Byron owes an Aug. 28 final; 7 county football results still missing

Byron's football team played Mesick at home on Friday, Aug. 28. Five weeks later, nobody outside that field has been told what the score was. The school has never confirmed the final, which means the record we print next to the Eagles is incomplete — and so is the record any parent, grandparent or college recruiter would try to look up.

That is not a Byron problem alone. Every record this desk publishes carries the same caveat, printed at the top of our own verified game-day dossier: "Schedules from the county scoreboard; records computed from completed games we logged." Those marks come from games we were able to confirm ourselves. They are not official, because no county athletic office has given us an official number to check them against.

In September, The Current formally asked every athletic department in Shiawassee County to supply its official season records so our logged marks could be reconciled. As of Monday, not one department had answered.

The gap is widest in football. Eight county teams played Friday, Oct. 2: Owosso at Goodrich, Lake Fenton at Corunna, Chesaning at Mt. Morris, Montrose at Durand, Saranac at Perry, Ovid-Elsie at New Lothrop, Bath at Laingsburg and Morrice at Coleman, all with 7 p.m. kickoffs. As The Current reported, only one final came back — Corunna's 53-50 loss to Lake Fenton. The other seven remain unconfirmed four days later.

Volleyball is in the same shape. Two county matches played Saturday, Oct. 3 — Port Huron at New Lothrop and Chesaning at Bath — were still unresolved when the scoreboard closed, and the host schools owe those finals. So do the schools that played the eight-game slates of Monday, Sept. 28 and Tuesday, Sept. 29, including Chesaning at Ovid-Elsie soccer, the Perry-Laingsburg doubleheader and Chesaning at New Lothrop volleyball.

Four more county teams were on the floor and the pitch Monday night: Chesaning volleyball at Saginaw Swan Valley at 5 p.m., Corunna soccer at Juniata Christian at 5:15, Flushing at Owosso soccer at 6:30 and Durand volleyball at Laingsburg at 7. The records listed alongside them — Chesaning 3-2, Corunna 2-2, Owosso 2-3, Durand 2-3, Laingsburg 1-4 — are our count, not the schools'.

This is a small thing to fix. A score is one text message from a coach, a scorekeeper or an athletic secretary, usually before the bus leaves the parking lot. When it doesn't come, the kids who played are the ones who end up without a published record of what they did.

What happens next: We are contacting each county athletic director again for official season records and for the outstanding finals, and we will print which departments report and which do not. Coaches, ADs and scorekeepers can send a final straight to the desk, and every county score posts live during games at shiawassee.news/scoreboard and on the shiawassee.news homepage — free, no app, no paywall.