The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Madison siblings share perfect seasons

Justin Brunswick is a senior on the Madison boys basketball team. His sister, Michelle, is a freshman on the girls basketball team. The two teams have a current combined record of 50-0 on the season.

Staff photo by Nick Graham Justin Brunswick is a senior on the Madison boys basketball team. His sister, Michelle, is a freshman on the girls basketball team. The two teams have a current combined record of 50-0 on the season.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Contech changes name, ownership structure
New 15 min. ago
Alleged shooter indicted on murder charge
12:58 p.m.
Students injured after truck hits school bus
12:53 p.m.
Area entrepreneurs take lead role for small business owners
12:42 p.m.
Kasich: Education will lead to new jobs
8:52 a.m.
> More headlines

9:55 PM Tuesday, March 16, 2010

MADISON TWP. — One is a 6-foot-9 senior who starts on his basketball team, the other is a 5-11 freshman who rarely gets off the bench.

One is the tallest student in the school, the other isn’t the tallest player on her team.

One is effervescent, the other is quieter than an empty gym.

While Justin Brunswick and his younger sister, Michelle, are as “different as night and day,” their mother said, they’re connected by the Madison High School’s basketball teams, which are 50-0 and aiming for double Division III state basketball championships.

Their parents, John Brunswick, a 1979 Madison graduate, and Sheila Brunswick, a 1980 Vandalia-Butler graduate, may have endured the most difficult task this season: Attend four games a week and survive the boys’ perfect season and the girls’ thrilling, last-second, double-overtime, check-your-heart win over Versailles that propelled the Mohawks to the Final Four.

“It’s been very exciting that’s for sure,” Sheila Brunswick, a fourth-grade teacher at Babeck Elementary School said Tuesday, March 16, while sitting with her family in Madison’s cafeteria.

For Justin and Michelle, separated by two years, their desire to be the best began at an early age. Every time they played, every time they went outside, the sibling rivalry turned competitive.

Why play for fun, right?

When the games ended, the loser probably was the first one in the house.

“We’d get mad at each other,” Justin said. “It was either leave or start fighting.”

When Justin began playing select soccer, his sister was dragged to all the games.

She was Justin’s little sister.

Now she’s Michelle Brunswick.

She’s a standout runner on the school’s track and cross country teams, plays soccer and is the basketball program’s Most Improved Player, according to Coach John Rossi Jr.

Jeff Smith, boys basketball coach, said having a brother and a sister on the teams “further connects the two programs.”

Are they brother and sister or best friends?

“Brother and sister,” Justin said without hesitating. “You know, love/hate.”

A few minutes later, as they posed for pictures together in the Madison gymnasium, Justin refused to smile like a man facing a death sentence.

The other girls on the team, watching the exchange, teased Justin until he cracked up.

Then Michelle stopped smiling.

Contact this

columnist

at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.

Share this article