The Turnaround Season: The Story of the 2010 Marquette Senior High School Football Team.
The 2010 Marquette Senior High School football season was a story of how Friday Night Lights came to life in a football-sleepy community for the unlikeliest of teams. Entering the season, Marquette had not won a game since October 2007 when the team’s seniors were freshmen at MSHS. The previous season, another winless campaign, had ended with the 2009 team scoring 28 points over the course of the entire season.
It was a common joke around the community that football season at Marquette was just to pass time until hockey started in mid-October, but the 2010 season was different. For a school who had made the modern MHSAA playoffs just once in school history (2001), simply being competitive in all nine games would have been deemed a success.
The first big indicator that the 2010 season was going to be different came with finding a new head coach. With Dave L’Huillier taking the helm, change was on the horizon. L’Huillier had spent the previous two seasons as head coach of strong freshman teams, including a 2009 squad that went undefeated and won a Great Northern Conference title. His other experience included over two decades of coaching at multiple levels of the football and basketball programs. His first and most important task was trying to build a foundation for the program. In week nine of the 2009 season, a 38–6 loss to Calumet, only 16 players were on the Marquette sidelines. On opening day of the 2010 season, 37 players took the field against Petoskey.
Even with all the positive momentum that was taking place, there was still plenty of adversity that Marquette faced, playing in the Great Northern Conference against the biggest schools in the Upper Peninsula. After two years of facing freshman foes, Coach L’Huillier would find himself across the field from some of the greatest coaches that the UP has ever seen, including Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Famers Ken Hofer from Menominee, his son Chris at Kingsford, Dan Flynn of Escanaba, and a pair of potential future inductees in Negaunee’s Paul Jacobson and Calumet’s John Croze.
Personnel-wise, Marquette’s offense was led by skilled backs Garrett Pentecost and Kasaim Koonala, who provided a thunder and lightning rushing approach that gave defenses fits. Colin Terry and Chris Forsberg were shifty, athletic receivers who doubled as cornerbacks. In the trenches, Zak Green, Tanner Delpier, Alex Urbiha, James McClung, Josh Bullock, Joe Iwanicki, and Ryan Frazier pulled double duty — providing lanes for the MSHS rushing attack while also stopping opposing running games in the run-heavy brand of UP football. Koonala, Josh Johnson, Forest Gilfoy and Craig Cairati led a corps of linebackers who created big plays all season for a defense that was pitted against a wide variety of offensive looks throughout the season. From the get-go at the first scrimmage, anyone who watched this team could see the improvement. On the other hand, this was still a program coming off of a season in which they had collected over two times as many losses as touchdowns scored. With all that in mind, the 2010 season exceeded all expectations.
The reason I want to tell this story is twofold. One, it’s a story worth telling, and two, we’re in need of a good story. Faced with the prospect of no high school football and a lack of new stories being created this fall, there’s no better time to revisit that 2010 season than now as it turns 10 years old. A decade ago, as an energetic senior, I had the pleasure of watching the team’s resurgence from a front row seat in the radio booth as part of the MSHS broadcast team alongside John Thomsen. During the downtime brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, I reviewed stacks of notes for each week’s game to produce a game-by-game analysis of the program’s community-defining resurrection. Each Friday for the next 11 weeks, a new article will be posted on the Medium platform and across social media detailing the game that was played during that given week of the season.
Author’s note: Doing a project this big cannot be done alone. Thank you to Terry Delpier for allowing me to use her pictures from the season, and to Drew VanDrese for editing the content of each article.
Next week, the team kicks off their year against Petoskey. The schedule goes as follows
Week 1 Petoskey August 28
Week 2 Sault Ste. Marie September 4
Week 3 Cheboygan September 11
Week 4 Escanaba September 18
Week 5 Gladstone September 25
Week 6 Kingsford October 2
Week 7 Menominee October 9
Week 8 Negaunee October 16
Week 9 Calumet October 23
MHSAA Playoffs Round One Bay City John Glenn October 30
MHSAA Playoffs Round Two Cadillac November 6
