Tuscola County Sports

Tri-Valley Turnover. At the present moment, it looks as though the Tri-Valley East conference will have a total of four new head coaches come this fall. In Vassar , 10-year head coach Vince Leveille has moved on (check story on previous blog) and his replacement at the top spot is his defensive co-ordinator from a year ago, Jason Kiss. Kiss is a Nouvel graduate who played collegiately at SVSU. He previously held the same defensive co-ordinator position for five years at Nouvel before being hired for the same position and as boy's track coach before the 2006-07 school year at Vassar. Kiss seems like a good coach, although he has no previous head coaching experience at the varsity level. Vassar administration is reportedly banking a lot on Kiss due to his background as both a player and a coach at Nouvel. I hope he's successful, but I also hope he realizes that he's in for a lot of work. Vassar has not had a competitive program for a lot of years; there were times in the ea...

Rocket power. This Thursday, the Reese Rockets baseball team is playing Bay City John Glenn at the Dow Diamond in Midland, which is the home of the Great Lakes Loons. John Glenn is playing a doubleheader, facing Reese at 5:30 and then Birch Run at 7:00. I'm going to be covering the game for the Advertiser and I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't been to the stadium yet, but from what I've heard from those who have been, the initial reports are all good. I've yet to hear one bad word about the field or the stadium; everyone says that the views of the field are great, the seats are comfortable and the scoreboard is huge! It is a great opportunity for these kids to be the first high school teams to play on the new field...and it apparently wasn't cheap. The cost to rent the field for play was $2,000, with John Glenn having to cough up half and Reese and Birch Run splitting the rest. The Rockets are not off to the best start, but this might be just the k...

Tuscola County Invite crowns two. Vassar easily repeated as the champs of the Tuscola County Invitational on Saturday. In three games, the Vulcans scored a total of 35 runs; they defeated Millington in the opener 14-0, handed USA a 10-6 defeat and continued to pour it on in finals, winning by a score of 11-5 over Mayville. There was a lot of good baseball over the whole day, but the hitting from the Vassar squad may have been the most impressive thing. Not only was their hitting solid, but their pitching was tough as well. Against Millington, Vassar's Kyle Lemcke walked the leadoff hitter and then responded by retiring the next fifteen hitters, holding on to the no-hitter. Lemcke pitched the final two+ innings vs USA and the seventh vs Mayville; in all, he threw 10 and 2/3 innings with no runs allowed on Saturday. The Vulcans looked good in the field, making all the plays they needed to make against Mayville, and the hitting kept firing on all cylinders throughout the game, as t...