Local prep summer league gets underway with new home at Wyandotte Roosevelt – The News Herald

WYANDOTTE — When it comes to prep sports, volleyball may be about as active as any during the summer months, if not more.

Over at Roosevelt High School, several different schools competed in a slew of modified matches. It’s the latest site for the local summer league following its inception, which originated elsewhere altogether in years past.

“The first summer leagues we were invited to were out at Schoolcraft College,” Roosevelt varsity head coach Alan Edwards said. “It was difficult for all of these Downriver teams to get out there. They were trying to do freshman, junior varsity, and varsity at exactly the same time. That made it difficult, especially if you had kids on vacation.

“Then the next year, they wanted to do it twice a week,” Edwards continued. “I thought, ‘how in the world were we going to pack these kids up and go back and forth twice a week?’”

The glaring logistical issues for the teams in the area effectively resulted in breaking off and forming their own local-based summer league, which is something of a relaxed and condensed version of the annual News-Herald Invitational held in October during the school year.

In addition to Edwards’ Roosevelt squad, programs from Allen Park Cabrini, Dearborn Divine Child, Dearborn Edsel Ford, Flat Rock, Lincoln Park, Trenton, and Southgate Anderson were all on hand.

“We took over to bring it here to Downriver, because it was hard to go out (to Schoolcraft College),” Roosevelt varsity head coach Alan Edwards said on Wednesday. “You want to try and make it work. We struggled with the, ‘everybody plays at the same time’ approach.

“We eventually stumbled into the format that we’re doing now, one that we liked.”

Roosevelt High School is the third and latest stop of the league. Following Schoolcraft, it first migrated to Metro City Church in Riverview, which allowed for for matches to run concurrently on three courts. That same alignment then transitioned over to the Taylor Sportsplex for a couple more summers.

Now, setting up shop on his team’s own floor has allowed for expansion in the league.

“I didn’t think that they would let me, but I asked,” Edwards said. “But with four courts, we can now have eight teams instead of six.”

While they have neutralized a lot of the obvious travel and commitment woes from years prior, Edwards says they also carried over a lot of the concepts from the original Schoolcraft-based league. Among those was playing in 20-minute “waves” and seeing both varsity and JV players get garner playing time.

“It has worked so much better,” Edwards said. “If you had some kids that were out of town, you can slide some (sub-varsity kids) in and figure out where to play them. We have kids that are playing up and down, so we’re trying to figure out where they go.”

The offseason is always going to vary from one program to the next. Edwards knows that as much as anyone.

It’s why he is cognizant of making sure all of his players, regardless of experience level, are finding time to hone their craft during the summer.

“Everybody does it differently,” Edwards said. “We probably have only 30-40 percent of our players active in club. We use this to teach skill and to get some weight training in. We’ll also do some position traning. For us and a few other schools, this is our chance to give them an opportunity to play. Some teams will run just open gyms as well.

“We try to do a little bit of it all, to try and catch the kids up.”

An added bonus, Edwards says, is the high level of camaraderie between he and his counterparts in the sport.

Several of the schools that will be members of the league this summer are returning regulars in some capacity. Plus, most of the coaches, if not all of them, cross paths outside of the high school season, if not work together on the club circuit.

Edwards on Wednesday said one goal is to expand the summer league even further, perhaps with teams from outside the Downriver region altogether. And whether or not it remains at Roosevelt beyond this summer remains to be seen.

Regardless of its location, what will remain is a strong fraternity of coaches dedicated to teaching the game and developing players, even if it is in a more abbreviated, less intense atmosphere.

“It’s a major learning thing,” Edwards said. “It’s why we don’t even keep score. Every 10 minutes, we’re changing lineups to see what works and what doesn’t. You can change it into working on different drills so it’s not just serving. Later in the year, we may work on balls coming in from the sideline, getting faster on defense and offense.

“Since everybody knows each other, nobody has a problem doing that.”

Originally Published: June 26, 2025 at 2:15 AM EDT