By Dan Nilsen
“Every track meet is considered a preliminary for Northern High’s girls.”
That was the opening sentence on a Flint Journal story by sports writer Len Hoyes in the early 1980s. The line was an accurate summation of a track and field team that did nothing but win for three straight years. And win big.
Northern had won 32 straight meets at that point, the closest one a 97-50 dual meet rout of Midland. At invitationals, their scores often soared into the 100s.
“The real target is the state championship,” the story continued.
Such was the case in the spring of 1981, when a young Northern team had just four seniors but still nailed down their third straight Class A championship at Northwestern High’s Guy Houston Stadium.
The Vikings posted 67 points, almost doubling runner-up Detroit Chadsey’s 35 points. Northern placed in 10 events, winning four, with Vikings showing up 12 times in the top six.
The win extended Northern’s streak to 56 meets without a loss, going back to a second-place finish in the 1978 state
finals.
It also gave senior captains Letitia Hughley and Judy Tucker three straight years of never losing a track meet or basketball game. They graduated with 125 wins, 0 losses and six state championships each, because the Northern girls basketball team also had gone undefeated three straight years and won three Class A titles.
“There was always pressure because we wanted to keep the record going,” Hughley said of the track team. “We were always trying to be our best, always challenging each other in practice to be better. If somebody broke a record, someone else was trying to break that record again. That’s the way we competed.”
Northern coach George Dedrick and assistant Donald Durrett knew the talent they had and didn’t need to spend much time teaching the seniors fundamentals.
“You didn’t,” said Durrett. “You just had to keep them motivated. George and I would go to Grand Rapids to get the newspaper for those regional results. We’d come back with stories of what the other teams were doing, who we had to compete against.”
Hughley, who would go into coaching herself, understood that strategy.
“You can lose yourself being a successful team. You can get a little complacent,” she said. “They kept us grounded
all the time, pushing us to do even better.
“We had the best coaches. They were just awesome. It was one big happy family. They dealt with all these different girls and different personalities and made it work.”
Indeed they did.
At the state finals on Northwestern’s newly resurfaced track, Tucker was motivated to win an individual title for the first time, and showed her determination in winning the 220 low hurdles. She was seeded 10th on the basis of regional times and relegated to a slow heat instead of the last, fastest heat. But no one in the last heat could match her time of 28.7.
Tucker also cleared 5-9 to set a Class A finals record in the high jump and placed third in the 110-meter low hurdles in 14.1.
Joanna Childress, another standout senior, had won both hurdles races in the Kearsley regional but was sixth in the state 110 lows in 14.3. Still, it gave her team another point.
“She had too many ninth lanes today,” Dedrick told Hoyes, referring to the difficult outside lane.
Wendy Callaway was the fourth senior and the seventh Northern qualifier for state.
Sophomore Marlene Isabelle took third in the 440 in 57.1, with Monica Taylor following in sixth place in 58.8. Carlene Isabelle, Marlene’s twin sister, was fifth in the 880 in 2:20.2. Tucker later joined Taylor and the Isabelle twins, anchoring the mile relay to a second-place finish and pushing Ann Arbor Pioneer to a record 3:51.3 that eclipsed Northern’s 1979 record.
Hughley also scored in all four of her events. After a record-tying 12.2 in the 100 at the regional, she cut that to 11 seconds flat for a fifth-place finish in the state 100. She also won the long jump with a leap of 18 feet, 8 inches.
Led by Childress, Terri Barber and Yvonne Lee, Hughley anchored the 440 relay team to victory in 48.5. In the 880 relay, she joined Childress, Barber and Marlene Isabelle in placing sixth in 1:43.6.
Tucker and Hughley were inducted into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 as part of a combined four Northern basketball teams that won four consecutive state titles in the fall seasons of 1978-81. Tucker and Hughley played on the ’78, ’79 and ’80 teams that went undefeated at 74-0.
“I think about those years once in a while, and even now I think of it,” said Hughley. “To my knowledge, no one has ever done that.”
Hughley, who went on to coach Northern girls basketball and the Mott College women’s team simultaneously, was also inducted as an individual in 2008.
