Michigan high school girls basketball team cancels practice to shoot deer

Seems like things are getting pretty out of control up in Michigan these days. For example, Ravenna Michigan’s women’s high school basketball team begged out of practice not because they wanted to paint their nails or catch a midnight screening of the latest Harry Potter movie but because they wanted to spend the first day of hunting season blasting shots into the hearts and souls of helpless deer so they can bag them up and take them home to make sure their families don’t starve to death. This, of course, is how I assume everybody acts in Michigan.

Because Coach Stone expected everybody to skip out on practice to shoot deer anyway, he struck up an agreement with the girls: They were allowed to go on their hunting trips as long as they agreed to spend an extra half hour practicing in the days leading up to their hunting excursion. They accepted.

Bill Stone, Ravenna’s first-year head coach, really had no choice when players Ashley Beahan, Brooke Haan, Morgan Kantola, Racheal Shavalier and Samantha Spoelman approached him the first week of practice and asked if he could cancel practice the following Monday, Nov. 15. Their reason? They wanted to head for the woods on opening day of deer hunting season.

In 10 years of coaching at Fruitport, Stone had never canceled a practice so his girls could hunt. “I had never seen anything even remotely like this,” said Stone, whose Bulldogs are 2-1 so far this season. “But these girls are about as passionate about hunting as some wives are about shopping when their husbands go hunting.

Did they kill any deer on their big day in the sun, you ask? Nope. None at all.

Ravenna girls hit their shots, whether it’s on the basketball court or while hunting in the woods [M Live]