It’s exciting to inherit something that’s already great, and accept the challenge of keeping it that way.

For Matt Koziak, that might have meant adding his name to a long list of legendary coaches at Muskegon High School, like Leo Redmond, Harry Potter, Dave Taylor and Tony Annese.

But there’s something extra special about building a winner from scratch, and succeeding where all others had fallen short.

Koziak knows about that first-hand.

In 2009, Koziak was named head coach at Muskegon High School, replacing Annese, after serving for three years as his offensive coordinator.

The responsibility and pressure of the new job were immense. The Big Reds were – and still are – the winningest high school football team in Michigan history. They had won Division 2 state championships in 2006 and 2008, and fans expected Koziak to carry on that wave of success.

We will never know how it might have turned out, because Koziak only stayed at Muskegon for one season as head coach, after finishing 7-4. A newspaper account said he was leaving for unspecified health reasons, but he said the real reason was family.

“I had a young family,” Koziak told MuskegonSports.com. “That was 2009 and I had a five-year-old, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. I didn’t view myself as a good father or husband in those times.

“I wanted to continue that (winning) tradition, and I put more emphasis on work than I should have. I noticed that over the course of the season. I could be a little irritable or short with my family, and they deserved better than that. I was burning the candle at both ends, and maybe too much on one end.”

Koziak stepped back into an assistant coaching role at Muskegon in 2010, before accepting the head coaching position at Mona Shores a year later. The job was alluring for him, because he is a Shores graduate who played for the team back in the 90s. It was also a huge challenge, because Mona Shores football had always been mediocre at best, and often really bad.

The Sailors were coming off a 2-7 season in 2010, and were 29-61 in the 10 seasons before Koziak took over.
Mona Shores was the only prep football team in Muskegon County that had never qualified for the state playoffs.

According to some accounts, there was even talk at some point about cancelling the program altogether.

Koziak, who graduated from Mona Shores in 1993, remembers the challenge of playing for a team that expected to lose a lot every year.

“We were in the O-K Red back then, and were playing these schools that had 1,000 more kids than we did,” he said. “I remember one year playing at East Kentwood. We had 25 kids and they had like 80. The first half of the game we were in it, but a lot of our guys played both ways on offense and defense, and by the second half it got tough. My teammates and I were hard-nosed, blue-collar kids who worked our asses off. There just weren’t enough of us.”

Despite the bleak record, Koziak always had the feeling that Mona Shores had the talent to put a winner on the field, if the losing mentality could be overcome and more kids decided to play.

“I went to Mona Shores and played at Mona Shores, my brother and my friends did, too, and I really believed there could be something special there,” he said. “I wanted to give it a shot and see if I could help contribute to that.

“I had watched how Coach Annese interacted with the kids at Muskegon. I learned from the best, and I wanted to take that blueprint and bring it here. The hardest part is getting kids to believe. That didn’t happen overnight, but once we
got the kids to believe, the administrators started to believe, and the community started to believe. It truly takes a village and great things can happen.”

Winning the dramatic way

After a few tough years out of the gate, Koziak guided the Sailors to their first playoff appearance in history in 2013. A year later he took them all the way to the Division 2 state finals, where they lost to traditional power Warren De La Salle
44-8.

In 2018 Mona Shores was back in the state finals, and lost again to De La Salle, 29-16. In 2019 the Sailors finally broke through, advancing to the finals and winning their first state championship in a stunning 35-26 victory over perennial
power Detroit Martin Luther King.

Then in January, the Sailors won their second straight state title, and finally got revenge on De La Salle, with a hard-fought 25-19 victory at Ford Field. The January game was actually the finale of the 2020 season, which was stopped, started up again, stopped, and started up yet again, due to the maddening uncertainties of the COVID pandemic.

Despite all of that, the Sailors kept their eyes on the prize and regrouped after a six-week layoff during the playoffs that pushed the last rounds from November to January.

They dodged a few bullets in those final weeks, and kept winning in the dramatic fashion that has become their trademark in recent years.

In their district game against Forest Hills Central, the Sailors overcame a 10-point deficit and led 28-25 late in the game. FH Central drove to the Mona Shores 26-yard line with nine seconds remaining. The Rangers completed a pass, and the receiver made it to the one-yard line before he was hauled down by Keonte Pierce, an All-State defensive back, as the clock expired, to preserve the victory

The next week, against underdog Caledonia, the game was tied 35-35 with 6:01 remaining following a 44-yard touchdown
run by the Fighting Scots. The Sailors answered with a late scoring drive, capped by Brady Rose’s 13-yard TD run and a two-point conversion, and won 43-35.

In the Jan. 8 regional finals against East Lansing, following the long COVID playoff delay, the game was tied 21-21 in the final minute. A pair of runs by Rose got the Sailors down to the 7-yard line with 2.8 seconds left. Then Keegan DeKuiper kicked a 24-yard field goal as time expired to give Mona Shores a 24-21 win.

In the state semifinals, the Sailors trailed by 10 points at halftime, then scored 29 unanswered points in the second half to claim a 43-30 victory.

Even the state championship game was not decided until the final moments. Mona Shores took the opening kickoff, scored a touchdown and led 13-0 at halftime. Fans who had been watching the team throughout the playoffs did not trust that score, because a Mona Shores playoff game is not without drama, and sure enough it came late in the game when De La Salle twice pulled within six points in the fourth quarter.

The outcome and the championship were not ensured until the Sailors covered an onside kick and managed to kill off the rest of the clock.

“You call them fun – I call them maybe an early grave,” Koziak said with a chuckle about all the close wins. “Winning is always fun, but the way we have won some games has been something we’ll never forget.

“We’ve had a ton of fun and we’ve experienced it with a great group of young men and the staff and the community.”

Now, looking back, Koziak can rightfully claim that he and his staff built a winner from scratch. He’s too modest to actually say that, but the proof is in the record. Mona Shores is 84-30 in Koziak’s 10-year tenure, with three conference
championships, four district titles, four regional titles and two state titles.

That’s a very long way from where the Mona Shores football program was for decades before his arrival.

“It has felt really good to come back to my alma mater and help the community get behind the football team,” he said. “There have been a lot of great coaches that tried very hard and poured their hearts into it.

“I’m just very fortunate to be in the position that I’m in. I have the greatest job in the world.”