Hice, Mazzolini Named Forsythe Winners
March 14, 2016
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
Gary Hice's first job in education was as a study hall monitor. But he also got a chance to coach that year at Charlevoix, and that made all the difference.
"I don't know why I came to love it," Hice said of a career in high school athletics that didn't come to an end until nearly 40 years later. "That first job I had as study hall supervisor was not much fun. But I enjoyed working with kids ... and that spurred me to get into education. I think that's the most awesome animal on the face of the Earth, the high school student."
Gina Mazzolini, meanwhile, was a former high school and college star who came off the court as an athlete but returned almost immediately as a coach before rising to administrator with influence at the statewide and national levels – and a similar passion for giving back to the high school game.
“It’s one of those things where I’ve worked in this position because I loved doing it,” Mazzolini said. “I enjoyed working with the adult coaches and adult officials, and then the student-athletes."
Both have served Michigan high school student-athletes for more than 30 years in ways that will continue to impact schools and athletes for years to come.
In recognition of their efforts, they have been named the 2016 recipients of the Michigan High School Athletic Association’s Charles E. Forsythe Award.
The annual award is in its 39th year and named after former MHSAA Executive Director Charles E. Forsythe, the Association's first full-time and longest-serving chief executive. Forsythe Award recipients are selected each year by the MHSAA Representative Council, based on an individual's outstanding contribution to the interscholastic athletics community. Hice and Mazzolini will receive their honors during the break after the first quarter of the MHSAA Class A Boys Basketball Final on March 26 at the Breslin Student Events Center in East Lansing.
Hice retired in 2014 after 30 years as Petoskey’s athletic director overseeing one of the most successful programs in northern Michigan that regularly produced contenders for championships statewide. Under his leadership, Petoskey added five sports, revamped its facilities and became a founding member of the Big North Conference after Hice contributed to its creation.
Mazzolini has served the MHSAA since 1993 and is the administrator for girls volleyball, swimming and diving, alpine skiing and tennis. She also handles the sanctioning of out-of-state competitions and serves as the MHSAA’s point person on foreign exchange and international student issues. Mazzolini will receive a Citation from the National Federation of State High School Associations this summer and was the 2010 recipient of the MHSAA’s Women in Sports Leadership Award.
“Gary Hice and Gina Mazzolini have contributed to Michigan high school athletics on a variety of levels providing vision, leadership and dedication,” MHSAA Executive Director John E. “Jack” Roberts said. “Gary Hice served as a leader of leaders in northern Michigan and provided an example to be followed statewide, while Gina Mazzolini has shaped rules and policies that have impacted programs not only in our state, but nationally as well. We’re proud to honor Gary Hice and Gina Mazzolini with Forsythe Awards.”
After his year at Charlevoix, Hice taught social studies and physical education and coached for one year at Petoskey before spending five years as director of parks and recreation and harbormaster for the City of Petoskey. He returned to the high school as athletic director in 1984.
During his tenure, Petoskey added girls golf, girls soccer, girls bowling, boys bowling and ice hockey programs. Petoskey teams won MHSAA Finals championships in boys skiing, girls skiing, wrestling, boys soccer and boys tennis, and the girls cross country and track and field teams were among those that earned runner-up finishes. The Petoskey girls ski team won four straight titles from 1991-94, and the boys ski team started a championship streak that last month reached six straight seasons. Hice also led the construction in 2000 of a $6-million gymnasium, weight room, wrestling practice area and indoor track at Petoskey High School, and initiated the school’s athletic Hall of Fame.
Hice is a member of both the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association and National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. He was named state Athletic Director of the Year by the MIAAA in 2011 after receiving its George Lovich Award of Merit in 2008. He also was honored with the MHSAA’s Allen W. Bush Award in 2002 for his often-unseen contributions to high school athletics.
“When you’re in the heat of the battle, you don’t think on those terms,” Hice said of his many contributions and their lasting effects locally and beyond. “But toward the end of my career, I would relish the times when I could help young ADs, new ADs, people who didn’t have a lot of experience. In fact, I miss that today.”
Hice is a longtime member of Kiwanis Clubs, first of Petoskey and currently of Little Traverse Bay, and also has served with the Petoskey Education Foundation, Jeffrey P. Bodzick Memorial Scholarship Foundation and Beyond the Scoreboard initiative that promotes positive character and sportsmanship in northern Michigan’s youth and interscholastic athletics.
After standout basketball and volleyball careers at St. Johns High School and Central Michigan University, Mazzolini taught and coached multiple sports during the 1979-80 school year at Ovid-Elsie High School. She then spent two years teaching and serving as an assistant volleyball coach at Michigan State University, where she also earned her master’s degree in physical education. Mazzolini then left to teach and serve as assistant volleyball coach and interim women’s Sports Information Director at the University of Texas.
In 1982, Mazzolini became an activities director with the University Interscholastic League, the service organization to high school activities in Texas. She became an assistant athletic director at the UIL in 1988, and five years later she returned to Michigan as a member of the MHSAA staff.
"To be recognized by my peers for this award … I’m appreciative and humbled," Mazzolini said. "You do those things because you enjoy them.”
In addition to her work at the MHSAA, Mazzolini has provided a long list of contributions at the national level. She has served as the NFHS representative on the board for the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, which identifies, promotes and supports international youth exchange programs, and has sat on several CSIET committees. She’s currently serving on the NFHS Annual Meeting Planning Committee and also has served on NFHS rules committees for soccer, swimming and diving, and volleyball (chairing that sport’s rules committee from 2004-08), and on NFHS advisory committees for athletic directors and sports medicine.
She recently was inducted into the Michigan High School Ski Coaches Association Hall of Fame and has served as a voter for the Greater Lansing Sports Hall of Fame.
Mazzolini graduated from St. Johns High School in 1974 after an accomplished career that included leading the Redwings to a District title in the first MHSAA Girls Basketball Tournament in 1973. She went on to star in both basketball and volleyball at CMU; she graduated in 1978 as the leading scorer, rebounder and shot-blocker in CMU history and still ranks among the Chippewas’ leaders in multiple statistical categories. She was inducted into the CMU Athletic Hall of Fame in 1992.
Hice graduated from Ann Arbor Huron High School in 1970. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Eastern Michigan University in 1974 and his master’s at CMU in 1989, and received Certified Athletic Administrator certification from the NIAAA in 1994.
Past recipients
1978 - Brick Fowler, Port Huron; Paul Smarks, Warren
1979 - Earl Messner, Reed City; Howard Beatty, Saginaw
1980 - Max Carey, Freesoil
1981 - Steven Sluka, Grand Haven; Samuel Madden, Detroit
1982 - Ernest Buckholz, Mt. Clemens; T. Arthur Treloar, Petoskey
1983 - Leroy Dues, Detroit; Richard Maher, Sturgis
1984 - William Hart, Marquette; Donald Stamats, Caro
1985 - John Cotton, Farmington; Robert James, Warren
1986 - William Robinson, Detroit; Irving Soderland, Norway
1987 - Jack Streidl, Plainwell; Wayne Hellenga, Decatur
1988 - Jack Johnson, Dearborn; Alan Williams, North Adams
1989 - Walter Bazylewicz, Berkley; Dennis Kiley, Jackson
1990 - Webster Morrison, Pickford; Herbert Quade, Benton Harbor
1991 - Clifford Buckmaster, Petoskey; Donald Domke, Northville
1992 - William Maskill, Kalamazoo; Thomas G. McShannock, Muskegon
1993 - Roy A. Allen Jr., Detroit; John Duncan, Cedarville
1994 - Kermit Ambrose, Royal Oak
1995 - Bob Perry, Lowell
1996 - Charles H. Jones, Royal Oak
1997 - Michael A. Foster, Richland; Robert G. Grimes, Battle Creek
1998 - Lofton C. Greene, River Rouge; Joseph J. Todey, Essexville
1999 - Bernie Larson, Battle Creek
2000 - Blake Hagman, Kalamazoo; Jerry Cvengros, Escanaba
2001 - Norm Johnson, Bangor; George Lovich, Canton
2002 - John Fundukian, Novi
2003 - Ken Semelsberger, Port Huron
2004 - Marco Marcet, Frankenmuth
2005 - Jim Feldkamp, Troy
2006 - Dan McShannock, Midland; Dail Prucka, Monroe
2007 - Keith Eldred, Williamston; Tom Hickman, Spring Lake
2008 - Jamie Gent, Haslett; William Newkirk, Sanford-Meridian
2009 - Paul Ellinger, Cheboygan
2010 - Rudy Godefroidt, Hemlock; Mike Boyd, Waterford
2011 - Eric C. Federico, Trenton
2012 - Bill Mick, Midland
2013 - Jim Gilmore, Tecumseh; Dave Hutton, Grandville
2014 - Dan Flynn, Escanaba
2015 – Hugh Matson, Saginaw
PHOTO: From left, Gina Mazzolini and Gary Hice receive Forsythe Awards on March 26 from Benton Harbor athletic director Fred Smith.
Working Through Transfer Trends
December 2, 2015
By Jack Roberts
MHSAA Executive Director
One of the responsibilities that schools have asked organizations like the MHSAA to execute is the management of transfer student eligibility. Historically, many associations have linked eligibility to residence ... thus, for some the regulation has been called the “Residency Rule” or “Transfer/Residency Rule,” not merely the “Transfer Rule.”
Over the years, as society became more mobile and families less stable, these rules became more and more complicated; and now, for most state high school associations, this is the regulation that consumes the most (or second) most pages of their handbooks. Over the years, this has also been the regulation most frequently challenged in court.
Over the years, some states have relaxed their transfer rule and others have refined their transfer rule. In either case, the transfer rule remains an imperfect rule, an imperfect net. Sometimes this net snags students who should not be made ineligible, and for those situations all associations have arranged some kind of waiver or appeal process.
And sometimes, and much less easily solved, the net fails to catch the situations it really should ... the transfers that are not hardship related or the result of some very compelling educational need, but those that are obviously for athletic reasons. It is those that we have been most focused on in Michigan.
Our first effort to get at the most problematic transfers was the adoption for the 1997-98 school year of what we called the “Athletic-MOTIVATED Transfer Rule” ... Regulation I, Section 9(E). Examples of an athletic-motivated transfer are included in the rule. The rule only applies to transfer students who do NOT meet any of the stated exceptions for immediate eligibility and are ineligible for one semester under our basic transfer rule. They become ineligible for 180 scheduled school days if there is a finding that the transfer was more for athletics than any other compelling reason.
This effort has not been successful enough because it requires a school that loses a student to another school to promptly allege to the MHSAA office, with supporting documentation, that the transfer was more for athletic reasons than any other compelling reason. The receiving school then must respond to those allegations. Then the executive director makes the decision. The unfortunate result of applying this rule is that it usually causes hard feelings between the schools, and hard feelings toward the executive director by the school decided against. In 17 years, schools have invoked this rule only 45 times.
Our more recent effort to address the most egregious athletic transfers resulted from requests from the coaches associations for wrestling and basketball, which were watching too many students change schools for athletic reasons, usually related to an out-of-season coaching relationship. The new rule – the “Athletic-RELATED Transfer Rule” – is Regulation I, Section 9(F). The difference between Section 9(E) and the newer Section 9(F) is that in 9(F) one school does not have to make and document allegations before staff can act. If MHSAA staff discover or are informed of any of the circumstances listed in 9(F), we can act. Again, the rule only applies to those transfer students whose circumstances do NOT meet one of the automatic exceptions. It applies only to students who are ineligible for a semester under the basic transfer rule. If there is a finding that one of the athletic related “links” exists (usually an out-of-season coaching relationship), then this transfer student who would be ineligible for one semester is made ineligible for 180 scheduled school days.
So far, it appears that 9(F) may be a better deterrent than 9(E). It has been referenced when students are rumored to be transferring, and it has stopped many of those transfers before they occur. We expect 9(F) to be an even better deterrent in 2015-16 because the rule has been broadened to apply to administrators and parents (not just coaches) and to address directing and coordinating athletic activities (not just coaching).
We have said that if this latest effort does not succeed in slowing athletic transfers, then the next step is 180 days of ineligibility – at least in any sport the student played in high school previously – for all transfer students who do not qualify for an exception that permits immediate play. I fear that would catch far too many students who should not be withheld so long from competition and could lead to a period like the early 1980s when the MHSAA, at the request of the state principals association, adopted the core of the transfer rule we have today and which resulted in a period of busiest litigation for the MHSAA when, at one time, the association had more than a dozen cases in court simultaneously on transfer matters. We’ve got to make the current rules work – with tweaks, perhaps; but not with radical revision.