Page one is "Nobody called." The front page also carries "He asked three times" and the correction that goes with it. Everything else in the first issue of the year is below, in the order it ran.

Football

Five things about this football team that have nothing to do with Nick Mansour

Page one is about the quarterback. So is the other page-one story. So was our broadcast on Wednesday. My own sports editor has told me, without any apparent guilt, that the next four issues are also going to be substantially about the quarterback.

So here are five things that are not, and I would like it noted that the third one is more likely to decide this season than anything on the front page.

1. Four of five offensive linemen are back and nobody has written a word about it

Kobe Lookebill and Troy DeGayner were both all-state honourable mention and will both be again. Reed Thompson grew an inch and a half over the summer and is now, by the training staff's own tape measure, the largest person enrolled at this school. Devon Ashcraft is in his second year starting at guard and has opinions about being ignored that he will share with anybody holding a recorder.

The only new piece is centre, where sophomore Wyatt Kroll takes over from a four-year starter. Coach Barrow's complete evaluation of him: "Been fine, which for a sophomore centre is a rave review."

Fenton gave up nine sacks in nine games last autumn. Nine. In a league where teams throw it thirty times a night that number is close to absurd, and essentially none of the credit for it has ever landed on the five people responsible. The quarterback raises this unprompted, to everybody, every time, and it has changed nothing, which tells you roughly everything about how credit travels.

2. Chase Lynch is playing college football and there is no argument about it

Eastern Michigan has been to two practices in person. Ferris State has been in contact. He had eleven sacks last season against tackles who will not be the worst tackles he ever faces, and he rushes with his hands in a way people normally have to be taught for three years.

Asked about the recruiting attention, Lynch said "it's mostly emails," which is the most Chase Lynch sentence this newspaper has ever recorded.

3. The defence lost seven starters and this is the actual story of the season

Nobody wants to talk about this because it is not fun. Fenton returns four defensive starters. Four. The secondary is Ben Haijcar and three people with six varsity starts between them.

If this season goes wrong it will go wrong here, on a cold Friday in October, and the following week everybody in this building will talk about the offence anyway.

Defensive coordinator Rick Pellerin does not do interviews and agreed to exactly two sentences in a corridor: "We're young. We'll be better in October than August."

4. Shane Kolinski gained fourteen pounds and insists it is all in his neck

That is not a bit. That is a direct quotation. I asked where, he said "neck, mostly," and then he made me feel it, and I have not entirely recovered.

He also caught eighteen passes last year, which continues to surprise everybody including, on the available evidence, opposing linebackers.

5. Zach West might be the story nobody is telling

He is a junior, he is six foot three, and he has run a verified 4.6 in the school's own testing — the only verified athletic number anybody on this offence possesses. He caught twenty-two balls last year in a rotation. He is WR2 now, in an offence that uses enough three-receiver personnel to put him on the field on nearly every snap.

The quarterback named him on television as the thing opponents are underrating. When I asked West about that he said "he said that?" and then looked at the floor for long enough that I stopped recording.

· · ·

Profile

The other quarterback

Ben Haijcar spent eight years becoming Fenton's quarterback, lost it in one spring to a boy who had never played, and is now probably the best defensive back in the Flint Metro League. He would like somebody to write about the second half of that sentence.

Photo — Haijcar in the defensive backs' room, alone, twenty minutes before practice. Notebook open. The whiteboard behind him still carries the offence's install from the period before.

Four hundred times. That is how often Ben Haijcar has been asked about Nick Mansour, and it is his own figure, not mine. He arrived at it by counting for one week last November and multiplying, which is a thing a person only does after he has begun to feel counted.

"Some of them are nice. Most of them are nice, actually, and that is the part that is hard to explain. Nobody is being unkind to me. It is just — every single conversation."

He started at quarterback here as a sophomore. He was the quarterback at the middle school before that, and at the youth level before that, going back to the age at which a coach simply picks the biggest kid who can throw it over everybody. That was Ben at nine years old and it stayed Ben for eight consecutive years.

Then, on a Tuesday in April 2025, an unpaid student assistant who had spent that winter printing the practice scripts told him his back hip was leaking.

I want to sit on that phrase, because this whole school skips it. He was not a teammate. He was the boy who collated the paper. He had been in that field house since January, for nothing, because he had texted the head coach three times over fourteen months until somebody finally said yes.

"I said something back to him that I'm not going to repeat," Ben said. "Then one left my hand like a rocket and I just stood there looking at it."

He is the person who asked Mansour to demonstrate, and he has never once pretended otherwise, which people find surprising and which he finds irritating that they find surprising.

Did he know who Mansour was before that afternoon? "Yeah. Kind of. He gave me the sheet every day." A pause. "I don't think I ever said his name out loud. I want to be honest about that, because everybody else is going to tell you they knew."

"I handed him the ball. Everybody talks about that spring like it happened to me. It happened because of me. And I'd do it again, which is the part that really messes people up." Ben Haijcar

What he does now

Four interceptions last season, the most by a Fenton defensive back since 2018. He plays free safety like somebody who spent eight years learning how quarterbacks think, which is exactly what he is.

"I know what they're going to do. Like, I actually know. I see a formation and I know what's coming off it, because I've called it. That's a cheat code, and nobody thinks of it as a cheat code because I got it by losing my job."

Pellerin, in the second of his two sentences: "He plays the position from the quarterback's seat. That is not teachable and I certainly did not teach it."

He will also take a package of snaps at quarterback this autumn, the same as last year. He said the word "package" preceded by the briefest possible pause.

The part he does not say

Twice in a forty-minute conversation Ben began a sentence, stopped, and said "never mind." The third time, I waited him out.

"It's my senior year. That's it. That's the entire answer. Everybody wants me to either be angry or be a good guy about it, and the actual thing is that it's fine and it is also the only senior year I get. Both. At the same time. Nobody wants the both."

He said he does not blame Nick. He said it three separate times without being asked, which is either the truth or the kind of thing a person says three times.

"He apologises to me. Constantly. For a year and a half. And I finally told him this week to knock it off, because it's worse. Every time he says sorry he's reminding me there's a thing to be sorry about."

What did Nick say to that?

"He said I am the best safety in this conference and that the film proves it." Ben laughed, once, short. "Which is the correct answer. He always has the correct answer. It's exhausting."

Where he is going

Quietly, Ben Haijcar has received more genuine college contact than the quarterback has. Two Division III programs have written to him about playing safety. Adrian sent a letter in July.

Nobody at this school knew that — including, until he said it out loud in a meeting room on Tuesday, anybody on this newspaper.

"Don't make that the headline," he said.

It is not the headline.

"I'm serious, Pearce."

It is not the headline.

· · ·

I am begging you to wear orange

Hi. Nick Melero and I run the student section this year, and before anybody writes in: yes, both of us, yes he is louder, and no, louder is not the same as in charge. Here is what you need to know and then a small number of things I am asking you for personally.

Week 1 is an orange-out. Not white. Not black. Not "orange-ish." Every year one person wears a black hoodie, decides it is a blackout, eleven people follow him, and the whole east side ends up looking like a car park.

Gates open at 5:30. The good part of the section is full by 6:15. If you turn up at 6:55 and complain that you cannot see, I want you to know in advance that I will have no sympathy and that it will be visible on my face.

Seniors in front. This is not tyranny, it is simply how it has always worked, and if you are a freshman reading this: you get four years, this is year one, be patient, it is fine.

We have four chants and they are all fine. We are not doing the one from last year that got us a conversation with Mr. Bakker. I know it was funny. It is not happening.

Do not chant at the other team's kicker. He is seventeen. He is from Clio. He has done nothing to you.

Now the personal part

Last autumn the student section was better than this school deserved, and it was better because something was happening on that field that people wanted to be inside. Nine and zero. I stood on a bleacher every Friday and screamed until I could not do my homework.

Then we lost in the second round without him, and roughly six hundred people spent the winter saying "yeah, but if Nick had played."

Here is what I think. That is a miserable way to support a football team and we should stop doing it, and I include myself, because I said it too, in a Denny's, in December.

This team is forty-eight people. Seven new starters on defence. The centre is a sophomore. A boy named Wyatt is going to snap the ball to the person we have all collectively decided is the main character, and if Wyatt snaps it badly then nothing else in this column matters.

So come. Wear orange. Yell for the offensive line, which nobody has yelled for at any point in the recorded history of football. Yell for Ben, who has answered four hundred questions about somebody else and has been decent about every one of them. Yell for Peyton Coffman, who has never had one person chant his name and who would be so unbelievably happy about it.

And when they are bad — they will be bad at some point, that is what a season is — be there anyway. That is the only part of this that is actually up to us.

One more, and Melero disagrees with me, so this part is mine and not ours: please stop doing the chant with his name in it. He hates it. He will never once say he hates it. I have watched his face during it twice now and that is enough evidence for me.

See you Friday. Orange. I will find you.

· · ·

Arts

"Nocturne," or: the autumn the band volunteered for something it may not survive

Every autumn Mr. Perkins informs the marching band that this year's show is difficult. He said it in 2023, 2024 and 2025. In 2024 the show was Carnival and we learned it in nine days.

This year the show is called Nocturne and I need every person reading this to understand that on this particular occasion he is telling the truth.

The entire second movement is in 7/8. The pit has a passage Perkins described, out loud, to our faces, as "genuinely too hard for a high school band, which is why we're doing it." Four sophomores appeared to be on the verge of tears. One did, slightly, and I am not naming her because she has been excellent about it since.

What it actually is

He wrote the arrangement himself over the summer, which he does not normally do. It is built around a solo trombone line — sixty-one bars in the third movement, alone, out in front, on the fifty, with the whole band holding a chord underneath and nowhere on that field to hide.

Nothing Perkins has written for a student has ever been this difficult. It sits high, it is exposed, and it does not resolve anywhere near where you expect it to.

The obvious question is who plays it. He was asked at the first rehearsal and said, "We'll see."

Asked directly whether the feature was written for Nick Mansour — who held that chair for three years and has not touched the instrument since spring — Perkins said, "It was written for whoever's standing on the fifty in October." Then, "Next question." Then, about a minute later and entirely unprompted: "It's a hard part. Roughly one person in this school could handle it today, and his calendar is full."

Asked whether he has told that person the part exists, Perkins said, "He knows."

For the record, because I asked and nobody else has: the part has to be cast or cut by the first week of October. Sixty-one exposed bars cannot be learned in a fortnight by somebody who has not picked the instrument up since spring, and Perkins knows that better than anybody in this building, and he wrote it anyway, over a summer, without being asked, for a chair he has not filled.

I am a drum major and I am not supposed to editorialise about the director. I am going to, once. That is not a piece of music. That is a letter.

The schedule

Full-field rehearsals Monday and Wednesday, 6:00 to 8:30, from the twenty-fourth. Sectionals Tuesday. Our first performance is halftime of the Clio game, where we will play roughly forty percent of a show, which is normal for Week 1 and will still be better than what Clio's band is doing.

Sorry. That was unprofessional. I stand by it.

· · ·

Letters to the editor

Trimmed for length and for language, and for nothing else. Four letters arrived between June and August, which is more off-season mail than this newspaper has received in the previous six years put together.

· · ·