Former longtime basketball coach John Maxson always knew his son Dominic would return to the hardwood once his playing career with the South Lyon unified hockey team was over.
Well, hockey season is over, Dominic is about to graduate, and Maxon is already studying film of the current players at HUDL.
Livonia Stevenson athletic director Ernie Muscat announced Wednesday afternoon that Maxson has been hired to take over the Spartans' men's basketball program.
Maxon, who coached at Taylor Kennedy and South Lyon as well as the Michigan-Dearborn men's basketball team, is a former former coach who retired after 10 seasons with the Spartans, including the last three seasons as head coach. He replaces coach Eoghan Stevens. New AD at Frost Junior High School.
Maxon met his new team on Tuesday.
“It was a really, really quick process,” Maxson, 46, told Hometown Life. “For me, it was a question of wanting to go back to coaching, but the last few years I had to take a step back so I could be around my son and watch him play hockey. I asked my wife if that would be the case. You could just look around and things started to pop up.”
Maxon, who teaches physics at South Lyon High School, caught the coaching bug at an early age.
He was a 16-year-old student at Pinconning when he started helping out with the school's sixth-grade team.
While attending Michigan State University, he served as an assistant at Williamston, where he also coached seventh graders.
He got his first head coaching job right out of college. During her first year teaching at Kennedy High School, which closed in 2018, the principal asked her to become the girls' varsity basketball coach.
The only problem?
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“They told me I was the new coach, and by the way, we had a game tomorrow,” Maxon recalled. “At the time, I was coaching freshmen, so I had no idea who the girls were on the varsity team. For the first few games, I was sitting there asking the assistant coaches for the names of some of the girls. Remember the experience.
After five seasons, he turned the Eagles into consistent winners, playing for a district championship in his final season.
But when former Kennedy men's basketball coach Mike Baum, who led the Eagles from 1981 to 2006, resigned to focus solely on coaching Kennedy's softball team, Maxon switched from the women's competition to the men's competition. .
During his tenure, Kennedy won three Michigan Mega Conference league championships, two district championships and one regional final.
His team was so good, in fact, it motivated him to pursue coaching at the next level. He landed at nearby UM-Dearborn and coached there from 2011 to 2014.
He then spent four years with South Lyon's girls basketball team, but once his children were old enough to play sports in high school and middle school, Maxon left the head coaching position to focus on his family. I resigned. However, he volunteered as an assistant with the Lions' boys program for many years.
Now he's back and excited to coach again.
“It was really exciting for me to meet them,” Maxson said. “Honestly, when Ernie took me on a tour of the facility, I was impressed with the weight room, conference room, community room, team room, and they were all in great condition or brand new. It was a place where I could feel like I was helping kids, and they set up a great environment with a field house and a competition gym.”
Like Livonia Public Schools' new rivals Churchill and Franklin, the Spartans will graduate four starters from an 11-13 team this winter, so it should be quite a rebuilding project for Maxon.
Chief among them is senior Mark Stein, a Hometown Life All-Area first-team player and All-Kensington Lakes Activities Association selection who totaled 1,000 points in his career. . The Spartans also lost point guard Dylan McGlinch, who signed with Heidelberg University (Tiffin, Ohio) last month, and big men John Toth and Jon Erickson.
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However, Maxon is taking over from guard Isaac Iacoban. Isaac Iacoban had a breakout season as a junior and should be one of the best players in the KLAA East as a senior.
“Their average minutes their senior year was around 24-26 minutes per game, so there's going to be a lot of minutes available,” Maxon said. “But Isaac will be back, and he will be asked to do a lot for us.”
That's especially true in the KLAA East, which features three of Michigan's best teams: Dearborn, Wayne Memorial and Belleville.
The Pioneers are coming off a 23-1 season for most of this winter, ranked No. 1 in the Michigan Basketball Coaches Association poll, won the Kensington Lakes Activities Association, and are a 6-foot-9 power forward. He sent Mohammad Habhab into play. At Central Michigan University. But the Zebras have a lot of talent returning, including guard Carlos Medlock Jr., who is perhaps the best sophomore in the state, and a team that almost made it past district league, winning the district championship for the first time since 2019. There is a cast surrounding him.
But Maxson is excited about how competing against the big hitters going forward will help the Spartans improve.
“I didn't choose Cupcake Conference to attend, that's for sure,” Maxon said. “But my vision for this program is to be physically tough, play smart, sound basketball, want to work on the glass of the floor, on the defensive end, and in the future with those types of teams. It's about building a team that can compete.
“We have to step up for that, but things can turn around quickly in high school basketball. When you get one or two kids buying into your system, it's contagious. “A little confidence goes a long way.'' If you build that tradition and expectation, kids will embrace it wholeheartedly. ”
Brandon Folsom covers high school sports in metropolitan Detroit for Hometown Life. Follow him on Twitter @folsombrandonj.