FAYETTE, Ohio — So many stories. So many names. So many wins. Where to begin?
Might as well start with John and Mary Colegrove. They are in their late 60s and are Fayette lifers.
Their daughter, Amy, is a fifth-grade teacher and is married to the boys head basketball coach, Todd Mitchell, also a Fayette product. Their son, Ryan, is an assistant coach. Their grandson, Ryan’s boy Tharyn, is the starting point guard. A great-nephew, Joel Smith, also starts. The younger grandkids all play in “mini” leagues and are future Eagles.
John and Mary must spend half their winter lives sitting in Fayette’s gym. “Bleacher butt?” Mary said, laughing and doing a little pirouette. “Look at this poor thing.”
Welcome to Fayette. It’s about family and basketball. Basketball and family.
And the Fayette family has never enjoyed a basketball season like this one.
The boys team beat Edon on Friday, 55-19, with fans crammed together on Senior Night to finish the regular season 21-1. The girls won a sectional title on Saturday at Bryan to improve to 23-1.
Tonight, the girls play a district semifinal in Archbold. The boys have a one-game sectional at Swanton on Friday.
It is tournament time in big cities and little villages across the state. And in those tiny places where an electrical glow rises out of seemingly endless farm fields, well, it is special. In Fayette’s case, will the last person to hit the tourney trail please turn out the lights?
Brothers Jerry and Dan Seiler were pretty fair players at Fayette in the 1970s and ’0s, respectively. They’ll be on the tourney bandwagon this week, Jerry to watch son Jerad, arguably the star of the boys team, and Dan to cheer for daughter Kaela, one of two 1,000-point career scorers on the girls team. They’ll be a dad one night, an uncle the next.
“It's been an unbelievable year for both teams,” Jerry said. “I hate to see it come to an end and maybe it won’t for a while yet. It's been a blessing for the community.”
Jerry said he played on some “so-so teams, but Dan’s teams were pretty good. I think his ’82 team had the record for wins, at least until Todd’s team.”
Todd is the player who became the boys’ head coach, and that would have been in ’86 when the Eagles won 17 games before losing in the district tournament to Ottawa Hills.
“Our old gym was half the size of this one,” Todd Mitchell recalled. “People from all over the district would line up early and wait for hours to get tickets.”
The district is in Gorham Township on the western edge of Fulton County, roughly 44 miles west of Toledo on U.S. 20, not far south of the Michigan line. Fayette has a population of about 1,280 — the township approaches 2,400 — and the 1,300-seat gym in a beautiful, eight-year-old school building that serves all grades is often not big enough.
Folks in the Toledo metro area might know Fayette for the Bull Thistle Arts Festival or for the Reed Organ Festival at the Opera House, which dates to 1889, or for the camper-friendly, nearby Harrison Lake State Park.
But this time of year, with chilly winds if not snow blowing across the fields, there is only one topic at Freddy’s Bar & Grill, where postgame crowds flock for a burger and a beer, or R & H Restaurant, where many gather the next morning for a breakfast favorite called the Haystack.
Well, two topics, really. A lot of these folks are farmers — Jerry Seiler works 1,500 acres — so weather is always on the agenda. But the rest of the talk is all Fayette basketball.
“There’s a pretty good buzz around town,” Jerry said, in something of an understatement.
“This town is always 100 percent behind our teams, win or lose,” said John Colegrove, retired now after 47 years at ZF-TRW, an auto-related manufacturing plant in Fayette. “And with these teams, wow, everybody is fired up. There’s never been a senior class to match this one.”
Not even the Rodney Bingman — yes, another Colegrove son-in-law — class that made it to the regional finals in 1995 before running into eventual state champ Liberty-Benton.
That's as far down the tournament trail as any Fayette team has gone. So far.
The Eagle girls are a week ahead of the boys, tourney wise, and two wins closer to their ultimate destination.
And, as far as the young ladies may go, 93-year-old Pauline Jones will go with them. She is post player Alexis Fruchey’s great-grandmother, and the lifelong Fayette resident has missed only one game for as long as Alexis has been playing.
“She was in the hospital, but she listened to that one on the radio,” Alexis, a 6-foot-2 senior, said. “She is definitely my No. 1 fan and it means everything to me to be able to look up in the stands and see her there.”
As for Fruchey’s other biggest fans, her parents, Corey and Melanie, both are former Fayette athletes.
Family and basketball.
When Kaela Seiler scored her 1,000th point earlier this season, she joined fellow senior Taylor Griffiths, who did it a year ago. Since veteran coach Kevin ‘Scoop’ Miller arrived at the start of the 2013-14 season, the Eagle girls are 59-12.
“I walked in to a bunch of good kids,” Miller said. “I mean, great kids, on and off the court. But there is a challenge. The families here have been invested in basketball for years, for generations. Everyone is so close knit and family-oriented, and they expect the coach to take good care of their kids. A big responsibility, yes, but a really good thing.
“It’s part of the beauty of small-town basketball. We have a meet-the-team night before the season. No game, just a get-together. And the whole town comes out.”
And the fans never stop coming out, home or away.
Miller and the girls’ unabashed No. 1 fan, principal Jon Molter, are the rarest of people in Fayette — outsiders who have fallen in love with the village, the families, and especially with the students.
Todd Mitchell once left, getting his degree at the University of Toledo and spending several years as an assistant coach in basketball and football at several schools in Toledo.
He returned to accept the Fayette head coaching job in 2000, planning to “stay for a few years, build my resume and maybe get back to the City League in Toledo as a head coach. But then a monkey wrench got thrown my way.”
Yes, Mitchell fell in love, too. With Amy Colegrove. Now they have a second-grade daughter and a fourth-grade son — they’re the team managers — and a sixth-grade son who video-tapes all games for the coaching staff. Oh, yeah, they all play in the “Mini-Eagles” leagues that keep the Fayette gym jumping from sunup to sundown on Saturdays.
And when that league ends play, a few of the kids might head over to Ryan Colegrove’s house. You’ve never seen anything like it.
The assistant coach, who once was the girls’ head coach and led Fayette to a regional berth, raised the roof on his house a few years back and built a monster-sized rec room on the second floor that includes, yes, a hardwood basketball court. Since he's the art teacher, it has an Eagle painted on the floor, and the walls are adorned with Fayette sports memorabilia from through the years.
Superintendent Erik Belcher, an All-Ohio basketball player back in the day at Hilltop High in nearby West Unity, has seen just about everything. But he got a look at the Colegrove indoor court for the first time a few days ago and even his jaw dropped. And, yes, he had to take a couple shots.
So, by the time Fayette’s boys get to Mitchell they’ve been dribbling for a while on any number of courts, indoors and out. There aren’t too many driveways without a hoop.
The coach who didn’t intend to stick around all that long won his fourth league title this season and, despite some lean years early on, is approaching 175 wins with the Eagles.
His teams do it with structured offense and suffocating defense. Opponents have been held to scoring totals in the teens and 20s in 11 games this year.
The offense starts by tapping two talented big men, 6-4 Jerad Seiler and 6-8 Tristen Bates, who could be football stars but for the fact Fayette doesn’t have football.
“Yeah, we’re a pretty big part of things,” Jerad said. “Everything starts inside, but when we kick it out we have guards who are great shooters.”
When he and his teammates aren’t playing, they’re in the stands watching the girls team. And vice versa.
“We’re all friends,” Jerad said. “It’s cool we’ve both had such really good seasons.”
That success has kept athletic director Barb Figgins, also an assistant girls’ coach and one of the better athletes in Fayette history, busy in the ticket office. The only person busier may be Bates’ 6-6, 230-pound brother Kaleb, a junior who doesn’t play basketball but may be NW Ohio's biggest, most intimidating mascot when he dons the Eagle outfit for boys and girls games.
Molter is in his second year as Fayette’s principal. He was nosing around a storage room last summer when he unearthed a “junk box” and found some dusty, heavy old trophies that he cleaned up and displays in his office.
The oldest, from 1936, indicates Fayette was the Tri-County champion. Then there’s a trophy earned in 1954 for winning the Fulton County Tournament.
“Whenever one of our basketball players is in my office, I point at those and tell the kids we need some new trophies,” Molter said.
The 2015-16 Eagles are doing their part. Both teams captured Buckeye Border Conference championships and the girls have a sectional title in hand. Plus, Fayette scored a rare daily double with both teams finishing first in Division IV of The Blade's polls.
So Molter will have some shiny new hardware on the shelves.
Now, an entire village, in this case one big family, is hitting the tourney trails and holding its collective breath to see where it all might end.
Contact Blade sports columnist Dave Hackenberg at: [email protected].
First Published February 24, 2016, 9:22pm