Football

Five things about this football team that are not Nick Mansour

Our front page is about the quarterback. Our broadcast Wednesday was mostly about the quarterback. I have been assured by my own sports editor that the next four issues will also be substantially about the quarterback.

So here are five things that are not.

1. This offensive line has four returning starters and nobody has said a word about it

Kobe Lookebill and Troy DeGayner were both all-state honorable mention. Reed Thompson is a junior who grew an inch and a half over the summer and is now, by the training staff's measurement, the biggest human being in this school. Devon Ashcraft is a second-year starter at guard. The only new piece is center, where sophomore Wyatt Kroll is replacing a four-year starter and has, per Coach Barrow, "been fine, which for a sophomore center is a rave review."

Last year Fenton allowed nine sacks in nine games. Nine. In a league where teams throw it thirty times a night, that number is absurd, and roughly none of the credit for it has gone to the people who earned it.

2. Chase Lynch is going to play college football and it is not close

Eastern Michigan has been to two practices. Ferris State has been in contact. He had eleven sacks last year against offensive tackles who are not going to be the worst tackles he ever sees, and he plays with his hands in a way you usually have to teach somebody for three years.

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

3. The defense lost seven starters

This is the actual reason to be nervous about this season and nobody wants to talk about it because it is boring. Fenton returns four defensive starters. Four. The secondary is Ben Haijcar and three people who have combined for six varsity starts.

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

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

That is not a joke I am making. That is what he told me. I asked him where and he said "neck, mostly," and then he made me feel it, and I have not fully recovered from the experience.

He also caught eighteen passes last year, which surprises everyone including, apparently, opposing linebackers.

5. Zach West might be the story of this season

He is a junior, he is 6-3, and he has run a verified 4.6 in the school's own testing, which is the only verified number anybody on this offense has. He caught 22 balls last year in a rotation. He is now WR2 and Fenton runs enough three-receiver stuff that he will see the field on nearly every snap.

He also, when I asked him about it, said "I don't know, we'll see," and then looked at the floor for a while. So we will see.

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Profile

The other quarterback

Ben Haijcar spent eight years becoming Fenton's quarterback, lost the job in one spring to a kid 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 part.

Ben Haijcar has been asked about Nick Mansour four hundred times. That is his estimate, not mine, and he arrived at it by counting one week last November and multiplying.

"Some of them are nice," he said. "Most of them are nice, actually. That's the part that's hard to explain. Nobody's being mean to me. It's just — every single conversation."

He started at quarterback at Fenton as a sophomore. He had been the quarterback at the middle school before that, and at the youth level before that, going back to when the coaches picked a kid to be the quarterback because he was the biggest one who could throw it over everybody. That was Ben, at nine years old, and it stayed Ben for eight straight years.

Then, in March of 2025, a student personnel assistant told him his back hip was leaking.

"I said something back to him I'm not going to repeat," Ben said. "And then I threw one and it came out like a rocket and I just stood there."

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

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

What he does now

Four interceptions last year. That is the most by a Fenton defensive back since 2018. He plays free safety like somebody who has spent eight years learning how quarterbacks think, because he has.

"I know what they're going to do," he said. "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."

Coach Pellerin, in the second of his two sentences: "He plays the position from the quarterback's seat. You can't teach that and I didn't teach it."

Ben will also take a package of snaps at quarterback this fall. Same as last year. He said the word "package" with a very small pause in front of it.

The part he doesn't say out loud

Twice during a forty-minute conversation, Ben started a sentence, stopped, and said "never mind."

The third time, I waited him out.

"It's my senior year," he said. "That's it. That's the whole thing. Everybody wants me to either be mad or be a good guy about it, and the actual thing is that it's fine and it's 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 something a person says three times.

"He apologizes to me," Ben said. "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 it's like — you're reminding me that there's a thing to be sorry about."

What did Nick say?

"He told me I'm the best safety in this league and that it's on the film." Ben laughed, once, short. "Which is the correct answer. He's always got the correct answer. It's exhausting."

Where he's going

Ben has, quietly, gotten more actual college interest than the quarterback. Two Division III programs have contacted him about playing safety. Adrian sent a letter in July. Nobody at this school knows that, including — until he said it out loud in a meeting room on Tuesday — anybody on the student newspaper.

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

It is not the headline.

"I'm serious, Pearce."

It is not the headline.

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I am begging you to wear orange

Hi. I run the student section this year. Here is everything 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 somebody wears a black hoodie and says it's a blackout and then eleven people follow him and we end up looking like a parking lot.

Gates open at 5:30. The good section fills by 6:15. If you show up at 6:55 and complain that you can't see, I want you to understand that I am going to have very little sympathy and I am going to show it on my face.

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

Chants. We have four. They are all fine. We are not doing the one from last year that got us a talking-to from Mr. Bakker. I know it was funny. It's not happening.

Please do not chant at the other team's kicker. He's seventeen. He's from Clio. He did nothing to you.

Now the personal part.

Last year 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 part of. Nine and zero. I stood on a bleacher every Friday and screamed until I couldn't do my homework.

And then we lost in the second round without him and about six hundred people spent the winter saying "yeah but if Nick had played."

Here's what I think. I think that is a terrible way to be a fan and I think we should stop.

This team is forty-eight kids. Seven starters on defense are new. The center is a sophomore. Somebody named Wyatt is going to snap the ball to the person we have all decided is the main character, and if Wyatt snaps it badly nothing else in this article matters.

So: come to the game. Wear orange. Yell for the offensive line, who nobody yells for, ever, in the history of football. Yell for Ben. Yell for Peyton Coffman, who has never had a single person chant his name and who would be so happy.

And when they're bad — they will be bad at some point, that's how a season works — be there anyway. That's the whole thing. That's the only part of this that's actually up to us.

See you Friday. Orange. I will find you.

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Arts

"Nocturne," or: the year the band decided to make things hard on itself

Every fall Mr. Perkins tells the marching band that this year's show is difficult. He has said this 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 everyone reading this to understand that he is not lying this time.

It is in 7/8 for the entire second movement. The pit has a passage that Perkins described, out loud, in front of us, as "genuinely too hard for a high school band, which is why we're doing it." Four sophomores looked like they were going to cry. One did, a little, and I am not naming her because she has been great about it since.

What it's actually about

Perkins wrote the arrangement over the summer, which he does not usually do. It is built around a piano line — there is a solo piano feature in the third movement, played on the field, on a real upright that the boosters are going to have to move onto the turf and off again in under ninety seconds.

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

The obvious answer is not available on Friday nights.

Asked directly whether the piano feature was written for Nick Mansour, Perkins said, "It was written for whoever's sitting on the bench in October." Then he said, "Next question." Then, about a minute later, unprompted: "It's a hard part. There's about one person in this building who could play it right now and he has other commitments."

The schedule

Full-field rehearsals Monday and Wednesday, 6:00 to 8:30, starting the 24th. Sectionals Tuesday. First performance is the halftime of the Clio game, and we will be performing approximately forty percent of a show, which is normal for Week 1 and which will still be better than what Clio's band is doing.

Sorry. That was unprofessional. I stand by it.

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