Port Huron Unified Providing Opportunity
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
December 4, 2019
Growing up in Yale, Trevor Sugars never thought about playing high school hockey. He bounced around Sanilac, St. Clair and Lapeer counties finding house leagues to stay involved in the sport he loved, as Yale didn’t have a team.
But a year ago, thanks to an expansion of the Port Huron Unified cooperative team, a new option arose, and Sugars has taken full advantage.
“This is great for Yale because we get to come out and have a hockey team, and younger kids can get into the sport of hockey,” said Sugars, a junior defenseman. “They’re able to go further without having to pay all the money for AAA.”
Three players from Yale and six players from St. Clair join the 11 from Port Huron in donning the Big Reds jersey this season. It’s the fourth that Port Huron has collaborated with East China School District – St. Clair and Marine City – and the second it has collaborated with Yale. The collaboration has given players from those schools an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have, while saving the Port Huron program.
“I went to a coaching clinic before the season started, and we actually had a roundtable about unified hockey programs,” Port Huron coach Ben Pionk said. “It was kind of interesting, because we all had one common theme. Most of us were all there for survival. That’s why we’re unified. A lot of the teams were in the same boat. Some of the other unified programs, they have like seven schools and you’re getting two kids from each school just to make a team. Honestly, it was all for survival, and that was solely ours. It wasn’t to build a superpower team; it was to make sure we had a team we could even put on the ice.”
Pionk has been at Port Huron for two decades, most of which spent coaching a team solely from his school. But numbers began to dwindle not long ago, threatening the future of the program.
“I can’t remember what year it was, but we had tryouts and I had eight kids standing here,” Pionk said. “I went to our former athletic director and talked to him and said, ‘What do you want us to do here? You really can’t put a program on the ice.’ We actually started the season that way and then we picked up a few more; I think we ended up with 12 that year. We got through the year, and kind of the next year was the same way. You go back four or five years and people weren’t working a lot, so what are you going to do? Are you going to play hockey or pay your bills?”
Not only was it hard to be competitive with so few players, but Pionk was worried about the safety of his players, who were forced to take longer shifts. He said he knew there were players in St. Clair – a school that had a program through the 2012-13 season – so Port Huron became a unified team for the 2016-17 season.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the team has now nearly doubled in size.
“Even after the first year or so of being unified with St. Clair, we still weren’t getting really good numbers,” Pionk said. “We just found that a lot of the older kids down there had been with their teams, and at this point they were established where they were and didn’t want to leave to come play high school hockey. They would love to have played high school hockey but didn’t want to leave at that point. Through Port Huron Minor Hockey’s help, they knew there were a couple kids in Yale who had kind of aged out and weren’t going to have anywhere to play, so we kind of approached their school about it and next thing you know, we had Yale as well. Now, a few years into it everybody knows we’re unified and the kids are coming out. We have 17 skaters and three goalies this year.”
The six players from St. Clair this season make up the biggest group Port Huron Unified has brought in from another school besides Port Huron High. While they may have grown up expecting to one day be Saints, they’re grateful for the opportunity they now have.
“The high school experience is so much fun,” said Duncan McLeod, a junior defenseman from St. Clair. “It’s just fun to play for something – something big.”
While players from out of town are excited about a newer opportunity, those within the program are excited to see their team growing again.
“My freshman year, my sophomore year, we were really struggling on numbers,” Port Huron junior Kevin Schott said. “It was tough having to double shift a lot and pretty much play wherever Coach needed you to play. This year I was really excited to hear that we had a lot of kids coming from St. Clair and Yale – some better skating kids that I knew had played travel. So, I was really super excited to see that we were going to have a full and deep team this year.”
With all the new faces and multiple schools combining to create one team, not a lot of the players had played with one another prior to high school. That hasn’t been an issue, though.
“We all came together real quick, because we all know how to play hockey – we've all been playing hockey for at least four years,” Sugars said. “We all know our positions, got together and figured it out.”
This year’s team has already enjoyed as much success as any of its unified predecessors. The Big Reds opened the season with a pair of wins, eclipsing last year’s win total (one).
“We’re trying to be at least .500 this year,” Sugars said. “I wanted to be the best Yale high school team, but we already did that.”
A flu bug hit the team right before Thanksgiving, which didn’t help during a busy week. But even sitting at 2-3, there’s optimism about the season and the future, as without a senior on the roster, there’s a possibility everyone could come back next year.
“It’s looking positive for the year,” McLeod said. “We have a good team going.”
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) Port Huron Unified’s Noah Gunderson (19) is among Port Huron High School students who help make up the program again this winter. (Middle) Duncan McLeod, a St. Clair student, controls the puck. (Photos by Jeremiah May.)
#TBT: 2002 Ends with Lights-Out Finals
July 12, 2019
By Rob Kaminski
MHSAA benchmarks editor
The Flint IMA had been to the MHSAA Ice Hockey Finals what Joe Louis Arena was to the Detroit Red Wings since it began hosting high school championships in the state in 1977.
For parts of four decades, the facility set the scene for many memorable moments on ice for scholastic skaters.
So it would have been fitting as the curtain was closing on an era March 9, 2002, if there’d been an overtime championship game or two to commemorate the last MHSAA Finals at the building.
In 2003, the MHSAA Semifinals and Finals would move to Compuware Arena in Plymouth – now USA Hockey Arena – where the event has been played ever since.
There would be no overtimes during the IMA’s swan song, but the arena wasn’t about to let go without a fight. Following the morning’s Division 2 Final, won by Grosse Pointe North over local qualifier Davison, things got strange.
As if by divine intervention, a significant power outage hit the Flint area between the first and second periods of the Division 3 Final, necessitating a return to the building for an encore performance that Monday.
Following is an account from then-MHSAA Assistant Director Randy Allen, administrator of the sport at that time.
“East Grand Rapids and (Dearborn) Divine Child were between the first and second periods when the power went out at what must’ve been around three in the afternoon. Some of the house lights went on, but there was no huge generator. The power company told us it could be quite a while before the power came back, so the decision was made pretty quickly to come back Monday. (Editor’s Note: MHSAA regulations at that time prohibited Sunday competition, thus play would resume Monday)
“Finishing the game in progress Monday was really a no-brainer, but now there were a couple of immediate challenges. First, how were we going to let people know, and second, what was going to happen to the (Detroit) Catholic Central-Marquette Division 1 game coming up later in the day?
“Well, knowing what I knew about the TV business (Allen’s background in Wisconsin included sportscasting), I grabbed one of the television reporters there, probably from Grand Rapids, and asked him to come down to the ice with me. It was totally dark; I figured once he put his camera lights on, it would get the attention of the crowd, which it did. So there’s about 2 or 3 thousand people in the arena – in the dark – and I’m standing in front of a light from a TV camera, and at the top of my voice I explain the situation and let them know we’re coming back Monday.
“Anyone wanting to come back, admission was free of charge, and we’d trust they were at the game. If they wanted a refund, they could mail their ticket stub to MHSAA and we'd send a refund. We obviously couldn’t use the box office without power. I don’t recall more than a couple dozen refund requests coming to our office later.
“Now the real challenge is the Division 1 game. Marquette very, very much wanted to go home and come back a week later. They’d been on the road all week (Marquette won a Quarterfinal in Traverse City that Wednesday). Jack (Roberts, former MHSAA executive director) was there, and he and Marquette’s AD (Scott Koski) and their superintendent debated a bit. In the end, the regulations of the day were upheld, and the game would be Monday.
“As it turned out, someone in the Marquette entourage had a contact in the Detroit Pistons front office, so the team was entertained in a suite at The Palace of Auburn Hills on Sunday night, so that was quite a happy ending from their standpoint.
“Many of the Marquette people were either in the arena or at a single hotel or two in the area, so alerting them to the change was not difficult.
“But then we started to think, ‘What about the Detroit CC people who would be driving up for their game later? Remember, social media was not as prevalent as it is today, or even the dependence on the internet.
“So, Saturday night, I sat there at the entrance to the IMA with my car running and lights on to inform the CC fans and anyone else who pulled up that the game had changed ... ‘Power’s out; game’s on Monday.’ They'd say thanks, and out they'd go. No one really got angry; there wasn’t anything anyone could do. I sat there an hour and a half with a steady stream, and shortly after the scheduled game time I called it a night.”
And, the IMA called it the end of an era, but not before hanging on for one more night, when Divine Child and Detroit CC would raise the last trophies in that building ... under the lights.
PHOTOS: (Top) Marquette was among teams that needed to stick around Flint two more days to play in the 2002 MHSAA Ice Hockey Finals. (Middle) Flint’s IMA arena.