ROYAL OAK — Chris Kelly had an epiphany when saw his reflection on the first day of practice.
“I looked at my shirt in the mirror and I was like, ‘Well, I’m the head coach at Shrine now.’ I’ve been coming here to Shrine football — since even before fourth grade, when my dad was a coach. I was coming up here in kindergarten, first grade. Now that I’m in charge, I’m still kind of coming to terms with it, but I’m just glad to be back at Shrine and ready to get going.”
Kelly, who graduated from Royal Oak Shrine in 2015, is one of a half-dozen new head football coaches among the 22 member schools. Each one is hoping to guild their teams in the right direction through the opening of practices this week, to the first games across the final weekend of August.
“I’m hoping we have a good year,” Kelly said. “I know they want to have a good year and finish on top. I’m their third coach and that’s difficult for them, but they’re leading the team and I’m going to hitch my wagon to some of those senior leaders and see where they take us.”
After a successful career at Shrine where he won the Catholic League’s John Shada Scholar-Athlete Award his senior season, Kelly played football as an undersized running back at Hope College. Since then, he’s since settled into a teaching role in the Troy Public Schools. He’s coached football, powerlifting and lacrosse at Troy Athens, and prior to that, football at Sterling Heights Parkway Christian. But there’s nowhere he’d rather be now.
“Obviously I went to Shrine my whole life, and my whole family did, and when (the job opening) popped up — I think it was in December or January — I was like, I’m going to give it a shot,” he said. “I know I’m young and don’t have a ton of experience, but it’s my alma mater and I figured I’d give it a go.”
One of Kelly’s first moves was to bring back his father, Colin, on to the coaching staff. Colin graduated from Shrine in 1983, but and surrounded on the sideline by several other Shrine alumni: Harry Cooney (2012), Raymond Brown (2012), Carlos Carpenter (2015) and Victor Carpenter (2018), cultivating a home-grown feel for the 2025 Knights.
Even with the coaching changeovers this year and in 2023, the core of the team has remained fairly stable. The Knights’ impact players have improved their poise and grown their skill sets over the past few seasons. The top players are senior quarterback Jack Tisko, senior center/linebacker Liam Ridley, senior two-way lineman Ben Haley, junior lineman Patrick Nichols, junior running back/linebacker Jaycee Foster, junior receiver/defensive back Owen Wisniewski, and junior tight end/defensive end Grand Poulton.
“I’m feeling good about our team,” Kelly said. “There’s a lot of very talented kids, they work hard, they’re eager to learn, and I’m trying to get the most we can out of these seniors in the couple months I have with them. I don’t get the privilege of having them for four years, so we’re just trying to douse them with everything we can right now in order to have a successful season.”
In 2024, Shrine was 7-3 and reached the MHSAA playoffs, losing in the first round.
“Each week we want to go 1-0,” Kelly said. “Our goal is to make the Prep Bowl, so that means winning the league, beating all of our opponents. Obviously we want to make the playoffs, but that will come if we are able to go 1-0 each week and do well in our league. When we make the playoffs, we’ll take a poke at it and see what happens.”
The Knights’ first game will be a home-field crossover contest against Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook, 7 p.m. on Aug. 28. Like Shrine, Cranbrook is also led by a new hire, Marcus Green. Green joins the Cranes from Detroit Lincoln-King high school, which enjoyed a breakout year in 2024 with an undefeated regular season.
Bishop Foley shifting gears
Just a few miles away from Shrine, the players at Madison Heights Bishop Foley were gathered in the weight room, listening intently to the opening remarks from their new head coach, John Maltese, before going out to the field and working on special teams play.
Maltese — a successful head coach during an 18-year run at Dearborn Divine Child and White Lake Lakeland — had taken a break from coaching until he was brought in to help restore the Ventures’ fortunes.
“I took a few years off to be a father and a husband, but at the same time when I wasn’t coaching, I was grad school athletic director for (Clawson) Guardian Angels, which is a feeder school to Foley,” he said. “That’s where my daughters were going, they were involved in athletics, I enjoyed doing that.”
Like Kelly, Maltese got his “dream job.”
“Foley’s really the only place I really wanted to coach,” he said. “I started to get some phone calls when it opened up, I decided it was the right time to jump in. It’s the only place I really wanted, and I’m glad it worked out.”
His nephew, Mike, is Bishop Foley’s athletic director. Together, they will face several challenges rebuilding a team which set program records for most wins (10) and most points scored (392) in 2022. But since then, the Ventures have fallen on hard times.
“They’re 1-18 over the last two years, and currently on a 15-game losing streak, but he kids are buying into what we’re talking about and they’re working hard,” John Maltese said. “It’s just a long process because I’m the third coach in three years, so there’s different terminology from two years ago to last year to now, so they’re starting to get it, but it’s a process. That’s what we’re battling, but the kids are resilient. They’re doing well so far.”
Maltese is hesitant to describe the upcoming season in terms of team objectives.
“You just get better each day,” he said. “It’s a cliché, it’s an old Lou Holtz quote — ‘You get better, you get worse, you never stay the same’ — so we’re always at work, whether it’s the weight room, whether it’s drills. You build upon that and learn from what we’re talking about, and you move forward from there. The games come as they will, and we’re just focusing on week one. We’ll just see if we can stop that losing streak and it’s going to be a challenge.”
Bishop Foley starts its regular-season at cross-town rival Madison Heights Madison, 7 p.m. on Aug. 28. The Eagles are rebounding from winless seasons in the near past, and went 4-5 last year with a new coach and young players, so that provides the Ventures with some hope.
Foley returns three starters on each side of the ball. Top contributors include senior quarterback/safety Jacob Thompson, senior lineman Zach Auerbach, senior running back/linebacker Brad Dugan, senior split end/defensive back Dominic Burley, and junior running back/cornerback Lukas Straske.
Like his counterpart at Shrine, Maltese welcomed the end of summer conditioning and the chance to launch pre-season practices Aug. 11.
“We’re not going to a team camp or have ‘Midnight Madness’ or anything like that,” Maltese said. “We’re just going to plug along and take care of the things we need to take care of; it’s kind of an old-school approach.”
Besides Kelly, Maltese and Green, three other Catholic League schools hired new football coaches for 2025.
Toledo St. John’s Jesuit brought in Joe Horn to be the school’s sixth head football coach in program history. Horn served as the offensive coordinator at nearby Whitehouse Anthony Wayne High School in 2023 and 2024. St. John’s Jesuit suffered through a 1-9 season in 2024.
Detroit Loyola hired Joel Blankenship as its next head coach. Blankenship brings in extensive experience coaching in the Detroit Public School League.
Riverview Gabriel Richard — Division 8 state finalists last year under head coach Marc Shea — tapped a successor in John Sobush. Sobush has served the program as an assistant coach, and played a key role when the Pioneers reached the regional finals in 2023.
