Franklin Steers Thru Tough Start, Rolls Into Regional Ready for Repeat Pursuit
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
February 23, 2023
The Livonia Franklin boys bowling team raised its state championship banner from last year back in January at its home alley, but that wasn’t close to being the proudest moment this year for head coach Dan Hejka.
In fact, each passing day probably becomes the proudest moment, but not necessarily for successes that Franklin has enjoyed.
Rather, Hejka becomes prouder of his team with each passing moment because of how it’s found bright spots in a season dominated by a major detour and some potholes on the road to a potential repeat title.
The detour started right before tryouts, when Ian Wright – who won the Division 1 Finals singles championship last year as a junior the day after Franklin won the team title – called Hejka with some news.
“He had a little bit of wrist soreness,” Hejka said. “He gave me a call a couple of days before tryouts. He said, ‘I’m injured.’ I said, ‘OK, well you’ve got a spot (on the team).’”
Hejka said the goal was to have Wright come back after Thanksgiving, but then the soreness lingered into the holidays.
Wright was expected to come back with fellow senior Sam White to form one of the state’s top tandems.
“He bowled once or twice with us in practice after the holidays,” Hejka said. “With the pain he was experiencing, he was unable to bowl.”
Hejka suspects it was an overuse injury from bowling a lot over the summer, but regardless, replacing the reigning champion was going to be an impossible task.
Hejka said it was simply a “next man up” mentality.
“We all want him to bowl with us,” Hejka said. “But facts are facts, and reality is reality.”
With Regionals coming up Friday (team) and Saturday (singles), the reality is Franklin has forged on and looks like it might be peaking at the right time.
Of course, the road has been bumpy, with bowlers who weren’t in the lineup at the Finals last year being thrown into expanded roles, and tough dual losses to rivals in the Kensington Lakes Activities Association during the regular season.
However, Franklin downed highly-ranked Wayne Memorial in the league tournament last week and is heading into a Regional at Super Bowl in Canton with plenty of confidence.
“We’re coming out of it,” White said. “We’ve been bowling really good the last month. We’ve really come together as a team. As we started bowling better, we started bonding and it’s become a team atmosphere.”
Leading the way has been White, who’s gone from being the other half of Franklin’s anticipated dynamic duo at the beginning of the season to the unquestioned leader both emotionally and in production.
White has committed to play football in college at Trine University, but he hopes to bowl there as well.
“Sam has really taken a leadership role, one he probably didn’t expect to take,” Hejka said.
White, the lone bowler in this year’s lineup who competed at the Finals last year, enters this Regional round with an average over 190 and has bowled a high game of 279 this season.
“It’s a big burden with (Ian) not being able to bowl, but I felt like as a leader and a senior on the team, I needed to step up,” White said. “I needed to cheer on the team and be that leader we were missing without Ian being here.”
Junior Alex Mengel (182 average), junior Michael Lerner (180 average) and senior Ben Sparks (171 average) are all within the top 50 in averages in the KLAA and have become more comfortable as regulars.
The competition at the Regional for the three qualifying spots at the Finals will be stiff, with fellow KLAA and state powers Canton, Belleville, Wayne Memorial and Plymouth also headlining a deep field.
It will be a huge challenge for Franklin, but one that it’s prepared to take head on after a year of adversity and growth.
Franklin hopes to show other teams that not only is it dangerous to count out a defending champion, but a defending champion hungry to show it can still win without its star from last year.
“It comes down to making your spares,” Hejka said. “If we make our spares, we have a shot at the top three.”
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 Livonia Franklin’s Sam White bowls during competition; he’s taken on a larger leadership role this season for the reigning Division 1 champion. (Photo courtesy of the Livonia Franklin boys bowling program.)
Stockbridge's Keene, Onsted's Nichols Make Every Pin Count
By
Jeff Bleiler
Special for MHSAA.com
March 4, 2023
Onsted's Sydney Nichols knows the value of a single bowling pin.
At last year’s Division 3 Singles Finals, Nichols missed the 16th and final match play spot by that smallest of margins.
She turned that disappointment into determination and entered this year’s Finals with a goal of making the top eight. Instead, she won the whole thing.
Nichols, a junior, threw four straight strikes late in the second game of the two-game final match to defeat Coloma senior Savannah Hamilton, 375-370, on Saturday at Jax 60.
On the boys side, Stockbridge senior Mason Keene defeated Gladwin junior Harvey Zelt, 407-353.
“I wanted to at least make it to the top eight to be all-state, and now somehow I made it here,” Nichols said.
Nichols safely qualified ninth with a six-game total of 1,102 after starting things off with a 201. She won her first match — and accomplished her goal — by a 347-306 count over Midland Bullock Creek senior Brooklynn Marshall before advancing to the semifinals with a 393-349 victory over Cheboygan senior Izzy Portman. Nichols’ 224 game to open that match was the highest score of any of the games bowled in the match play portion.
She then earned a 15-pin victory over Hillsdale junior Chloe Manifold, 330-315, before taking on Hamilton. In the championship, Nichols trailed by 15 after the first game and trailed by two pins in the sixth frame of the second game before catching the clutch four-bagger to seal it. She had nothing but strikes or single-pin spares in that game.
“That was really important,” Nichols said.
Her coach, Roger Clark, said her mental approach to the sport showed all day.
“If you don’t have a spare game, you don’t have any game,” he said. “We told her, ‘You’re in control of your own game. I’m just here for guidance.’ She pulled through.”
Nichols, who has been bowling since she was about 8 years old in nearby Hudson, said her mental acuity was important.
“If you get in your head, you’re going to start pulling it, and I got in my head and would pull it, but I came back with a spare for the most part,” she said.
When asked what her senior year might entail, she responded: “Two-peat maybe?”
Hamilton qualified as the 10th seed and defeated 2021 champion and 2022 runner-up Elizabeth Teuber in the opening match by nine, denying the Flint Powers Catholic junior a team and individual Finals title in the same weekend.
While Nichols has been bowling for many years, Keene only picked up the sport a year and a half ago. He nearly did not have a senior season to enjoy since the Stockbridge program had no coach.
He didn’t have to look far to find one.
“I didn’t think we were going to have a season and the only thing you can do is ask, so I asked my dad and he agreed to be a coach and it’s awesome,” Keene said of his father, Nathan. “He’s been bowling for 20-plus years so as soon as he saw me pick it up, he was super happy.”
Keene nearly had his day end early Saturday. He rolled 1,144 for the six games of qualifying — boosted by a 265 third game — to snatch the 16th and final spot by three pins. That earned him a match against top-seeded Dustin Moeckel, a Napoleon senior who averaged 215 during qualifying.
Keene won 403-337 to jumpstart a match-play session during which he never shot below 200 and averaged 213 for eight games. He saved the best for the quarterfinals where he shot 224 and 246 to oust Armada junior Ryan Ching, 470-312.
He rolled games of 202 and 225 in the semifinals to deny last year’s runner-up, Ogemaw Heights senior Tyler Downs, a shot at redemption, 427-386. For his part, Zelt took out the reigning champion, Cheboygan senior Cole Swanberg, in the other semifinal to further prevent a rematch of the 2022 final.
In the championship, Keene led by 17 after the first game, taking advantage of an open 10th frame by Zelt. A three-bagger in the fifth through seventh frames of the second game secured the title.
“I just had to keep my head in it, keep my spare game strong and make good shots,” said Keene, the lone left-hander among the quarterfinalists. “That definitely helped. I didn’t have to move much, and when I did it was small. I just kept my shot in the entire time.”