Veteran Coach Shows Wayne the Way
By
Tom Markowski
Special for Second Half
September 16, 2015
WAYNE – Donald Anderson watched the Wayne Memorial football program lose game after game after game.
As a fan of high school football and a resident of Westland, Anderson, at times, just shook his head. As a former coach, Anderson thought about the possibility of doing something about it.
Few Class A programs have had less success than Wayne. The Zebras have made the playoffs twice and have yet to win a playoff game. Wayne’s last winning season came in 2006, when it finished 5-4. From 2010-2013, Wayne won one game. The Zebras were 2-7 last season.
Wayne is a member of the Kensington Lakes Activities Association and competes in the South division with such well-respected and successful programs like Canton, Livonia Churchill and Plymouth. Even its sister school, Westland John Glenn (the schools are part of the Wayne/Westland school district), has been a playoff team on a regular basis.
As a point of fact, four members of the KLAA South (Canton, John Glenn, Livonia Franklin and Plymouth) have reached an MHSAA Final.
Wayne’s road to rise is not an easy one.
But they have begun the climb.
“We’re getting better. We moved it well against Plymouth (in a 36-13 loss last week). We just don’t have a lot of firepower," Anderson said.
“We’ve got a good young squad. We have just seven seniors, and we don’t have a JV. We have just 12 sophomores and I didn’t want to take away from our freshmen, because they’re good, and we can build on that.”
Last April the Wayne/Westland school district had openings for a head varsity football coach, at both John Glenn and at Wayne. Anderson applied for both and was hired at Wayne. This season he became the school’s fourth head coach in as many years.
Anderson, a Detroit Cody graduate and former NFL player (he was the 32nd player taken in the 1985 NFL Draft after playing four years at Purdue University), has had success as an assistant or head coach at every school he’s been at since he starting coaching in 1989.
Anderson was the defensive coordinator at Cody before becoming the head coach in 1995. In 1999, he went to Detroit Henry Ford as an assistant under Mike Marshall before going to Detroit Northwestern in 2003 as an assistant under Michael Crayton. In 2009, Anderson became the head coach at Northwestern. The school closed after the 2009-10 school year, and Anderson decided, at that time, enough was enough.
He’s been a spectator ever since. Until this season.
“I was still involved,” he said. “I was in consultations with other schools. They wanted to pick my mind. I had a lot of opportunities to coach. It wasn’t the right time. I’ve lived in Westland since 2009. I live between Wayne and Glenn, and I’ve been watching Wayne for a while. I decided to give it a shot. The subject just drew me in. When the opportunity came, I said let’s try it.”
But coaches at Wayne don’t last long. Why would a person, 52 years old and a successful businessman, take a position there when he passed up other coaching opportunities?
A big part was wanting to help local athletes pursue their dreams at the college level. But there also was the challenge.
“I like a task," Anderson said. "It’s like when I left Henry Ford and went to Northwestern. People thought I was crazy. Low and behold, look who’s on my staff.”
Marshall is now Anderson’s assistant, as is Charles Spann, a former head coach at Detroit Chadsey and Detroit Pershing. It’s people like Marshall and Spann who waited for Anderson to get back into coaching to return to the sidelines themselves.
Both Marshall and Spann won Detroit Public School League titles as head coaches. Now they’re trying to help a friend experience the same.
There are definite reasons for optimism. Anderson sees a lot of potential in 6-foot-3, 215-pound sophomore Reggie Micheaux, a receiver and defensive end. "He can go up and get it, and he's a big target," the coach said.
Running backs Jarvis Martin and Malik Bryant, the latter also a defensive back, are among others who are impressing early.
Anderson said former players like himself are different. They have their pride. Their egos push them into circumstances others wouldn’t tread.
But for Anderson, it’s more than his ego he’s trying to satisfy. Ten years ago he was diagnosed with kidney failure. He went through dialysis until he received a kidney transplant five years after the diagnosis. After two years, his new kidney failed. Anderson has received kidney dialysis, three days a week, since 2012. With all of that comes a different perspective.
The winning, for now, has had to wait. Wayne is 0-3. Still, those 13 points represented the most they’ve scored against Plymouth since 2007.
It doesn’t get any easier with Canton (3-0) next, but the Zebras will continue to build.
“It’s about passing it on,” he said. “God has been good to me. It’s about helping others.”
Tom Markowski is a columnist and directs website coverage for the State Champs! Sports Network. He previously covered primarily high school sports for the The Detroit News from 1984-2014, focusing on the Detroit area and contributing to statewide coverage of football and basketball. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Malik Bryant breaks past pursuing Plymouth defenders during last week's game. (Middle) Jarvis Martin works against a Plymouth player. (Below) Kyle Brooks turns upfield. (Photos courtesy of Wayne Memorial athletic department/Kathy Hansen Photography.)
Lung Transplant Survivor Inspires, Teaches Through Football
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
September 1, 2021
ADRIAN – As the final seconds ticked off the clock in the 2019 Division 8 Regional Football Final at Reading, Adrian Lenawee Christian assistant coach Jon Willett started looking for his wife.
Reading would be going on to play the next week, while the LCS’s season was over. Willett desperately needed oxygen. He could barely breath.
Hillary Willett, Jon’s wife, pulled the car as close to the Reading field as she could, and Jon opened the door.
“I got in the car and sat down,” Willett said. “And I looked at her and I said, ‘I just coached my last game.’”
As miracles go, Willett was wrong. Less than two months after that football game that Willett thought was his last, he underwent a double lung transplant at the University of Michigan Hospital. He still doesn’t know how he survived so long, but is certain there was divine intervention.
“I’ve always had a close relationship with Jesus Christ,” Willett said. “And I’ve always been passionate about football. I always thought that if I survived, I would use football as a tool to reach younger people. I’m doing that today.”
Willett helped coach the Cougars to last season’s 8-Player Division 1 championship and is back on the sidelines this season, coaching the Cougars JV team and continuing to serve as an assistant with the varsity.
He even gets in on some drills now and then, such as doing push-ups with the quarterbacks.
“Jon has been with me for seven or eight years,” LCS varsity head coach Bill Wilharms said. “He’s a great man and a great football coach. The kids love having him around, and he loves them. I love coaching with him, and he’s a big part of our coaching family.”
Willett grew up in Sand Creek, about 10 minutes south of Adrian in Lenawee County. He played on some outstanding Aggies football teams for Hall of Fame coach Ernie Ayers. Willett led the 1990 Aggies in rushing, finishing just shy of 1,000 yards his senior season.
He got into coaching when his sons, Noah and Isaiah, began playing flag football.
“I coached them in flag football, then in Pop Warner,” Willett said. “I love coaching football. When Noah was in middle school I coached him one year, then became an assistant for the varsity.”
Wilharms tabbed Willett to be the JV head coach, a position he’s held for the last couple of years. He also coaches varsity wide receivers and defensive backs and will assist the LCS scout team quarterbacks at practice. He jumps in whenever needed.
Sometimes, it’s as a motivational speaker.
“I share my testimony whenever possible,” Willett said. “I tell my players that life is short. You never know how long you are going to have. You truly don’t. You have to live your life to the fullest.”
Willett first was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis – chronic, progressive lung disease – in April 2017 when he visited the doctor due to a constant cough and shortness of breath. The prognosis was not good.
“The doctor said at that point I had 65-percent capacity of my lungs,” he said. “They gave me three to five years unless I could get a double lung transplant. They said that would be the only option and that there was no cure.”
Willett believed the doctors, of course, but admits he wasn’t the best patient.
“I figured if I could make it 10 years, my kids would be out of school,” he said.
The disease had other ideas. While he was put on oxygen due to shortness of breath, his LCS football players had no idea.
“I never did it in front of them,” he said. “I should have. I wasn’t a very good patient. I was wanting to be with the team. I wanted to coach.”
In July 2019, he noticed a big change.
“My lung capacity had dropped,” he said.
He continued to coach. He had some doctors’ appointments here and there but remained coaching the entire season.
“It was a mental thing,” he said. “I wanted to get through the season.”
He rode the bus to the LCS-Reading game. When the game was over, he told Wilharms that he had to go home.
“I told Coach Wilharms that I was just getting in the car with my wife,” he said. “She pulled the car up to the gate because it was so hard to walk. I couldn’t get air because of not having oxygen.”
When he told his wife that he thought he would never coach again, she said no.
“She looked at me and she said, ‘(You’ve coached your last game) with those lungs.’”
By Christmas of 2019, Willett had been in and out of the hospital on numerous occasions. He was on oxygen tanks around the clock. He went home at Christmas, believing it was his last.
“I said I want to go home. I think it’s my last Christmas. I wanted to be with my family,” he recalled.
When he returned to the hospital after Christmas, his son Noah sat in the backseat during the car ride changing out oxygen tanks every few minutes just to keep his father alive. Willett’s oxygen levels were dangerously low.
“When I got to U-M, there was a whole team of people waiting for me. They worked on me and sent me up to ICU. It was bleak,” he said.
The LCS community sent out word via social media to pray for Coach Willett, his wife, two sons and two daughters, Emily and Abigail. Willett said those prayers were answered.
Willett was told by doctors he had to have a double lung transplant within 24 hours, or he would die. Seven hours and 13 minutes later, the doctor walked in, with tears in his eyes, and told the family they found a match.
Willett is feeling better now. In February of this year, about a month after Willett watched from the sidelines as LCS won the championship in Brighton, the medications he had been on took hold and he began to improve.
When the season started this summer, Willett was no doubt going to be part of the Cougars staff.
“Everything is very stable right now,” he said. “My lungs keep getting better. I can tell at football practice, walking from end zone to end zone, I’m feeling better. I’m building up. That exercise helps.”
Some day he plans on reaching out to the family of the person who donated lungs to him. For now, he’s grateful to be alive and thankful for every moment he gets to spend coaching football.
“I’m feeling great and loving the opportunity I have to keep coaching and be with the kids,” Willett said. “The story I get to share with my players is truly a miracle. God took me to the point where it was 100 percent out of my control.
“If I can use football as a tool to keep talking to the youth and help them become better men, I’m going to do that. Football is what drives me.”
Doug Donnelly has served as a sports and news reporter and city editor over 25 years, writing for the Daily Chief-Union in Upper Sandusky, Ohio from 1992-1995, the Monroe Evening News from 1995-2012 and the Adrian Daily Telegram since 2013. He's also written a book on high school basketball in Monroe County and compiles record books for various schools in southeast Michigan. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for Jackson, Washtenaw, Hillsdale, Lenawee and Monroe counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Lenawee Christian head varsity coach Bill Wilharms (holding football) gives assistant Jon Willett a hug after last season’s 8-Player Division 1 Final win. (Middle) Willett returned to the sideline a year after a double lung transplant. (Below) Willett serves as junior varsity head coach and varsity assistant. (Photos by Jeff Jameson/Lenawee Christian Schools.)