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Warren Mott, Romeo among teams preparing for division change at MAC media day
CLINTON TOWNSHIP – As teams gathered at Chippewa Valley high school on Tuesday for the Macomb Area Conference inaugural media day, it was the first sign that football season is right around the corner once again.
And while the season is on its way, with practices getting underway on Monday, it won’t come without changes for the MAC.
The MAC will see several teams on the move, changing divisions, including Warren Mott, which will be moving to the Red Division, and Romeo, who will be moving to the White.
After an unblemished 2013 season in the MAC White, Warren Mott is prepared for new challenges in the Red Division as the Marauders will look to build on the 10-1 record they compiled last fall.
Mott head coach Tom Milanov said that going into the Red Division, his team will be facing some of the larger schools in the entire state and will need to be ready for the depth that those teams have to offer, making for a difficult task each week.
“You know it’s going to be a tough game every week,” he said. “It’s the top division in the county and most of those schools are bigger schools. You have the first, second, fourth and ninth or tenth largest schools in the state in there. So you know that they’re going to have a lot of depth at all positions, so we have to match that by staying healthy and trying to maximize all of the players that we have.”
In the Red Division, Macomb Dakota will look to keep its hold on the division as the Cougars will be looking for a third straight division crown as they’ve put together back-to-back perfect divisional records heading into the 2014 season.
Dakota head coach Mike Giannone said that the expectations for his team are high and the Cougars and others around the program look for Dakota to have another big year and will look to not only do well in the Red once again this year, but in the postseason as well.
“Everybody expects us to be pretty good, including ourselves, but our community expects it as well,” he said. “We expect to make the playoffs, we expect to make some noise in our league and hopefully in the playoffs as well.”
With Mott, the reigning White Division champions now moved up to the Red, that leaves the White Division crown up for grabs this fall as a number of teams will be looking to jump to the top of the division.
One of those teams will be Romeo, which moves down to the White Division after compiling a 6-5 overall record last season and a 2-3 record in the Red Division.
While the Bulldogs are changing divisions, they will still see some familiar faces this fall and coach Curt Rienas still expects his team’s schedule to be a tough one from start to finish.
“Even though we’re moving to a new division, a lot of our opponents, we’ve seen before,” he said. “Port Huron and Anchor Bay are teams that we’ve played in the past couple of years and we know they have a lot of talent coming back and they were tough games for us last season. Grosse Pointe South has had a lot of success and Utica Ford, we played last year and was also in our league and our two crossover games are against Ike and Dakota.”
