downtown Birmingham staple and the source for letter jackets for scores of Oakland County youth. The Varsity Shop also houses the old Royal Oak - Birmingham Game trophy, a red, white and blue-painted jug.

Royal Oak's '55 showing was part of a five-year span from 1952-1956 that saw Royal Oak go 35-9-1, claiming a share of the BCL title in both '53 and '54. The contests of '55, as recorded by The Daily Tribune, revealed the school's future name as the paper began referencing Royal Oak High as Dondero before the school was re-christened in the name of Royal Oak Congressman George A. Dondero in September of 1957. That fall the Acorns would become the Oaks and gain a bitter crosstown rival from a school christened for the Knights of Royal Oak Kimball, named for former Royal Oak school board president Clarence M. Kimball. The famed Royal Oak at 1705 Greenleaf Drive is still referenced in the city's municipal building as The Kimball House.

The BCL-champion Tractors completed a rivalry hat trick in '55 by virtue of their 19-0 win over Monroe, a 21-0 blanking of neighboring Dearborn High and a 42-6 pasting of Dearborn Edsel Ford, the inagural year of varsity competition for the Thunderbirds. Fordson was made up of mostly European white students in the 1950s, a stark contrast to their majority Arab/Muslim makeup of current day, but their winning football tradition was already well-established.

Monroe, by contrast, was suffering through one of it's worst spans of football in their long history. From 1954-1958, the Trojans went 9-29-1. Royal Oak defeated Monroe consecutively from 1953-1956. Monroe's lone victory from the '55 campaign was a 7-0 win over the Adrian High Maples, a rivalry that dates back to 1896, easily making the game one of the longest-running feuds in the entire state. To date, Monroe's rivalry with Adrian has been played 106 times, with Adrian holding a narrow 51-49-6 margin through 2007's game.

Part II: A look at the many participants from the 1955 Royal Oak - Monroe football game and how the players and coaches from a single HS football game went on to play pivital roles in Michigan's local and statewide sports scene for years to come.

MEGA Scoop Came From Rivalry Questions

Friday night I received a curious entry on this blog's comment section regarding the post, "Trying To Cover Some MEGA-sized Tracks?", from a trusted friend. Sean Maloney, athletic director of New Boston Huron High, put his two cents in regarding the threat of lawsuit as a possible deal-breaker to the potential Downriver League.

Before taking the post at Huron, Maloney was the AD at Milford High, where he was a first-person participant in the merger of the Kensington Valley Conference (KVC) and the Western Lakes Activities Association (WLAA), so he's well-versed in the ingress and egress of the league formation process. Maloney said the Downriver League was well on it's way to being finalized. "They have their bylaws and charter done, and they've been done for a long time, "Maloney explained Friday night. "They had taken the good parts, the parts they liked, from different league by-laws and these documents are finished on desktop computers. The Downriver League AD's were meeting when the 'suits' showed up unannounced to the meeting."

How my information on the MEGA's spring of discord came to pass is quite by accident; I was drawn to a Detroit Free Press story that ran April 18th that mentioned Ferndale High School as a potential deserter of the Oakland Activities Association (OAA). That would have been big news because Ferndale has as much history and tradition in Oakland County as any other school in the 248 area code, and the Eagles not playing fellow Oakland County schools would end 75-80 years of tradition. I called Ferndale's AD, Shaun Butler, who emphatically denied Ferndale leaving the OAA. Later I spoke with Edsel Ford AD Bob Picano, also mentioned in the above-referenced article, about a MEGA break-up affecting Dearborn's dynamic rivalry structure and the possibility Dearborn Fordson could lose as many as four major rivals should the MEGA collapse under the weight of it's own structure. I talked informally with Fordson AD Chuck Silver when I visited Fordson's iconic campus this spring to look at Fordson's football archives.

In the process about writing about the potential loss of more cherished rivalries, I talked to Allen Park's Ken Stephens, who confirmed the Downriver League's proposed membership. Stephens told me the drop-dead date was May 6th, the date the MEGA requested an answer to the question of the intent of the schools forming a new league to leave the MEGA. Picano was the first to tell me of a potential lawsuit 15 days earlier and put to rest a rumor that one Dearborn school could move without the other two. Monroe athletic director, Dr. John Ray, confirmed Monroe was leaving the MEGA for the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and also told me of the possible trouble Monroe will have keeping the historic Fordson game on the schedule, despite both school's desire to keep the game on the docket. Friday Maloney confirmed more of the Downriver League's near-mythical confusion.

I wasn't at any of these meetings, so I can't say what is truth and what isn't, but I've never known any of these men to lie to me. These are some of the straightest shooters you'll find in educational athletics. And I'm not trying to grind the gears of a fellow writer, a prep writer who's probably forgotten more about the local and state prep scene than I'll ever know. It's not about who's right and who's not. It's not about a cover-up or story spin about what really happened.

This is about what is happening in Michigan, and if you love prep sports like I do, it should be setting off some internal alarms. It's about southeast Michigan's economic conditions driving schools to find cheaper, cost-friendly alternatives for spiraling school sports costs. It's about leaders of buildings, departments and entire districts scrambling to stop the financial bleeding. Public schools aren't used to this kind of number-crunching. Most involved firsthand with public education say school districts need to stop being wasteful with all of their resources as a first step. Travel and energy costs, especially building heat and fuel, are threatening the viability of school sports as we know it.

Further, we're at a bit of a juxtaposition in Michigan whenever the word 'opportunity' is used in the context of school sports. It's rumored the threat of lawsuit came up because there wasn't ample opportunity offered to excluded schools. If a school district isn't tendered an invite to a proposed league, what does opportunity have to do with it? Who owes whom when it comes to opportunity? The Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) is already well-versed in this discourse. The word opportunity has become a launching pad of problematic litigation for high school sports in Michigan.

I've asked this open-ended question several other times without finding a good answer in reply: How did school sports get sidetracked in this manner? High school sports is about getting a quality education while broadening your experiences. It's about setting goals and testing your abilities. It's about learning that win or lose, you accept the outcome and yearn to improve on both the good and bad in your performance as an individual and within the team structure.

High school sports was never intended to be about gender discrimination lawsuits, and it wasn't created for lawsuits of race discrimination. I think the kids playing still get it. Can the adults leading the way say the same thing, and can it be fixed before it's mangled beyond recognition?

Trying To Cover Some MEGA-sized Tracks?

Today Mick McCabe, the Detroit Free Press scholastic sports writer, refuted what I reported three days ago, that the MEGA conference is ready to crumble but the threat of legal action is preventing the formation of a new league.

Guess what? None of that information has changed. McCabe's article leaves one legitimate question unanswered: If there's no threat of legal ramifications, real or otherwise imagined, what is stopping these eight schools from leaving at the absolute point they were ready to form their league? Ernando Minghine, superintendent of the school district that includes Dearborn Heights Robichaud, is quoted as admitting he said, "Let's not allow ourselves to get tangled up in some kind of legal consequence."

Doesn't that sound a lot avoiding legal action? Now I'll be fair and say this: Minghine's comments are a quote, not the full body of his words. Let's be fair to the man, but I'm at a loss to discover the legitimate reasons the proposed Downriver League failed in McCabe's article. Don't misconstrue that statement as me saying McCabe's article is inaccurate -- different positions are going to be stated from different people in positions of power as this power struggle plays itself out. And I think Mick McCabe is a good writer, a bit misguided when his views turn to officiating, but I'll concede that's an issue near-and-dear to my heart. While I've done his job, he's probably never done mine as an official, and that changes our collective scope in some regards.

If there was no threat of legal ramifications, why is this league dead? Because when the MEGA formed some nearly 15 years ago, the lawsuit of race discrimination was so strongly seeded, a judge decreed the league had to remain intact with all members aboard for a time not less that five years. Now I'm certain that no district leader, whether it be a superintendent, principal or athletic director wants to own the statement that their district played the "I'll sue you" card, but the truth is, athletic directors run athletic departments. They, along with coaches and transportation directors, know the problems associated with these giant-sized conferences.

In fact, if I were a superintendent, I'd be speed-dialing the bigger papers to put out those fires. I expected it, and seriously, did anyone not expect it?

Edsel Ford Athletic Director Bob Picano was the first to tell me the threat of lawsuit was strong. That was confirmed by another MEGA athletic director, one with credentials above any other current MEGA athletic director. Bottom line, I haven't heard or seen anything that changes my opinion.

For the record, I think the double-digit school conference idea is one that has outlived it's usefulness. Trust me when I say as a three-sport high school official, a former high school and college letter winner and a journalist who has covered high school, college and pro sports that nothing compares to the genuine excitement and fervor of a genuine high school rivalry. Sure, Detroit versus Colorado on the ice or the Tigers and Blue Jays from the 1980s was great theater, but sooner or later the venom subsides, one team fades and the game's energy dies. Plus, how many of us can afford the $200 it takes to go to a pro game with your friends or family?

High school rivalries have died under the weight of countless, meaningless games played for the simple fact it was easy to schedule them as a crossover in a vast sea of affiliated schools. School sports used to be about offering a great opportunity for a school's student body. Then it became how easy can we make a difficult job. We're seeing a bit of buyer's remorse in the MEGA, because economic conditions and school traditions have suffered at the hands of the frequent flyer miles it takes to be part of the Costco-sized leagues.

Game Four Remains The Toughest Officiating Assignment

Any official worth the stitches in their britches will tell you what they think is the toughest assignment in the officiating circles they work within. Having worked football, basketball and baseball, I think it's Game Four behind the plate of a collegiate conference weekend.

It's the toughest game of the weekend with the least resources available. The teams are tired. The coaches are tired and the umpires are tired. Both teams are down to the fourth or fifth best pitchers at the start of the day, and it's the game no one can afford to lose. One team is down 3-0 or 2-1, making Game Four a must-win situation for the team trailing in the series. The difference in splitting a four-game series or losing three of four is huge, just as salvaging one of four as opposed to being broomed is a huge swing.

In high school baseball, schools play what I think is an archaic, backward rotation of games in terms of importance. High school teams play their more important league games during the weekday and leave the weekend for non-league doubleheaders and tournaments. Often times issues like weather, drive-time traffic and school-related conflicts interfere with the league game played mid-week.

Unlike football or basketball, where the speed and emotion of each play is like a wave crashing upon the shore over and over, baseball is more akin to a slow, simmering pot, one that you're never really sure if or when it's ready to boil over and flip it's collective lid.

This past weekend Oakland University hosted Indiana-Purdue at Fort Wayne (IP-FW) in a Summit League conference series. Save for one inning, a frame resumed after a 30-minute rain delay where Oakland blew a close game apart, each school played each inning of the four games with no more than a two-run difference and most of the time the difference was one run or tied. Oakland took three of four but IP-FW could have just as easily split of taken three of the games. The game Oakland dropped was a 2-1 decision in the nine-inning opener Saturday afternoon.

When I first entered umpiring, I can honestly say I didn't have a strong appreciation for just how great it is when you can work a weekend series or a mid-week doubleheader without anything or anyone going sideways or ballistic. It's taken some trial, error and a healthy does of failure to acquire the appreciation I have for being able to walk off the field without feeling like you've stepped through a mine field.

As an official, one of the worst things you can do is look to make a call that is borderline just to prove you can make a tough call. There's plenty of opportunity to make tough calls without trying to cut a piece of hair in half just to prove you're that good. It's the many games that allow you to walk off the field with little or no incident that make you thankful for the handful of times you have to jump on-stage and make a call that doesn't get questioned, scrutinized or ridiculed for no other reason than it wasn't a popular decision.

This season, more than any I can remember in a long time, there hasn't been a lot of discussion about this ruling or that decision, which is nice. It means either the games have long been decided or that the teams in the area of metro Detroit or the Great Lakes region, both at the collegiate and prep level, are taking care of their own business by making plays instead of needing an umpire's call.

Lawsuit Threatens To Squash Downriver League

Those of us well-versed in Detroit's socio-economic landscape of the past 50 years know the epilogue of the 'Big Four', a squad car carrying four well-armed Detroit police officers that rode through the poorer neighborhoods in the 1960's, their suggestive might and blunt directives not unnoticed.

Last Friday it seems a different kind of 'big four' showed their might against what many thought to be the first bricks to fall from the foundation of the MEGA League. According to a highly-credible source who requested to remain anonymous, Lincoln Park, Melvindale, Romulus and Dearborn Heights Robichaud all threatened a lawsuit against a newly-proposed Downriver League if they were excluded from the proposed new conference. The league's conception seemed dead in the water on Friday although attempts to revive the yet-to-be christened conference remained through the weekend and in discussions as late as yesterday. The schools trying to form the Downriver League are Allen Park, Gibraltar Carlson, Southgate, Taylor Kennedy, Taylor Truman, Trenton, Woodhaven and Wyandotte.

Lawsuits to stop eight high schools from forming a league. The Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) appealing a $7.4 million dollar legal fees judgment, levied against them because, ironically, their many appeals of legal decisions stemming from a gender-equity lawsuit over sports seasons. We're still only talking about high school sports, right? When did high school sports become big business and bruised egos?

Leagues used to form when athletic directors would recommend a friend, a fellow A.D. from another school, and enough of them would form a league. This is how it was done in the defunct conferences like the Great Lakes Eight, the Border Cities League (BCL), the Southeastern Michigan Association (SMA) and the Eastern Michigan League (EML). Then came the Macomb Area Conference (MAC) expansion, the first public school league to rival the alpha and omega of the area's power conferences, the Catholic High School League (CHSL) and the Detroit Public School League (PSL).

The MEGA conference was formed in the early 1990's, albeit with lawsuits to soon follow it's rocky inception, as was the Oakland Activities Association (OAA).  This year's merger of the Western Lakes Athletic Association and the Kensington Valley Conference might signal the end of the last of the great rivalry conferences with the passing of the KVC.

The proposed Downriver League doesn't include Monroe High School, already committed to leaving the MEGA for the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Monroe leaving puts one of metro Detroit's longest-running football rivalries in jeopardy, the fabled Monroe-Dearborn Fordson game. The two schools will play their last scheduled game this year on October 3rd, Monroe's last season in the MEGA. Dr. John Ray, Monroe's Athletic Director, says the schools have played every year since 1933 and admits the game will be hard to schedule in future years.

"We would need another school to join us in the SEC, which would make our first date of the season available to Fordson," Ray told me yesterday. "We certainly want to keep (Fordson) on the schedule, because there's so much history between our schools. As it sets up right now, we don't have a football date to give to a school outside of the conference."

Only a handful of games in the metro Detroit footprint come close to matching the long-standing tradition that is Fordson-Monroe. Detroit Pershing's history with Detroit Denby quickly comes to mind. The Brown Jug games between Utica and Romeo and Center Line's game with Warren Lincoln match the Trojans and Tractors for longevity. Royal Oak and Birmingham have pitted their public schools together as rivals for nearly 100 years, albeit as a handful of different-named schools from both cities.

Oakland County's Prep Baseball Needs A Stronger OU

This weekend I get an up-close look at the destination of many an Oakland County prep student, Rochester's Oakland University. The Golden Grizzlies welcome Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne (IP-FW) for a four-game set this weekend.

The neat, professional-looking campus is a reflection of the county footprint it's nestled within. The tony stores and quaint retail districts of Rochester and neighboring Rochester Hills, plus the manicured lawns and jaw-dropping residential communities that surround Oakland University are unique to just about any collegiate campus in the state. In short, there's no 'student ghetto' at OU. In fact, I've yet to see a fraternity or sorority house on or near the campus, although I do see the letters BMW, SAAB, and H3 quite a bit. I'm fairly certain nearly any college student would take that over what a beer-stained frat house could offer.

Yesterday's first game was rained-out, meaning four games will be played in the next 31 hours, starting with today's first pitch at 12:00 p.m. Oakland's varsity field has long been known to be a liability to just about every coaching staff the school has empowered since the days the school was better known as the Pioneers and was a Division-II powerhouse in many sports. Per usual, the weekend will be played with fingers crossed and eyes wandering to the sky, hoping prayers for no more rain will be answered.

It shouldn't be like this. I know Michigan is in the midst of a one-state depression and even mighty Oakland County feels the pain. That doesn't mean progress can grind to a halt, too. In my near-10 years within college baseball, I've watched three different head coaches struggle to recruit the best talent available in Oakland County to OU because of facility offerings. Nate Recknagel was a freshman team All-American at OU; He's at the University of Michigan now. This week he had a single, double and home run for the Wolverines in a mid-week victory over Western Michigan. Several county student-athletes like Recknagel have chosen schools like Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan and Central Michigan because of facilities.

Players don't chose the aforementioned schools over Oakland because of academics. OU's got tremendous offerings in the undergraduate programs it features. Three years ago the University of Detroit canned their baseball program, giving Oakland a better pool of players to pick from against the other five Division-I schools in the state.

Oakland needs a new facility, a legitimate facility, if they expect to compete for any of the county's best baseball players. Oakland County is chock full of collegiate-quality baseball players. Look at the most recent statewide poll from the Michigan High School Baseball Coaches Association, at http://www.mhsbca.org/, dated 4/30/08. Four of the top 10 teams in the Division-I poll pull their players from Oakland County, including top-ranked and defending state champion Lake Orion, also ranked No. 26 of the top 50 teams in this week's nationwide poll at Rivals.com. The state's No. 10 team in Division II is Madison Heights Lamphere.

Times are tough -- I get that. College baseball is not a revenue-producing sport in this part of the country for any school, that is also fact. I don't pretend to have all the answers and the truth is, the answers are hard to come by. None of what I'm saying is news to the leaders at Oakland University and I'll be the first to admit I'm not going to be the one the writes the check to solve the problem. But as an Oakland County resident, I can also say that OU is a jewel in the rough, tucked away behind the glam and glitz of a well-to-do county. The school could be a regional, collegiate powerhouse at the Division-I level.

Oakland has a tremendous swimming facility and a perfect basketball facility, one that helped Coach Greg Kampe's Grizzlies to a win over the University of Michigan a few years back. Oakland's won conference championships and NCAA invites in other sports, proving it can be done.

Here's to hoping there's a way to create a better opportunity for the county's best players to stay at home and play college baseball at OU.

Retro Helmet Rollout: Baseline Jug Game

I'm thrilled to announce the roll out of the first pair of retro helmets from a pair of football fanatics, Willy Mena and Jeremy Anderson!

Mena authors the The Michigan H.S. Helmet Project while Anderson, who also lives in the metro Detroit footprint, authors the site The Fantasy Helmet Project. Mena found Anderson's work after I requested some retro helmets, for which a template had to be either developed or alternately found. I'm grateful to both for their hard work with this request.

Here we have the late 1960's, early 1970's editions from the revered Baseline Jug Game. This game pits a pair of neighbors against one another in the season's last week. I'm talking about the Mustangs from Wayne County's Northville High School and the Wildcats from Oakland County's Novi High School. The two districts share city borders, district resources and have a lot in common. Both are tony suburbs and great places to live and raise a family. Both have significant shopping districts, with Northville having a quaint downtown and Novi with it's considerable designer-mallwalk footprint.

Both have also had some great football success. Their game has included some legendary coaches, notably Darrel Schumacher from Northville and John Osborne from Novi. There have been some league champions and undefeated teams to go down to defeat at the hands of a lesser-touted rival. Then there was 1988, when Novi entered the Baseline Jug Game undefeated, league champion and ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press statewide poll, only to be stunned by Northville 23-18 on October 28th, the season's final regular season game. Novi still managed to earn a playoff berth and advanced to the Class A semifinal game, where the Wildcats dropped a 13-12 decision to Traverse City High, the eventual state champion.

It was during this week that Detroit Free Press prep sports guru Mick McCabe coined his infamous "No Way, No How, Novi" nickname for the Wildcats. I can promise you McCabe hasn't been offered as much as a free cup of Joe in Novi since.

To the left is a helmet representing the Novi Wildcats and to the right is the hat for the Northville Mustangs. Naturally these helmets were worn almost 40 years ago. Notice how much the Wildcats helmet looks like the Green Bay Packers. Also sporting a helmet eerily similar from this era? Eastern Michigan University's Hurons, who were then an NAIA school coached by Dan Boisture. Those Hurons were four years from NCAA Division-I status and advanced to the 1971 Pioneer Bowl with a 7-1-2 ledger.

By comparison, Northville used the same decal as Novi, which is a bit odd considering rivals usually tend to be driven to differentiate themselves from their rivals. Northville has also used some helmets with no logos and a simple orange, logo-less sided hat with a white stripe down the middle, identical to the longtime helmet of the ultra-traditional Cleveland Browns.

The Wildcats and Mustangs renew their rivalry on October 10th of this season at Northville. The game will be the 40th anniversary of the first Baseline Jug Game.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing.

Parochial, Private Schools Add To Oakland's Aura

Last week I umpired a Catholic League doubleheader between visiting Orchard Lake St. Mary's and Birmingham Brother Rice, played behind the Birmingham YMCA Center. Rice took a pair of victories from the Eaglets, who are rich with young talent but not yet blessed with the depth and experience that befitted Bob Riker's Warriors. Orchard Lake St. Mary's will be ready when it counts, because they usually always are and are led by good coaches.

In researching my book, Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th of this year, I interviewed hundreds involved on a daily basis within Oakland County's high school sports infrastructure. Naturally, a few good-hearted souls took up the cause to lament the Catholic League's advantage of plucking students from public school boundaries for the betterment of wins and losses in after-school athletics.

I listened -- my job as the dutiful reporter -- but a couple of points stuck out to me. First, does anyone else notice that it's never the 0-9 football team that is complained about, just the playoff qualifier from a private school like Rice or Detroit Country Day? Naturally, this is a bit hypocritical, and no public school ever complains about their fate when their team's results are average or worse. Many public districts are openly courting students in today's open-district, open-enrollment, school-of-choice fight for survival. Michigan's economic woes have created a virtual free-for-all within competing districts and private institutions.

But the other point makes me proud to be from Oakland County. Just how lucky are we in this county to have so many outstanding public and private schools in one square swath of land? Think about it -- most counties would love to have just one private school the caliber of Novi's Catholic Central, Royal Oak's Shrine High, Madison Heights Bishop Foley or Waterford's Our Lady Of The Lakes, in addition to the aforementioned private schools above. Certainly space prevents me listing all of the worthy candidates on either side.

Then you have tony districts like Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills and Troy. Clarkston, Lake Orion and Oxford are all immaculately maintained with highest standards for achievement and opportunity. The same can be said in Walled Lake, Novi, Northville (they share resources with Novi), Rochester, South Lyon and many other Oakland County public school districts. How many Oakland County schools have played for and won the MHSAA's"s football tournament? Last season Farmington and Lake Orion staged perhaps one of the greatest baseball finals in the state's biggest division and it was just the latest example of an Oakland County school shining brightly on the state's biggest stage.

I could write an entire column on the academic achievements of Oakland County schools in our state and national scope. And yes, those representing Wayne and Macomb counties would argue they have some strong entries into this debate as well, and they would be correct.

We get caught up in winning and losing in our hyperactive, American culture -- it's in our blood, I suppose. And yes, I'm doing a bit of cheerleading, but maybe that's what we need in Michigan right now. There hasn't been a lot of good news in the past few years as it relates to the issues that matter most in our region. So it's nice to drive home from a hotly-contested game and realize that competition we stage and officiate produces the opportunity to excel against the best the county has to offer.

As a parent, that's what any parent wants for their children, to offer them the opportunity of the highest level of competition and achievement. Oakland County certainly affords a parent or student that much. This alone should make everyone worry less about balls & strikes and safes & outs.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing.