Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By JASON JUNO
sports@yourdailyglobe.com
Ironwood --- Adam Mackey leads Ironwood’s all-time leading career scoring list. Jacob Ciesielczyk scored the most points in a single season for the Red Devils. Griffen Revoyr has the school’s individual game scoring mark.
Those are the kinds of questions Pete Lewinski didn’t know the answer to while he was coaching at Ironwood. Nobody he asked to try to find out knew either.
“I got tired of people asking me and I felt the Ironwood school should have a record of who the all-time leading scorers are,” Lewinski said.
Now that he’s retired, he went to work and the result is a detailed history of Ironwood boys basketball.
Mackey leads the all-time list by so many points that he was long assumed to be No. 1. Lewinski has concrete answers for anyone who asks now.
Three Ironwood players cleared the coveted 1,000-point scoring mark: Mackey with 1,654, Griffen Revoyr with 1,042 and Scott Paulsen with 1,004.
Revoyr scored 45 points in a 2018 game against Bayfield. Only two others hit the 40-point mark: Frank Gregory with a 44-point performance against Park Falls in 1953 and Mackey with 41 against Wakefield-Marenisco in 2013.
Ciesielczyk only played two years on the varsity team and he almost got to 1,000 points. He holds the top two spots for single-season scoring with 497 points in the 1993-94 season and 466 the year before.
It proved to be a time-consuming project that still isn’t quite complete.
Lewinski had access to the scorebooks from 1968 to 2024. For games before that, from 1920-1967, he went to the Globe’s online archive.
He’d find the season preview each year, which had the season schedule, and that helped him know where to find each year’s games.
Then he wrote down every individual box score (player name and points). Then the season totals. Then the career totals, which were mostly just their junior and senior seasons back in the days when Ironwood was a much bigger school.
He did it all by hand in dozens of notebooks.
He ranked every scorer, all 732 of them. He noted another 100 who played but didn’t score. He ranked the top scorers, the individual scoring seasons and the top individual game scoring performances.
He also jotted down every score throughout every season since then and every season’s final record.
The research is pretty much done, he just needs to finish getting it all typed up. He’s not quite sure what he’s going to call it, but he does plan on getting it all printed and giving it up to Mackey, who took over for him as boys coach, local media and others.
Mackey is looking forward to seeing the overall history of Ironwood boys basketball and the level of talent that has played here as Lewinski wraps up his project.
“Even during my limited lifetime and knowledge of Ironwood basketball, there have been many outstanding basketball players and teams. I was fortunate to watch some growing up and play with a few others,” he said. “Coach Lew is a basketball lifer. He eats, sleeps and breathes it, which is why I’m fortunate to have such a great relationship with him because we are so similar.”
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Mackey’s name appears at or near the top of many of the lists Lewinski put together. His 455 points in 2011-12 is the third highest scoring season in Ironwood. He has two others in the top 15, 421 his senior year (eighth) and 388 in 2010-11 (14th).
“Adam was a great basketball talent,” Lewinski said. “Also an all-around athlete. Growing up in a basketball family, he was very knowledgeable about the game. Adam could score from the perimeter or post you up inside.”
Perhaps his most memorable performance, a 32-point performance in the regional semifinal against Norway is a bit lower on the list, it’s tied for 20th all-time. He scored 30 of them in the first half to bury the Knights and get to the regional final.
“I was fortunate to have the opportunity to play for coach Lew,” Mackey said. “He was a mastermind at running offensive plays and sets, most of them I still use as a coach. The teams I played on were so competitive. We had only one goal in mind and that was to win. The points were just a result of playing with great, unselfish teammates.”
In Lewinski’s first two seasons coaching, Ciesielczyk scored 963 points, which is good for fourth all-time.
“I think this one is impressive, Jake Ciesielczyk, because he almost scored 1,000 points in two years,” Lewinski said. He also wrote down how many seasons, and which years they were, for each player. “He was a scoring machine. His dad, Brian Salty Ciesielczyk, was a basketball star for Bessemer and GCC. … Like Adam, he was a threat from the perimeter or inside.”
Jacob DiGiorgio is fifth at 938 points in three seasons. He’ll join many of the players on the list in the Ironwood Area Sports Hall of Fame when he’s inducted Aug. 3. He scored 39 in a game in 2015 against Wakefield-Marenisco (fourth on that list).
Michael Pawlak’s 778 career points in three years is eighth. He was the Player of the Year in the U.P. during his senior season of 2005-06 when Ironwood won a district championship and was named U.P. Team of the Year. Lewinski was U.P. Coach of the Year, too.
Lewinski said he was just talking to someone who said Pawlak wasn’t that big of a scorer because he was the point guard.
“But he was,” Lewinski said. “I like to call Mike a lead guard, scorer and distributor, which he was. … He had an outstanding career.”
Paulsen played much earlier and was a teammate of Lewinski’s. The 1974 graduate was 6-7. He played when Ironwood was in the big-school Great Northern Conference and he got a full ride to play at Northern Michigan where he was a teammate of Michigan State coach Tom Izzo.
“He was unstoppable in the low post and a good perimeter shooter,” Lewinski said of Paulsen. “He scored most of his points on the low block.”
Before that, Bob Meyer was a very good scorer in the 1950s with 771 points in three seasons, good for ninth all time. Even though he didn’t make the top 20, Ernie Kivisto was an all-state player his senior year (1941) and he went on to play at Notre Dame and Marquette.
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Lewinski also took note of those postseason honors. Every all-state, all-U.P. and all-conference player will get a mention. His name will be included for making the Great Northern All-Conference team in 1974.
Even members of the Gogebic Range Holiday Tournament team, his least favorite event — “It was a good tournament. Everybody loved it but me.”
Ironwood has won four regional championships in its history — 1937, 1961 with former superintendent Percy Smith and back-to-back in 1975 and 1976.
The ‘61 team lost to Alpena Catholic Central by just two points in the quarterfinal.
They were 21-3 in 1975 when they lost to Mount Pleasant in the quarterfinal.
“Bob Bishop, a red-hair rebounding machine, John Munari, the late Dean Erickson was point guard,” Lewinski said.
They lost to Saginaw Buena Vista in 1976. Pawlak’s dad, Jim, was on both of the regional championship teams and so was Mike Gerovac (6-7), Scott Anderson, Joe DeSantis and Randy Passint.
Lewinski’s senior team in 1974 was favored to do the same — they were the U.P. Class AB Team of the Year — but they were upset by Ishpeming in the regional.
There are gaps in the numbers of course. There are a few years in the 1950s where he couldn’t find the all-conference teams in the newspaper. Some of the box scores way back didn’t get reported, or weren’t available in the old papers at least.
In the 1920s and 1930s, many of the box scores didn’t include first names. He went to the Ironwood Depot to find yearbooks and even went to online yearbooks for help. He found some first names, season records and team photos.
He thanked several people for their help in his project — assistant basketball coach Ben Schmandt, Tom Mott, Mike Meyer at the Ironwood chamber where he found many of the yearbooks, Lynne Wiercinski at the Ironwood library, Dan Martinson, Mackey, and Jason Juno.
The late Eugune Maki gave him some of the coaching records. Lewinski leads that list for both the boys (341) and girls (173).
Maybe he can go back to reading books once this project wraps up.
“Sometimes I worked 12 hours a day,” Lewinski said. He started in January. “That’s what you can do when you’re retired.
“What took time was researching. Tedious, you gotta look this stuff up, record it and there’s so much. Hopefully now people will know the boys’ leading scorer.”
And a whole lot more.
