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Meyers Serves, Strides for Norrix Fall Teams
By
Pam Shebest
Special for MHSAA.com
August 21, 2017
KALAMAZOO — Finding a face in a crowd of 357 runners erupting down a hillside all at once could be a daunting task.
But spotting sophomore Joe Meyers is easy, said Greg Savicke.
“He’ll be one of the ones out front,” the Kalamazoo Loy Norrix coach predicted.
That was true at Friday’s Portage Central Early Bird Invitational, where Meyers finished 14th with a time of 17 minutes, 12 seconds.
That sounds like a great time for a first race of the season, but Meyers was not celebrating.
“I had a pretty bad race,” he said. “I was training in Colorado for like a month with my new coach, and I put in a lot of training.
“I should have been well in the 16s. It was just not a good race.”
He didn’t have much time to fret.
The two-sport athlete had his first tennis match of the season Monday.
He’s playing No. 2 singles for the Knights after putting together a 21-5 record at the same flight last year.
Juggling two fall sports is not a problem for the amiable Meyers, with tennis taking priority.
“We work around the tennis schedule,” said Savicke, in his 29th year as Norrix’s head cross country coach. “We get Joe when he’s available. Early in the season it’s not so much, but down the stretch, yes.
“That’s the championship part of our season for us, in October, so we get him for the most important meets coming up.”
Both sports are in Meyers’ DNA.
His mother, Jody, got him on the tennis court when he was 5 and just playing for fun.
“Then I quit and mainly played hockey for years until seventh grade, then picked up tennis again,” he said.
He started running with his father, John, at age 9.
As a freshman, “I didn’t really want to pick one because I knew I could do pretty good in both,” Joe Meyers said. “It worked out last year.”
Both are individual sports, but in running, “you have to definitely have a lot more drive to go out and run by yourself because you can have a lot of excuses not to,” he said.
“In tennis, you go to group and you have to try as hard as you can. I don’t really get as tired in matches (since I’ve been) running.”
Meyers works out with sophomore Reed Crocker, Norrix’s No. 1 singles player.
Crocker qualified for the MHSAA Lower Peninsula Division 2 Finals last season, losing his top-flight title match, 7-6(6), 3-6, 7-6(8), to top-seeded Varun Shanker of Midland Dow.
The only way Meyers will make it to the Finals is if Loy Norrix as a team qualifies, since the No. 1 player is the only individual eligible if the team falls short at Regionals. The No. 1 singles champion and runner-up at Regionals advance to Finals play even if their teams do not qualify.
“We have a better chance (as a team) this year,” Crocker said. “The team’s looking better.
“We’ve been doing a lot of sprints, a lot. (Sunday) was an easy day. We only ran a mile” before practice.
Crocker said Meyers pushes him to be better.
“Joe is like the marathon runner, so it helps me with conditioning and it helps me on the court because I know he can help build the wins,” Crocker said.
“We hit together, and he pushes me get better. I’ve had the joy to hit with him the last year or so because he joined my coach (Bill Jenkins, who is also Norrix’s head coach).”
Jenkins, in his third season with the Knights, has coached tennis for 38 years.
Meyers possesses a “good work ethic, and genetics are very much in his favor as far as a force in track,” Jenkins said. “He’s built for it in tennis as well.
“He’s also extremely coachable so he has a very good perspective, very good mindset and disposition for tennis. He’s extremely intense, extremely passionate and competitive, but he’s also very level-headed, so he’s able to channel a lot of that energy into proper use.”
Jenkins said, in his experience, it is unusual to have an athlete be so successful in two sports in the same season.
“He’s got very set dreams but he works at them on a daily basis, knowing that the only way to achieve them is through his commitment,” the coach said.
“Regardless of whatever natural distractions may come up, he seems to stay on track very diligently and is years ahead of his time.”
While Meyers needs the team to qualify for the MHSAA Finals in tennis, he has a much better shot of earning a berth in cross country.
Last year, then-senior Gabe Runyon was the only Norrix runner to qualify for the Lower Peninsula Division 1 competition at Michigan International Speedway.
Meyers just missed qualifying, finishing 21st at his Regional with a time of 17:04. The top 15 runners moved on.
Savicke lost Runyon and four of his other top seven runners to graduation this spring, noting that Meyers has moved up from second in the order to become the team’s top runner.
Meyers has improved on his 2016 Regional time and has an unofficial personal best of 16:30. He has hit 17:00 in a race, and his short-term goal is to get into the 16s during competition.
Said Savicke: “Joe’s father was a runner in high school for (Kalamazoo) Hackett in the 1980s, and he’s really active in bicycling and running events. He’s brought Joe along with him.
“I think that just paid dividends with his running abilities. I saw Joe in middle school, so I knew he would be a good fit for us.”
Norrix’s next cross country meet is Thursday with Meyers leading a varsity contingent of junior Will Carrier, senior Zach Skinner, sophomore Myles Baker, junior Rowan Mathieson, senior Garrett Bloom and sophomore Erick Ponce.
Once the fall season is over, Meyers does not plan to leave sports behind.
He bicycles and was the Michigan Bicycle Racing Association road race junior state and point series champ a year ago and “might pick up hockey or swimming this year,” he said.
In the spring, he is part of the varsity track & field team, competing in the 1,600, 3,200 and 3,200 relay.
Pam Shebest served as a sportswriter at the Kalamazoo Gazette from 1985-2009 after 11 years part-time with the Gazette while teaching French and English at White Pigeon High School. She can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Calhoun, Kalamazoo and Van Buren counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Kalamazoo Loy Norrix sophomore Joe Meyers returns a volley during a tennis practice Sunday. (Middle) Clockwise from top left: Meyers, tennis teammate Reed Crocker, Knights’ boys tennis coach Bill Jenkins, Knights’ boys cross country coach Greg Savicke. (Below) Meyers pushes ahead of a pack during Friday’s Early Bird race at Portage Central. (Photos by Pam Shebest.)
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Henry Adds Coaching to K-Zoo Connection
By
Pam Shebest
Special for MHSAA.com
October 7, 2020
KALAMAZOO — When he was 5 years old, Daniel Henry lost his father to brain cancer.
At age 14, he lost his mother to breast cancer.
Grieving his losses and living with his 23-year-old sister, Henry found solace in friends and high school tennis.
After skipping fourth grade, Henry was a young sophomore at Kalamazoo Central when his mother died.
“It was very difficult,” said Henry, now 21. “She’s the one who structured my day. It was my mom that planned out my activities because on the Northside (area of Kalamazoo), it’s very easy to get very distracted and do the wrong things.
“She definitely made sure that I followed the right type of people, people who were doing the right kinds of things for me. After that, it was, ‘Now what do I do?’”
Tennis indeed played a prominent role, engaging him at Central, pointing him toward the next step after graduation and bringing him back after college to share what he's learned.
Continuing a legacy
Tennis continues to give Henry a connection with his mother, Gina Rickman, who was a tennis pro at the YMCA of Greater Kalamazoo.
Continuing her legacy, he is a first-year coach of Kalamazoo Loy Norrix’s boys tennis team – quite a leap for a guy who played high school tennis at crosstown rival Kalamazoo Central.
“I hope no one from Central sees this,” Henry said, laughing. “I actually really do like it.
“Whatever I thought of Norrix my whole time being at the rival school, it’s kind of nice now that I don’t have to have any ill will toward my rival school. My mom went (to Norrix) as well. It’s just kind of poetic.”
Graduating from Kalamazoo College this year with a degree in computer science, Henry is taking a break from his job as a legal intern at Ven Johnson Law to coach.
Portage Central tennis coach Peter Militzer worked with Rickman and has known Henry most of his life.
“Gina had a heart of gold. She did more for the game of tennis with underprivileged youth than anyone I know,” Militzer said. “She instilled that same sense of giving back to your community in both Daniel and (sister) Brittany.”
Brittany Johnson took charge of Henry when their mother died, since his uncle lived in Chicago and his beloved grandmother, June Cotton, was in a nursing home.
“Looking back, I expected her to take on the role of my mother and was disappointed at times when I feel like she didn’t quite live up to that,” Henry said of his sister.
“But now that I’m nearing 22, I couldn’t imagine having the responsibility of taking care of anyone.”
Without his mother’s guidance, “It was very hard for me to find something to do constructively other than tennis.
”I’m just really happy I didn’t fall into some bad habits. It could have made it much harder to get here, if not impossible.”
Henry started playing tennis at age 7, but when a coach tried to change his grip by taping his hand to the racket, he said he gave it up.
“When I got to high school, I was like, ‘OK. I played this before. I’m not really good at it right now, but I can meet some friends and play a sport in high school,’” Henry said, “because I wasn’t sure if I was going to make the basketball team.”
Militzer said that at K-Central, Daniel was almost a coach to his teammates.
“He had few players on his team who could even rally with him, but it never seemed to get him down,” he said.
“In watching his team interact, you could see how important he was to the group.”
Keeping a Kalamazoo Promise
The Kalamazoo Promise was instrumental in Henry’s college choice.
The Promise is a fund provided by anonymous donors that will pay tuition to any Michigan college for students who graduate from Kalamazoo Public Schools.
“In kindergarten, they pound (the Promise) into our heads,” Henry said. “I didn’t really know what it meant at the time.”
By his sophomore year at Central, he understood and realized he had to keep his grades up if he wanted to attend college.
“I had a 4.0 before my mom passed away,” he said. “For me to just try to hold on and keep my grades, up I didn’t really need to study very much. But it started to show my senior year when I took AP classes.
“Part of it was I’m going to college because my grandma said so, and (I need to) keep my grades up so I can go to the best college I can go to.”
Henry said then-KPS superintendent Michael Rice – who became Michigan state superintendent of public instruction in 2019 – talked to Kalamazoo College men’s tennis coach Mark Riley about him.
“I’d been ignoring (Riley’s) emails because it was a Division III school,” Henry said. “Then I learned (Hornets tennis) was top 20 in the nation. I didn’t know much about college athletics.”
He chose Kalamazoo College, but said he was feeling burned out on school.
“Then Coach Riley said ‘No, you’re here to become a student. You’re here to learn.
“‘You’re here to get your degree and move on because tennis will only last four years, but the connections you make and things you learn will last the rest of your life.”
Norrix athletic director Andrew Laboe noted how the tennis team got a boost after football was postponed due to COVID-19 precautions earlier this year. At many schools, football players picked up other fall sports including tennis. “The telling part of that is three out of the four football players have stayed for the remainder of the season,” he said.
“Daniel is a big reason why they stayed. He has made tennis a fun experience for everyone.”
Laboe said Henry’s youth is a plus.
“He relates to the athletes well as he understands them at their level as he is young himself,” Laboe said. “They respect that he has played well at Kalamazoo College and that he is a product of Kalamazoo Public Schools and has been in our community his entire life.”
Riley said Henry is a “good listener, empathetic, caring, respectful and wants his (players) to love the sport like he does.
“He’s a proactive leader and has the ability to lead by example on the court. Daniel will thrive in life and any endeavor that he chooses.”
While Henry has his eye on attending law school in the near future, he is committed to teaching his Norrix players those same values.
“This is so fun, especially being in a team environment,” he said. “Looking at the relationship that I have with Coach Riley, he’s just hilarious and knows exactly what he’s talking about.
“If the player listens, he’s going to start winning. That’s just how it works. That’s how it worked throughout my career. The times I lost was because I wasn’t listening.”
Pam Shebest served as a sportswriter at the Kalamazoo Gazette from 1985-2009 after 11 years part-time with the Gazette while teaching French and English at White Pigeon High School. She can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Calhoun, Kalamazoo and Van Buren counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Kalamazoo Loy Norrix boys tennis coach Daniel Henry sends back a volley during a practice this fall. (2) Daniel Henry. (3) Daniel Henry and his mother Gina Rickman. (4) From left: Loy Norrix athletic director Andrew Laboe, Portage Central coach Peter Militzer, Kalamazoo College coach Mark Riley. (Action and top Henry photos by Pam Shebest. Henry and Rickman photo courtesy of Daniel Henry. Riley photo courtesy of Kalamazoo College.)