SPORTS SECTION

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  MONTROSE (CCN) — The Metro Flint area has lost a baseball legend. Walt Head has passed away at age 77. Two of Head's Flint Connie Mack division 18-&-under teams were inducted into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame before he was honored with personal induction in 2016.  READ MORE  

 FLINT (CCN) — Practice is over for Flint's 2021 cast of Mott Bears. The men's program begins its 30th season tonight (Feb. 19, 2021) under Steve Schmidt as head coach on the road at St. Clair Community College.   READ MORE  

A new Davison High basketball player is in the local spotlight after a lengthy post on social media by his dad. The post takes some swipes at Grand Blanc High basketball Coach Mike Thomas. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerburg should be ashamed for allowing his platform to let Nathaniel Brown rant about his son's old coach.

 Brown is well known as a chef in the area and he's currently the owner at Chef Nate's Wings and Things. He was a great basketball player in his day under the legendary Grover Kirkland at Flint Northwestern. In fact, daddy Brown was the captain of a team as part of a starting five that also featured Kelvin Tolbert, Marcus Willis, Desmon Farmer and John Selvie.

But daddy Brown used Facebook to rip a coach who did the right thing in my book.

Brown's son violated team rules imposed by the coach, and he was released from the team.

Sports are a privilege, not a right. They provide valuable lessons for life, including the lessons of learning the harsh punishment that sometimes comes with breaking rules.

Before we invite Coach Thomas to appear Saturday morning on The Daily Gazette Sports Weekend Show to defend himself, let me give you Brown's version. Quite honestly, I don't need to hear the coach's version to deliver a verdict on my feelings about the situation. Daddy Brown sums it up pretty well why Thomas dismissed Nathaniel Brown Jr. from the team. "HE LEFT A TEAM EVENT a hour and a half early," Brown posted on Facebook.

Enough said for me. No player ever dared to leave a team event during my many years of coaching teams in hockey, baseball and basketball.

"Let’s rewind and I’ll give you the history," Daddy Brown continued. "Back on November 13th, Nate turned 18. He and his friends decided to throw a little birthday kickback. Well, little turned into big. The problem is a girl showed up to the party with COVID-19. She passed it on to kids from the party and those kids passed on to some family members.. It turned into a mess. I get a call from Nate’s coach at the time, Mike Thomas. He explained his frustration and we discussed consequences. Fast forward to January 29th. Nate made the decision to leave the team lock-in early. On that night, Mike said that Nate was off the team. That Sunday we all (Mike, Nate's Mom and Nate) had a Zoom meeting. Mike explained his frustrations. We did too. He said he made (an emotional) decision on Friday and he would let the team decide if (Nathaiel) can come back."

 The player then sent a text to his coach, saying he felt it would be better to leave the team, according to his dad's rant on Facebook.

He subsequently transferred to Davison — one of Grand Blanc's rivals in the Saginaw Valley League's South Division.

Daddy Brown complains in his social media post about how Thomas "didn't follow up with him" after the Zoom meeting as asked. He also complained about the coach not talking to him about things last season when he had concerns about his son was handled on the team.

It's right there that Daddy really lost me.

Let me enlighten Daddy here, and any other parents with similar temptations about going wild with a rip job on the coach of their son or daughter.

   With five state championships as a hockey coach in my DNA, I feel qualified to weigh in. One of my thrills in life was leading Team North to a Silver Medal at the Junior Nationals in 2000 at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs where four teams from around the USA competed for spots on Team USA's Junior Olympic squad of 18-&-under stars. No parents were consulted about their ideas on how to coach their kid or help assemble Team USA Juniors, and one common denominator among every young star there was a supportive parent.

The group dinner to announce the team included many parents coming up to thank the coaching staff members for giving their young athletes a chance at the big stage, although not being selected. Nobody ripped me for how I ran the selection camp for the juniors or how much playing time their sons were able to get. A few weeks later came an opportunity at the U.S. Olympic Center in Lake Placid to help assemble Team USA's world team of professional players for the 2000 World Championships in France. What a thrill putting on my Team USA jacket and standing inside the historic ice arena in Lake Placid where Team USA won the 1980 Olympic Gold Medal.

The 2000 team I helped assemble later went on to win the Gold Medal in France.

So Gold Medal in hand, let me lecture here on the value of sports in the Killer's Rulebook.

1) The coach is always right.

2) If you believe the coach is wrong, refer to Rule 1.

It's my guess that Coach Thomas was putting a good old-fashioned scare into Nathaniel Brown Jr. The idea of "letting the team decide if you get reinstated" is a favorite trick used in producing many, many championship teams during my coaching career in hockey, baseball and basketball. It's a trick copied from many coaching legends I was able to meet along the way. You know your players are not going to throw one of their friends off the team! But you get a star player's attention on who is in charge, in case he wants to challenge your authority again and risk the penalty of sitting in the stands on game day in street clothes.

Discipline is the key to building a championship team. Sometimes a star player needs to sit for breaking team rules or for lazy play in practice or in games. It's the way to let players learn that the coach is in charge.

Not every coach wins championships, and seldom do the ones who don't impose strict discipline.

I've had an opportunity to cover some of the greatest high school teams in the annals of Flint area sports history. I've been up close at practices and games for many of the best college coaches in our state in multiple sports as a long-time newspaper sports cColumnist and sports talk show host. The great coaches have a lot in common with what I've seen so far of Mike Thomas at Grand Blanc.

He has produced results by "winning" at Grand Blanc and last year's team would have made a run at a Class A state title. He had a solid track record of winning, too, at both the high school and college levels before coming to Grand Blanc in 2017. The 37-year-old led Kalamazoo Central High to a 92-11 record that featured ack-to-back Class A state titles in 2010 and 2011. Thomas then went to Albion College where he played in college, spending five years as an assistant before getting the Head Coach position at the school where he is the No. 2 all-time leading scorer.

Thomas, a Saginaw High product, was a four-year starter at Albion where the Britons won MIAA titles in 2003 and 2005 and made a trip to the sectional title game in the 2005 NCAA Division III Championships. He was a three-time all-MIAA first team selection and ranks third on Albion's career list for both 3-point field goals and free throws.

As a coach, he has won Michigan High School Coach of the Year honors by both the Detroit Free Press and the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan. Yet, one dad wants to use his social media platform to tell us he's a bad guy. 

His post doesn't mention how it took only three years for Thomas to transform Grand Blanc's program into the very best in all of the Metro Flint area last season.  Last year's Bobcats beat 17-0 Midland in the Saginaw Valley League championship game and beat a Flint Beecher team that had won 18 in a row. It was one of the most anticipated game in our areas in years, packing fans into Dort Federal Event Center (formerly the IMA Sports Arena) in what was the first high school game played there since 2004. The Bobcats played one of the toughest non-league schedules in the state and they were 18-3 — stopped only by COVID-19 shutting down March Madness in the second week of competition. His team was ranked No. 2 in the state when play was halted by the governor.

In this age of COVID-19, Coach Thomas gets an A-plus for how he handled the situation with Nathaniel Brown Jr., according to the way I evaluate Daddy Brown's version of how things went down on social media. 

 I will be the first, however, to suggest that some of the allegations raised against Thomas are serious and deserve an investigation by the school's athletic director and the Grand Blanc Board of Education. If Coach Kirkland, rest his soul, could weight in on his former captain's conduct in this saga — trust me: He would have recommended a a different venue to level such horrible accusations.

If true, maybe Thomas should be fired — no matter how successful he has been in his coaching career.

If not true, maybe Thomas should call a lawyer and ask about how he goes about filing a defamation lawsuit for libel. Add slander, if Brown is saying the same things he wrote about Thomas on Facebook and they are not true.

Defamation lawsuits are a horrible penalty in the USA. Although many say death and taxes are the only sure things in America, let me assure you that our Congress values one's reputation enough to preserve defamation suits as bullet proof —  even in bankruptcy. In other words, you pay a judgment for defamation, no matter what.

If you gather any assets, they can be seized and sold at auction until you pay off the judgment. No bankruptcy filing to get around not paying up.

Let's hope this Editor's Notebook rip job of a parent is the kind of medicine that other parents may not want to risk taking the next time they're mad at their child's coach when they consider using social media to throw stones.

Hug your child, encourage him or her to listen to their coach, follow the rules, play hard, practice hard and let their actions show the coach they deserve playing time. No coach is perfect, and if he or she is dealt a bad coach, teach them to deal with it. Life is hard. If the boss tells an employee not to leave early, he or she likely won't have a job.

Let's hope Nathaniel Brown Jr. stars at Davison and shakes hands with his old coach one day at center court with an apology for his dad's social media rant, and an apology for not finishing what he started with Grand Blanc basketball because I'm guessing the team would have voted to keep him in the lineup for the Bobcats.

Davison is lucky to have a great new player and let's hope the basketball career of Nathaniel Brown Jr. isn't overshadowed by his dad's rant on Facebook about his son's old coach. 
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​Mike Killbreath hosts The Morning Gazette Radio Show weekdays from 7 am until 8 am although on hiatus until March 1. He is also soon launching a new statewide syndicated TV show known as The Michigan Crusaders. He also hosts The Daily Gazette Sports Weekend Show every Saturday from 9 am until 11 am and The Daily Gazette Sports Night Show weekdays from 6-7 pm on MetroFlintNewsTalkRadio.com.
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