Ypsilanti High's move to SEC ignites rivalries, raises competitive bar

Players and coaches at both Ypsilanti and Lincoln, which also plays in the SEC, say it’s about time for the schools to meet annually. Lincoln football coach Chris Westfall said he’s “glad we’ll have Lincoln-Ypsilanti, because the kids will get excited about it.”

But Ypsilanti also will venture west into Washtenaw County, where it will play athletically prolific high schools in Ann Arbor, Saline, Dexter and Chelsea. The league reaches into Lenawee County to include Tecumseh and Adrian; and to Monroe County, where Temperance Bedford and fellow Mega Conference refugee Monroe are based.

(See related story on the new alignment and scheduling in the SEC.)

While acknowledging the SEC is strong, Ypsilanti football coach Dave Poole rejects the notion that it’s a better football conference than the Mega was.

“I think (the players) are tired of hearing about how good some of the other teams are,” Poole said. “People tell me we’re going to have our hands full, but wasn’t Inkster good? Highland Park?”

If the Mega was comparable to the SEC in football -- and some would argue stronger in boys basketball -- contrasts might be sharper in other sports. Golf, for instance, is becoming a youth staple in many areas, contributing to strong high-school programs. But in Ypsilanti, where most children don’t grow up playing the game, it will be tough to compete against players who’ve strolled the links for years.

“Many of the teams we’re going against have the potential of being state champions, or being very high in the state,” Ypsilanti girls golf coach Devvon Wilce said. “For our kids, many of them are picking up clubs for the first time and are in the beginning stages.”

When Wilce asked her players if they had golf experience, she said two replied that they had played putt-putt.

“And that’s cool,” she said. “We start from the ground up. My hope is that the other teams will recognize that our kids are just learning the game, they’ll be sensitive to that and they’ll be helpful.”

Girls golf is just one of the sports that the SEC excels in. The schools that made up the league last year have combined for 58 MHSAA state championships and 49 state runner-up finishes since 2000.

Pioneer has won a majority of those state titles (32), but the rest are spread around squads from Dexter (10), Huron (5), Tecumseh (4), Bedford (3), Saline (2) and Chelsea (2).

And they come in nearly every MHSAA-sponsored sport: Boys tennis (9), girls swimming (9), boys swimming (6), boys cross country (6), girls track (5), girls tennis (4), softball (4), girls golf (3), boys track (3), girls bowling (2), volleyball (2), girls soccer (1), boys golf (1), baseball (1), wrestling (1) and boys soccer (1).

When the time came for Ypsilanti to make a decision on a new league, it had few options. Becoming an independent, like neighboring Willow Run did, was unappealing, athletics director Charles Fuller said.

“Being independent creates a lot of difficulties, such as filling schedules,” he said. “You have the luxury of scheduling who you want, but you’re also hemmed up.”

And with Ypsilanti being in Washtenaw County, it made geographic sense to join its fellow in-county schools in the SEC, where the road trips will be shorter and transportation costs will drop.

“The SEC was local for us,” Fuller said. “We’re looking at getting back into some old rivalries.”

Ypsilanti was in the now-defunct South-Central Conference with current SEC members Pioneer, Huron and Adrian from 1974 to 1996.

Not everyone is thrilled with the move. Tom Micallef, a longtime cross-country coach and former track coach at Ypsilanti, said his teams went from having a chance to compete for league championships each year to now completely overlooking their conference schedules.

“Last year, we won the league title with the girls and were second with the boys,” Micallef said. “I told them I’m not sure that’s in reach for us now, maybe not in my lifetime.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t go out and compete. We’re lucky, we’ve got the easiest regional we could have gotten into. We’ll be pointing at regional meets rather than league meets.”

Micallef, though, acknowledged he’s not sure what else Ypsilanti could have done, and said his program will continue with the same focus, albeit a less competitive one when it comes to league meets.

“The Mega was going down, so we had to go someplace,” he said. “In cross country, if we can’t win, we’ll at least work on personal bests and improvement.

“But when we were in the Mega league, we could always say at least you’ll have the chance to win a championship. I’m hoping now we can at least be competitive with the second half of the league.”

James Briggs covers sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at jamesbriggs@annarbor.com or 734-623-2557