Former Novi AD earns MHSAA award for championing Unified Sports
Brian Gordon
As athletic director at Novi High School a decade ago, Brian Gordon helped Michigan become a national leader in growing Special Olympics Unified Sports for students with intellectual disabilities.
Nearly three years after retiring from school administration, he remains an impassioned advocate helping schools all over the state add these inclusive programs to their athletic offerings.
To recognize his pioneering and now continuing work in expanding these opportunities across the state, Gordon has been selected as the recipient of this year’s Nate Hampton Champion of Progress in Athletics Award by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
The Hampton Award was created by the MHSAA’s Representative Council to honor Nate Hampton, who retired in 2021 after serving in education and educational athletics for 50 years, including the last 32 as an MHSAA assistant director.
Lofty achievements
Honorees have championed the promotion and advancement of opportunities for women, minorities and other underrepresented groups within interscholastic athletics, while serving as an administrator, coach, official, educator or school sports leader in Michigan.
Gordon will receive the Hampton Award during the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (MIAAA) annual conference, March 13-16 in Traverse City.
“To me, (Unified Sports) is absolutely the purest form of sport – what you’re supposed to get out of participating in athletics,” Gordon said. “Kids that participate in this program get every bit of that – teamwork, camaraderie, adversity, how to win, how to lose, being part of something bigger than yourself.
“It was, to me, just so impactful. The whole idea of more kids being involved in their athletic program, where they have the opportunity to play in front of their parents, being members of an athletic department at their school, to me was just incredible. … And the life lessons that kids learn, families learn, you can’t even measure them.
“It’s just a great, positive experience – for everyone.”
Quite a journey
Gordon began his professional career in educational athletics in 1990 as a physical education and health teacher for Royal Oak Schools, and moved into his first athletic director/assistant principal role at Royal Oak in 2010.
He left to become the director of athletic and physical education at Novi High School in 2012, retired from Novi at the end of the 2020-21 school year but then returned to Royal Oak as athletic director the following fall for two more years.
Unified Sports pair students with and without intellectual disabilities as teammates for training and competition.
While at Novi, Gordon and Brighton athletic director John Thompson were inspired to bring Unified Sports not only to their schools, but to the Kensington Lakes Activities Association as a whole – and during the 2015-16 school year their schools were joined by Northville, Howell and Hartland in offering Unified teams, with the total soon growing to 13 KLAA schools.
The KLAA, at Novi, hosted the first league tournament in the nation for Unified Sports teams – playing 21 basketball games during the inaugural event.
