The Blackhawks’ football team received the highest GPA in the state of Michigan amongst all other schools.

  “I think it is ultimately what the goal is to have student athletes; student first and athlete second and to be that successful on the field and off the field is attributed to them and how hard these kids work” said head football coach Dan Loria, who prides his team on being successful in both aspects. “I always say that academics have to come first and it is a privilege to play football, but that is temporary. The odds of playing college and then professional sports are way under one percent. It is an opportunity to learn about life through sports and ultimately what happens in the classroom is going to be your future.

  The Blackhawks received the award by the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association and according to BHHS athletic director, RJ Guizzetti, “They allow you to take the top 10 to 12 players for the team. They don’t ask you to do the entire team because some kids have 60 players on their team, and some will have 20. We have quite a few excellent student athletes and we ended up with one of the higher team GPAs that I have seen in a really long time.”

 According to senior and football player Alex Emde, playing football and getting good grades is a challenge that takes a lot of work to succeed.

  “It is not easy just because of how time consuming football is. But it’s mainly just important to manage your time well because you know it is going to be limited. It is always important to take advantage of every moment you get whether you are home or playing football,” said Emde who has a 3.95 cumulative GPA and is considering multiple schools including the University of Michigan and University of Southern California. “There are many different challenges that I faced mainly surrounding football, studying and sleeping. I found out if you don’t sleep well, you do not do well the next day and it leads to a bad cycle. I always put a time limit on myself and have a schedule to be prepared for the next day.”

  The football team went 6-3 in the 2017 regular season, and was able to make it to the playoffs and had the highest GPA for the second consecutive year.

  “It is really a great thing for us as educators, teachers, and administrators; we have coaches meetings as part of the fall, winter and spring seasons, and one of the things we tell them at everyone of these meetings is we’re about educational athletics, we aren’t just a sports team, a sports program, an athletic program, we are about educational athletics and we want our coaches to stress academics along as well as success on the field,” said Guizzetti. “And so, to see a team on the field like this, to not only be 6-3 in the regular season but go out and have such a high GPA it shows me that those kids, their families, the coaches, are all dedicated to the same thing we’re looking for.”