![Brooklyn Columbia Central basketball](/sites/default/files/2022-02/220225_BCC_2H.jpg)
Powerful Post Pair Fueling Columbia Central's Postseason Hopes
By
Doug Donnelly
Special for MHSAA.com
February 25, 2022
BROOKLYN – The gymnasium at Brooklyn Columbia Central High School has been the site of some intense battles among two high-energy post players for the past three years. But only a handful of people have been in attendance to watch.
That’s because most of them have come during the Golden Eagles’ practices.
It is at those practices, run by Columbia Central coach Codi Cole, where 6-foot-2 junior Zoie Bamm and 6-3 senior Tadessa Brown have scrapped, battled, and molded themselves into future Division I college basketball players.
“It doesn’t do me a lot of good to practice and post up against someone 5-2,” Brown said. “Zoie and I have had some great battles. I love going against her. She’s strong and has some muscle. We battle hard, usually until the coach makes us stop.”
Those battles have launched some great success for Columbia Central, which clinched its fourth-consecutive Lenawee County Athletic Association championship Thursday with a win over Dundee. The Golden Eagles had a streak of 37 straight conference wins snapped earlier this season but have rebounded nicely and are eying a deep tournament run.
Cole is a basketball junkie who graduated from East Jackson in 2003. He was coaching travel basketball through the Michigan Sports Facility in Jackson, where he works, when he applied and landed the Columbia Central job.
“One of the parents encouraged me to apply,” Cole said. “I wasn’t their first or second choice and when I got the job. I was told they wanted someone with more varsity experience.”
It didn’t take long for Cole to bring a championship attitude to the program.
CC went 10-11 in his first season in 2017-18. Since then, however, it’s been championship after championship. Over the last four years, the Golden Eagles have gone 15-5, 20-3, 16-4 and they are 14-4 this year. In the LCAA, Columbia Central is 49-2 since the start of the 2018-19 season.
“I’m blessed to be at a school where there are some people obsessed with basketball,” Cole said.
He has as familiar face on his bench – his high school coach Jim Nelson has been an assistant the last four years. Nelson has coached basketball for 40 years in the Jackson area.
“When I came to coach, I asked him to coach with me,” Cole said. “It’s great having him with me.”
This season some of the younger players on the team had to grow up faster than expected. The team lacked experience other than Bamm and Brown, and Bamm was slowed at the start due to an injury.
“We played (Parma) Western in the first game and lost and scored 17 points,” Cole said. “Frankly, that’s not what we are used to. We didn’t have Zoie and had a lot of inexperience. It took a second to get going with the new crew. There were some struggles.”
After the season-opening loss, Columbia Central won three games, then ran into Onsted. The Wildcats ended up winning, 46-34.
“That was a big eye-opener for us,” Cole said. “After that, we started rolling.”
Since the Onsted loss, Columbia Central has lost only to 2021 Division 3 champion Grass Lake and Division 1 Temperance Bedford.
“I’d say we came together as a team,” Bamm said. “We were young coming into the season, and we needed to make things work. I expected us to develop as the season went on.”
Bamm eased into the season. She tore her ACL last April and spent the entire offseason rehabilitating her knee. When this season started, she didn’t get the approval from her surgeon to play right away.
“He didn’t think I was ready,” Bamm said. “He wanted me to keep practicing.”
After the opening-game loss, however, Bamm returned to the court. At first her minutes were limited, but that didn’t last long. Now her and Brown both average about 14 points a game. In Thursday’s win over Dundee, Bamm had 25 points, 19 rebounds and nine blocks in one of her best games of the season. Junior Anna McCollum leads the team in 3-pointers and is third on the team in scoring.
“There is always room to grow,” Brown said. “There’s so much more we can do to get better. We want to keep playing for as long as we can.”
Besides the practice battles between Brown and Bamm, the Golden Eagles also spend time watching film to get better.
“We watch a lot of film,” Brown said. “I watch film with Coach. We are always looking for things that can make us better. We try and change the small things, especially with the younger girls on the team.”
Brown, the only senior, and Bamm, started playing together when Brown was in eighth grade on a travel team.
“We became friends even then,” Bamm said. “We’ve been training together a long time.”
Brown said the duo has enjoyed their practice battles.
“She’s so great to practice with,” Brown said. “She’s going to be a Division I player too.”
Brown had some college offers, but she couldn’t quite find the right fit. That’s when she assembled some of her film and sent an email to Division I coaches around the country.
“Clemson was one of the schools that contacted me back,” she said. “We started communicating and I made an unofficial, virtual visit and I loved the campus and everyone there. It is such a family atmosphere there. They accept you for who you are, and their coaches are amazing. I cannot wait to get my career started there.”
Before college, however, Columbia Central has more work to do. The Golden Eagles open the postseason as the No. 2 seed in a Division 3 District that includes Big 8 Conference champion Jonesville. They have a final regular-season game tonight to try and wrap up a 13-1 LCAA campaign.
“The other day in practice I started looking around and thought we only have a few practices left,” Brown said. “It was truly like, ‘Where did the time go?’ moment. On senior night, I realized this was the last time I am going to play in this gym. It’s so surreal. I’m happy with everything that happened here.”
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) Tadessa Brown, right, and Zoie Bamm take a photo together during Brown’s college signing event. (Middle) Bamm and Brown’s friendship goes back to middle school. (Below) Bamm calls for the ball during a game against Hudson. (Photos courtesy of Amanda Bamm.)
![Bay City John Glenn girls basketball](/sites/default/files/2021-03/210303_JG_2H_0.jpg)
1,000-Point Pair Pacing Another John Glenn Contender
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
March 3, 2021
Abi Tarrant knew how close Carly McCrum was to 1,000 career points and wanted to make sure her Bay City John Glenn teammate’s accomplishment was celebrated.
On Feb. 17, when McCrum achieved the milestone in a victory against Alma, the John Glenn fans in attendance cheered the moment while waving homemade signs, which they had been carrying thanks in large part to an effort spearheaded by Tarrant.
“Last year, I broke the (school career) rebound record, and all of the student section, everybody made posters, and it was a huge moment for me,” Tarrant said. “I knew she was getting her 1,000 points that week, so I wanted her to have the same type of environment. Even though the student section wasn’t there, she could still have that kind of energy from the crowd when she hit it.”
It was only after the celebration for McCrum subsided that Tarrant realized just how close she was to the same milestone: 16 points.
“I knew exactly where she was because I had been planning the poster thing,” Tarrant said. “(One thousand points) kind of snuck up on me. I didn’t know I was that close to her. But in the game it happened, I knew.”
Tarrant achieved her own milestone the next time out, a John Glenn victory on Feb. 19 against Birch Run, giving the Bobcats a pair of 1,000-point scorers in the same class.
McCrum now sits at 1,053 career points and Tarrant has 1,046 as they have led the Bobcats to a 7-1 start to the season and a top-five ranking in The Associated Press Division 2 poll. Their lone loss came in double overtime against Frankenmuth, another top-five team.
“I just thought it was a really cool experience,” McCrum said. “We’ve both been on varsity since our freshmen year, and we’ve played with each other on the same travel team, so it was very cool that we hit it in the same week. We both feel like this team is really special, and our goal is to win a state championship.”
Tarrant and McCrum became the seventh and eighth players in school history to hit the 1,000-point mark. It’s the second time John Glenn has had classmates reach the milestone, joining 2016 graduates Jenai LaPorte (1,547 points) and Cassidy Boensch (1,403). Boensch did play her first two seasons at Au Gres-Sims.
“I’ve been really spoiled,” John Glenn coach Cory Snider said. “Three of those 1,000-point scorers (LaPorte, Boensch and 2017 graduate Kalle Martinez) were all on the same team. The five kids I’ve had (reach 1,000 points) have all been on the same teams, so that’s a really unique situation. You don’t hear of that a whole lot. They make me look way smarter than I am.”
McCrum and Tarrant are both four-year varsity players for Snider, and for McCrum, it was clear early on that she would become another of the school’s great scorers. She was the team’s leading scorer during her freshman (14 points per game) and sophomore (14.2) seasons.
“Carly has been the steady, calm influence on our team for four years,” Snider said. “It’s pretty incredible to be able to come in as a freshman and give us (14.2) points per game when she was (the focus) on everybody’s scouting report her freshman year.”
McCrum said it was a role she was comfortable with, as she had taken it on through middle school as a travel player.
“It wasn’t something really new for me,” said McCrum, a 5-foot-10 guard who has signed with Ferris State. “Probably my freshman year, I did feel some pressure and it got in my head, but it’s gotten a lot better, and I’ve gotten more comfortable with that.”
While she’s thrived in that role, and has established herself as a strong outside shooter, McCrum would rather be the one setting up teammates.
“She has such a high basketball IQ,” Snider said. “She’s more of a true playmaker than a natural scorer. She has a super high basketball IQ and loves to find the open player. She enjoys making an assist as much as she enjoys scoring a basket.”
While McCrum was filling up the scoresheet early on, Tarrant had to find a different way to make an impact for the Bobcats. Despite her size – she's 5-7 now – that wound up being rebounding.
“Freshman year, I was just kind of in the right place at the right time, and I think that’s a lot of it,” said Tarrant, who is committed to Hope College. “A lot of those are rebounds that the posts don’t want to get, like running out of bounds. I would sneak up behind people to get them – I just always find myself somewhere near it. My dad told me that if you’re not going to score, then you have to do something. I guess I just picked that.”
Tarrant has done that better than anyone in school history, racking up 732 career rebounds.
“She just played with such a high motor, and she had such a desire to be really good,” Snider said. “Her growth as a player has been incredible from her freshman year to now as a senior. It’s more growth than I’ve seen from any other player. It’s unbelievable.”
Tarrant’s scoring picked up in a big way a year ago, as she averaged 19.4 points per game, setting a junior-year record for points at John Glenn.
“I think we molded more as a team,” Tarrant said. “We started playing a lot better together. At first, I think it was hard. Freshman year, Carly was the best player through and through, then sophomore year I stepped up my game a little bit. Junior year, we figured out how our games complement each other. This year, we’re playing amazing together.”
With a strong supporting cast surrounding them, McCrum and Tarrant hope to take John Glenn back to the heights it reached not long ago. The Bobcats were a Class B semifinalist in 2016 but have had their season ended by Freeland every year since, including in the District Final the past three seasons.
But they feel this could be the year they add some team trophies to the individual successes they’ve been able to rack up.
“It would mean a lot,” McCrum said. “Abi and I have been on the same team since freshman year. Some of the girls, we have been together since sophomore year. We’ve all been together for a long time. First of all, we want to win Districts. We’ve lost three years in a row to Freeland. I think it would be so awesome. We’ve all been together for so long, and we’ve always talked about going so far.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Bay City John Glenn’s Abi Tarrant, left, and Carly McCrum make strong moves to the hoop against Alma this season. (Middle) Tarrant focuses for a free throw. (Below) McCrum maintains possession against Freeland. (Photos by Jodi Stopyak.)