BENTON HARBOR (WKZO) — The football season for the Benton Harbor High School Tigers came to a crashing end last night with a drubbing by former state champs and undefeated Zeeland West, 64 to 8 in the division finals.
The Tigers have only made it this far because of former WMU head coach Elliott Uzelac guiding the team.
Uzelac has also coached at Navy, even in the NFL, but when he retired and his wife noticed that he was bored, they agreed he should take on the local High School team which hadn’t won many games in years and had not been in the playoffs since 1989.
He says he wasn’t ready for what he found, problems most coaches don’t have to deal with. His team had no practice discipline, many had not eaten all day, some could only stay a while because their families relied on them to be breadwinners.
He helped them find new jobs, found volunteers to make sure that the team ate regularly and reintroduced discipline.
Uzelac says winning a few games has made all the difference. He sees a lot of smiles in the hallways and the community support for the team has been great.
This year they won their first playoff game, and Uzelac says considering where they were, they were already winners before last night’s game even began.
This year the team and their turnaround has been profiled by ESPN, Good Morning America and The Detroit Free Press among others.
