DETROIT -- Ted Martin took the game ball from the Division 7 state championship football game and handed it to his daughter Trisha.
Then, the two went to the 50-yard line at Ford Field, posed with the rest of Traverse City St. Francis' football team, and celebrated a lopsided 41-13 win over Ubly.
"It's just a wonderful feeling," Ted Martin said. "The way we finished last year (a 20-0 finals loss to Mendon), we came back and redeemed ourselves."
The Gladiators shared the state championship with coaches, family and sideline help, including the Martins. Ted Martin has helped organize things on the St. Francis bench for 14 years.
"It's absolutely awesome," he said. "I started doing it with my sons when they were 5 years old. It's a long family tradition."
Martin's two sons, Jerret and Brad, both graduated from St. Francis in recent years, and he kept the family legacy going Saturday at Ford Field in Detroit when he worked the sideline with his daughter Trisha, 13. Her job was to switch game balls in and out with the referees.
"It's fun, but sometimes it's tough because I get in the players' way and get trampled," she said.
Trisha's an eighth-grader this year and said Saturday's final was her last football game sidelines stint before she moves on to play her own sports next year.
That made it even more special for the father-daughter tandem to be a part of a state championship.
"It means a lot and I'm glad she gets to share it with me," Ted Martin said. "She's worked really hard to be part of this."
For Gunnar Carroll, 10, Saturday was his first trip to Ford Field. And, the fifth-grader and grandson of longtime assistant coach Jim Carroll hopes it won't be his last.
"It's really cool," Gunnar said of getting to be on the turf at Ford Field. "It's sweet to see where (the Detroit Lions) play. It's big."
Before St. Francis took the field to warm up, Carroll already was out there with a handful of the team's other water boys. They tossed around a football and familiarized themselves with their surroundings -- and thought about what might be in store for them someday.
"There have been a lot of water boys that have grown up and all of a sudden are great players for us," Gladiators coach Greg Vaughan said. "Do we recruit? Yeah. We recruit out of our elementary schools, get them on our sideline, get them around football and excited about it, because it's a great place to go."
Vaughan -- a 1995 St. Francis graduate -- wasn't a water boy because he didn't attend the school before his freshman year. But he knows the program is built from within.
"You teach kids to do it the right way, even with the water boys," Vaughan said. "We make them wear khakis and do this and do that. If you want to win and want to win consistently, you have to do it the right way."
St. Francis has now won four titles in the last 10 years, with previous championships coming in 1999, 2003 and 2005.
"We're in a big town, but we're a small school," said Vaughan, who won a state title as a player in 1993. "There's a lot of people that choose to send their kids to our school and had a stake in what we do, good or bad. People care. And we tell our boys that."
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