Century of School Sports: MHSAA's Home Sweet Home
By
Rob Kaminski
MHSAA benchmarks editor
November 5, 2024
Visitors to 1661 Ramblewood Drive for the multitude of MHSAA committee meetings, in-services and other functions are sure to see the faces of Michigan’s renowned educational athletics leaders throughout the years on various recognition boards.
Absent from any of those displays is the late East Lansing resident Thomas Reck. Yet, Reck and the long-range vision of Jack Roberts were equally as vital in “restructuring” the MHSAA in the late 1990s; quite physically.
“I really wanted something along US-127 – visible from 127 – and there was a good deal of open land where the building sits now that looked to be about the right size,” recalled Roberts, who at the time was just finishing the first decade of what would be an iconic 32-year run as the executive director of the MHSAA.
There was one potential roadblock to Roberts’ dream location: There was no indication of any kind that the property was for sale; no billboard, no realty listing.
That’s because it wasn’t for sale – yet.
“I contacted a realtor, Martin Property Development, and I suggested one of their employees call upon Mr. Reck,” Roberts said. “He did that, and got a purchase price of $600,000. To me, the excitement really took place before the first shovel went into the ground.”
The deal was then approved by both parties, and development began in 1996, with Reck’s residence remaining in place atop the small hill south of the new road leading to the proposed site of the MHSAA building.
“When we bought the land, there was no road,” Roberts said. “One of the reasons it curves is that Mr. Reck was given a life lease, so we had to go around his house. It also had to navigate some protected wetland areas.”
As for the name of the road, that was the MHSAA’s choice, one which actually came quite easily. The city of East Lansing had some concerns with the new development, and expanding on an existing name for the road was the first show of good faith by the newest tenants. Keeping the name Ramblewood made sense as there was already a Ramblewood Drive at the exact intersection to the east of Coolidge Road.
“We didn’t want to come in and change a lot of things, or inconvenience the residents in that area,” Roberts said. “We kept development back from the road and kept as much nature intact as possible. Even the signs that are there now are off the road and relatively small.”
Roberts and staff needed no signs to find their way to the new digs just more than three miles north of the previous offices on Trowbridge Road.
Led by Roberts and former assistant director Tom Minter, much of the moving occurred during Christmas break of 1996. Doors to the new building were opened in January 1997, roughly seven years after Roberts first began dreaming of a new home.
The building on Trowbridge was formerly a credit union, and its structure provided some unique problems.
“In the late 1980s, around ‘88 or ‘89, we bought our first major computer, an IBM mainframe, and put it upstairs in the old building,” Roberts said. “It was about five feet high and eight feet wide and had its own room. We had to drill through concrete to wire it. I began to realize that we were going to have a hard time keeping up with things in a building that was so difficult to modernize.”
John Johnson, the MHSAA’s first communications director and a pioneer in that position among state high school associations, also reflected on the early days.
“Anything which was data-driven was jobbed out for awhile,” Johnson said. “Football playoff rankings were delivered to us once a week from a third party. We were doing everything outside the building: school databases, officials databases, penalty databases. The only thing we had inside the walls was word processing. I had the first PC in 1987.”
And, he recalled, the beast of a mainframe that took up an entire room at the expense of personnel. “Yep, it took up the whole room,” Johnson confirmed. “I was in what was called the library, which had historical books, but also old T-shirts left over from previous years’ champions.”
That lack of storage was also motivation for Roberts to find new real estate, and addressing that shortcoming was paramount in the plans.
“We had no storage, and no efficient way to receive shipments like rules books, paper, and the basic supplies we needed to run our business,” Roberts said. “That’s also why we have the lift in its current location at the new building; shipping and receiving were really important to us, along with our drop ceiling which made it much easier to run wiring as needed.”
As sparkling and expansive as the new facilities were, perhaps the best feature of all was its cost. The structure only took up a portion of the land purchased by the association, per Roberts’ vision. That left four parcels on the property for sale by the MHSAA, and with the road and utilities in place, those sections became even more valuable and enticing.
The MHSAA’s expenditures totaled roughly $1 million for the purchase of the land, road construction and utility installations. The parcels then sold for approximately $300,000 apiece.
“In the end, we had our space free of charge, and had $200,000 for furnishings,” Roberts said. The lone cost would then be the actual construction of the building, financed through a bond. And, the MHSAA could choose their neighbors, which was also part of the grand plan.
“We were going to be particular about who moved in, and that they’d be further back; not right on the road,” Roberts said. “Above all, we wanted to be good neighbors to the residents in the area and choose businesses that would be good neighbors as well.”
The other four parcels are occupied by medical practices, and the area remains a somewhat sleepy and hidden subdivision to this day.
Interestingly, and unknown to most, the MHSAA nearly held on to the parcel closest to its front door as a rental venture. That prospect led to spirited but friendly debate among Representative Council members at the time, leading to a vote on the matter of whether to sell the land or construct another building and rent space in that structure.
“There was good-natured discussion on the topic with arguments both in favor of selling and for building and renting on that last parcel,” Roberts said. “I remember on the morning of the vote, I offered the Council this to think about: We were really good at rules, really good at interpretations and administration of school sports. None of us were landlords or experts in that field.”
By a 10-9 vote, the Association would sell the final plot. “We didn’t get greedy, and history showed it was the right decision, what with the housing market landscape years later,” Roberts said. “We’d already won the lottery in a sense. Why enter into an area in which we knew little about?”
The timing of this new gem couldn’t have been any better, as the MHSAA was hosting the Section 4 meeting of state high school associations in September 1997. It was the perfect opportunity to showcase the facility with an open house attended by those in town for the meeting as well as current and former MHSAA staff and dignitaries.
Met with the now-recognizable and unique high-arching “roof” – half copper and half green, open frame – visitors were impressed. “The architect was on vacation in Florida and saw a similar building with the copper roof. When she assured me that it wouldn’t turn green over time, I agreed to do it,” Roberts said. “The design is actually still trendy, so it’s held up over time.”
Indeed it has, as verified by builders and designers currently giving the MHSAA’s home its first facelift.
“When I told people how old the building was, they couldn’t believe it, because its design has held up so well,” said MHSAA Assistant Director Dan Hutcheson, who has worked closely with contractors on building renovations during the last several months.
Even prior to this expansion and cosmetic overhaul, the MHSAA and its technology, staff were looking to the future.
“Ironically, we upgraded projectors and cameras to delve into Zoom and virtual meetings before we really even knew what they were or how valuable they could be,” Hutcheson said. “This was winter of 2020, and a couple months later, Covid hits and by luck we’re kind of prepared, at least communication-wise.”
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, once the MHSAA was back on solid footing, Executive Director Mark Uyl began to outline and identify areas for expansion and updating inside the building.
Roberts’ foresight in the initial storage and expansion areas have paid huge dividends, as plenty of space existed for new offices.
The first meeting with architects post-pandemic was in September 2022, with renovations beginning in September 2023. Now, two years later, the project is near completion.
New color schemes, video boards, LCD displays and touchscreens serve to keep the facility in stride with those to which the MHSAA’s constituents have become accustomed.
There was plenty of work behind the scenes, too, such as fixtures and plumbing which simply had exceeded their lifespan or needed to be brought up to current codes. The overall mission for the changes, as always, was to better serve the membership.
“We serve 750 member schools, with so many from those schools coming here for training, teaching and educational sessions,” Hutcheson said. “As our staff members visit schools around the state, we see video boards, electronic message boards. We needed to keep in step with the schools, and in doing so, better assist our ADs, coaches and officials with their work.”
For two people who didn’t know one another, Reck and Roberts brought countless people together since 1997 to help them do their work.
PHOTOS (Top) Clockwise from top left: The former MHSAA office on Trowbridge Road. (2) Work is underway on the new MHSAA building on Ramblewood Drive. (3) The MHSAA office on Ramblewood before recent updates that included a switch from green to gray on the exterior. (4) Now-retired assistant director Nate Hampton, far right, and others walk the upstairs hallway of the recently-built Ramblewood building. (Middle) Blueprints for the Ramblewood office exterior. (Below) Past Executive Director Al Bush (right) and his wife, Lois, were on hand for the 1997 open house hosted by then-Executive Director Jack Roberts (left) and staff. (MHSAA file photos.)
Novak Mourned, Missed After 42 Years of Telling Southwest Michigan's Stories
By
Scott Hassinger
Special for MHSAA.com
November 5, 2024
DOWAGIAC - One seat at the media table at five schools in Cass and Berrien counties will remain vacant when the 2024-25 high school basketball season tips off in a few weeks.
Scott Novak, legendary sports editor for Leader Publications for the past 42 years, won't be there to occupy his.
Novak, 63, passed away Oct. 23 following an extended illness.
Throughout his storied career, Novak earned several awards from the Michigan Press Association, The Associated Press and the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan.
Personal recognition wasn't anything Novak sought out. In fact, the Decatur native made it his crusade to see that he got the name of every athlete he covered each sports season into the newspaper at least once.
Novak formed long-lasting relationships with coaches, athletes, parents, officials and athletic directors in the communities of Cassopolis, Edwardsburg, Buchanan, Niles Brandywine and Niles High School, along with Southwestern Michigan College.
Not only did Novak cover local high school sports, but Little League and many other youth and adult recreational sports, along with professional motocross racing at the RedBud Motocross Park in Buchanan.
Novak devoted countless hours during the week and on weekends bringing thorough coverage to Southwestern Michigan. The sports pages Novak designed for the Niles Daily Star, Dowagiac Daily News, Edwardsburg Argus and Cassopolis Vigilant contained more than just stories and photos. The weekly sections Novak produced also contained an entire page or two devoted to statistics and box scores. He took great pride in including those as part of the sports section. Leader Publications is one of very few community newspapers that still does so.
Novak was passionate about his sports coverage in every community, especially Dowagiac where he resided.
Dowagiac High School's 1990 Class BB championship football team was one of the most notable stories Novak covered, along with the Chieftains' 2011 Class B semifinalist boys basketball team. Edwardsburg's 2018 Division 4 championship football run, along with a Final Four run by Niles in softball, were other big events he covered.
Ken Fox, sports editor at the Elkhart Truth, remembers a comment Novak made in the media room following Dowagiac's 35-14 win over Oxford in that 1990 Football Final at the Pontiac Silverdome.
"I'm not sure anyone could have been happier than Scott covering that Chieftains team. We both covered Dowagiac games in the tournament, and each win made Scott's smile grow bigger," Fox recalled. "Somehow we timed it right the day of the game and ended up walking into the Pontiac Silverdome together. When he was ushered right onto the field for the game, that smile was as wide as it had ever been. His first words to the rest of the media when he came into the interview room after the win over Oxford was vintage Scott."
"I told you all back in August that Dowagiac would win it," Novak said.
Robert Oppenheim, a sportswriter at the Elkhart Truth, remembers Novak for being upbeat and positive.
"Scott certainly enjoyed his high school sports and was very knowledgeable about the area,” Oppenheim said. “Personally, he was great to me. He was one of the first people to reach out to me about a job when I was looking for one after my past job experience as a sportswriter ended. I remember having a meeting with him at a Subway in Niles talking about what the job would involve. Each week we would discuss my assignment, and he was great to work with. He understood and wasn't upset when I got a full-time sports writing opportunity at the Elkhart Truth. That's the type of person Scott was. He cared about others. Heaven got a great sportswriter and an even better person."
Brent Nate, a 1997 Dowagiac graduate now in his 14th year as the school's athletic director, grew up knowing Novak.
"I've known Scott my entire life. Looking back, I now realize how special it was to have the local sports editor there covering our middle school football games. You always knew there would be an article on the game in Saturday's newspaper," Nate said.
Nate remembers fondly the night Novak visited his home to interview his older brother after Scott Nate was selected by the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1994 Major League Baseball Amateur Draft.
"I just remember the great interest he took in getting to know our family that night. Later when I returned to Dowagiac as athletic director, we rode together to several games,” Brent Nate said. “Scott was a great advocate for high school sports, and what he did for Dowagiac athletics will never be duplicated."
The Dowagiac athletic department will have Novak's empty seat on display this winter in the exact spot where he regularly sat during home basketball games.
Edwardsburg football coach Dan Purlee remembers Novak riding the bus with the team to playoff games when Purlee coached at Cassopolis.
"I always thought very highly of Scott and got to know him really well. He just really loved the Cass and Berrien County area in terms of covering high school sports and did a tremendous job," Purlee said.
Josh Hood, Niles Brandywine's assistant principal and varsity girls basketball coach, first met Novak when Hood was a student-athlete at the school.
"Scott just loved sports, and it was more than just a job to him,” Hood said. “He was very passionate about what he did. I'll remember all the laughs we had in the Bobcat Den and just sitting around talking to him before games and all the friendly banter."
Novak was nominated by Hood as a media member to BCAM's Hall of Honor in 2022.
"It was an easy decision to nominate Scott. I was so excited that he was selected in his first time on the ballot. The articles he wrote were unbelievable," Hood said.
On the day of Novak's passing, Niles Brandywine athletic director David Sidenbender left the school's football stadium lights on overnight in his memory.
"I got to know Scott pretty well when I attended and played baseball at Southwestern Michigan College. He was always fair in his writing and always showed interest in other people's opinions about what he put in the paper," Sidenbender said.
"We will always feel Scott's presence. He always made our kids feel special by interviewing them after covering our games. He will be greatly missed."
Matt Brawley knew Novak both as an athlete and more recently as Niles’ athletic director.
"Scott was a staple in Southwestern Michigan sports. He was very accessible and he knew his stuff,” Brawley said. “He really enjoyed the area and covered me as a player during our District championship and Final Four runs. I also was privileged to work with him during my time at Cassopolis and Niles as AD. He was just an amazing human being, a good friend and was there for everything. You could trust him if you told him stuff off the record as well.”
Brawley set up a table in Novak's memory at last Friday's home football playoff game with Paw Paw. The table contained candles, Novak's photo and a Niles Vikings hat as a memorial to him.
"Scott was the ultimate writer who was an even better human being,” Niles varsity boys basketball coach Myles Busby said. “I can see him, even now, sitting in his chair in the corner of our gym. He had an incredibly warm and welcoming presence about him that made it easy to talk to him. I always enjoyed talking to him as a student-athlete, but I found great appreciation learning more about him during my time as head coach.”
Niles senior tailback Sam Rucker stated that Novak's presence at the games never went unnoticed.
"It means a lot to us to see the media at our games. Just having him at the games inspired us and made everyone feel good," Rucker said.
Sports weren't the only thing Novak covered for Leader Publications. He also enjoyed country and classic rock music and covered many popular artists when they appeared at area venues. He conducted interviews with Tommy James and Kenny Loggins, along with several other stars.
Outside of work, Novak enjoyed being a father to his daughter Kirsten, who survives him.
Scott Hassinger is a contributing sportswriter for Leader Publications and previously served as the sports editor for the Three Rivers Commercial-News from 1994-2022. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Niles High School set up a memorial table in honor of Scott Novak at Friday's home Division 4 playoff game against Paw Paw. (Middle) Novak, right, conducts a postrace interview with former professional motocross and supercross racer Mike LaRocco at the RedBud MX track in Buchanan during the Red Bud Trail Nationals several years ago. (Below) The Dowagiac High School athletic department will honor Novak by keeping his vacant chair present in the school gymnasium throughout the upcoming 2024-25 basketball season. (Top photo courtesy of the Niles athletic department. Middle photo by Amelio Rodriguez. Dowagiac photo courtesy of the school’s athletic department.)