Kirk Cousins' hometown newspaper remains close to his heart
EAGAN — When Kirk Cousins walked to the podium on May 3, 2023, he was ready for questions about his contract situation.
After a few inquiries to start the press conference about the Minnesota Vikings selecting Jordan Addison in the draft and his approach to Year 2 in Kevin O’Connell’s system, it finally came up.
“The fact there was no contract extension, do you view that as a judgment from them on you? Do you view it just as wait and see?” ESPN’s Kevin Seifert asked.
The veteran quarterback reached back into his days as the quarterback of Holland Christian high school to talk about how he has always dealt with uncertainty as long as he has been playing football.
“This has kind of been a part of my story,” Cousins said. “I’ll go back even before you probably even know – high school. I remember the Holland Sentinel, our paper in our hometown, asking me my senior year of high school – I’m going into my senior year with no scholarship offers…. that whole season, you get the question from the Holland Sentinel, ‘How are you focusing on that? How are you handling that?’ I learned, you’ve gotta focus on winning football games.”
It was unusual to hear a Pro Bowl NFL quarterback talk about his hometown newspaper by name, much less to hear him reference questions from its reporter more than 15 years ago. The quote led both Minneapolis and St. Paul’s newspaper stories and ESPN.com’s article about his comments.
It turns out that Cousins’ reference to the Holland Sentinel was more than a random call back. Holland’s newspaper means a lot to the Vikings’ quarterback. It connects Cousins with fond memories of his high school career and still ties him back to the hometown he loves and the high school football team he roots on from afar.
And Cousins still means a lot to the Holland Sentinel too.
“It’s something special to be able to see somebody essentially their start to the top. It’s been pretty neat when you stop and think about it.” — Holland Sentinel sports editor Dan D’Addona
Sports editor Dan D’Addona started working at the Holland Sentinel when he was just out of college in 2003. He went to Central Michigan and landed the job at the Sentinel after freelancing for the Ann Arbor News.
“It’s not a sexy story, I wanted to stay in Michigan and this job came up,” D’Addona said, laughing.
D’Addona has done just about everything at the Sentinel since then. He was a sports reporter slash page designer at first and then spent one summer as a business and political reporter. President Barack Obama came to Holland while he was doing that gig, which he described as both cool and weird considering he had only been a sports writer before. He was on the design desk, then became assistant sports editor and then got the editor job when his predecessor took another position about a decade ago.
As the years have gone by and his titles at the Sentinel changed, one subject was always a consistent part of his job: Reporting on Kirk Cousins.
When I reached D’Addona on the phone, he didn’t hesitate to conjure his fondest memory of covering Cousins as Holland Christian’s quarterback. In the home opener of Cousins’ senior year, Holland Christian was down to Greenville by seven in the final moments and Cousins threw a touchdown pass on fourth down to bring his team within one. The Maroons decided to go for two and Cousins completed a pass in the end zone for the win.
The long-time newspaper man has all the details on the tip of his tongue, even down to which receiver caught the two-pointer. He also remembers the discussion about Cousins not being recruited and how that victory brought him to the forefront.
“He wasn’t [recruited] until that game, which is really late, especially if you are looking to go big,” D’Addona said. “That was when everybody was like, ‘Oh, he can come through in the clutch.”
Cousins remembers the game against Greenville too — and walking off the field talking to D’Addona about his key victory. When he was in high school, seeing what the Holland Sentinel wrote about his games and the other schools in the area was a big deal.
“You’d get up Saturday morning and run to the gas station to get the paper and read the write-up on your game and the other games to see how the teams did around the area,” Cousins said. “Back then we didn’t use Google quite as much, we didn’t have smart phones so you really were trying to get the updates on how everybody did in the different schools from the Holland Sentinel paper.”
*Click the photos to read Sentinel stories on Cousins*
Before receiving an email inquiring about Cousins’ appreciation for his hometown paper, it hadn’t dawned on D’Addona how he is the only reporter to have covered Cousins’ entire journey. He has followed high school players from all sorts of sports who went onto play in college but nothing like this.
“It’s something special to be able to see somebody essentially their start to the top,” he said. “It’s been pretty neat when you stop and think about it.”
It doesn’t feel like that long ago that he was standing outside the Holland Christian basketball locker room waiting for interviews and could hear Cousins singing in barbershop quartet style inside. Now when he covers Vikings-Lions, it’s inside a press conference room with dozens of reporters.
“Every time I cover a game where he’s in Detroit and I ask a question, he will answer the question and then be like, ‘shout out to the Holland Sentinel for being here, my hometown paper.’ It’s so funny because it’s like, where else would I be, Kirk, this is a big deal,” D’Addona says.
Of course, D’Addona does not claim to have seen all of this coming. He was delightfully surprised that Cousins was getting interest from Michigan State because he didn’t consider him the best high school QB in the area.
“He was good, don’t get me wrong,” D’Addona said. “I thought he could be a good college quarterback and have a good college career. I thought maybe he would go to a MAC school and earn his way up to start by the end of his career and then he’d be a doctor.”
Once Cousins arrived at Michigan State and worked his way up to the starting role, D’Addona started to put what he had seen from Cousins as a high schooler and how he was playing at a higher level together.
“It all added up to him knowing what he’s doing and he’s calm,” he said. “You never see him too flustered. That was always a big thing that I remember from when he was a high schooler getting chased around. He never seemed flustered. It’s the things that add up and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, he was pretty good.’”
D’Addona still writes about Cousins. After Week 2, he wrote a piece discussing the over-the-top criticism of the quarterback from national media called, ‘The Curious Case of Kirk Cousins.’ He says that if he doesn’t write about Cousins for a few weeks, he will get emails from readers wondering why they aren’t covering him.
“People want to read about him,” D’Addona said, adding that he covers Cousins’ returns to Holland when he holds a football camp or, most recently, invested in a local golf course. When they see each other, Cousins will still ask about D’Addona’s family, which means a lot to him.
“It’s always fun to say, ‘I covered that guy,’” — former Holland Sentinel sports editor Alan Babbitt
Former Holland Sentinel sports editor Alan Babbitt, who worked there from 2003 until 2013 and now does sports information for Hope College, said that following local athletes is part of Holland’s identity.
“Holland is a unique community,” Babbitt said. “Most communities are going to have pride in the people who come from there but Holland is particular. Holland is a popular retirement destination, people love to come to Holland and stay in Holland so they feel connected to the people [in sports]. They love to come to sporting events here. They like to not only cheer on the athletes here but they like to get to know them.”
Growing up, Babbitt was always the kid at school who knew the most about what the Wolverines, Spartans, Tigers and Lions were doing. While he was at Grand Valley State when his aunt saw a reporter opening at a weekly paper in Grand Rapids and he landed the job, loved it and began working toward a journalism career. He spent eight years at the Grand Rapids Press before getting the job as the Sentinel’s sports editor.
Babbitt worked alongside D’Addona and had similar memories of Cousins’ confidence and maturity as a high school player. Babbitt pointed out that Holland Christian’s football program was still relatively young when Cousins put them on the map, though he admitted he never expected Cousins to become an NFL starter when he saw him in high school.
“He was very talented and had some prolific teams at Holland Christian,” Babbitt said over the phone. “Looking back on it you can obviously see it. Holland Christian has a short history and he was someone who helped them get established.”
Babbitt was largely in charge of covering Cousins while the star quarterback was at Michigan State. He was able to go to Michigan State vs. Michigan and witness some of Cousins’ greatest college wins in person. Michigan had a linebacker named Desmond Morgan who was a native of Holland as well, which made for great local-angle coverage in the Sentinel for the big rivalry game.
“That allowed me to get to some games that I might not otherwise go to,” Babbitt said. “With Kirk being the starting quarterback, we had to make it a priority because people are going to be talking about it and wanting to read what Kirk has to say after the game.”
Cousins was happy that his college location allowed the Sentinel’s coverage to continue in a similar way to when he was in high school.
“West Michigan as a whole means a great deal to me, Holland as my home town means a great deal to me and I felt like because I played at Michigan State that paper was still able to cover my college career in a way what would be different if I went and played on the east or west coast,” Cousins said.
And they really covered it.
“You could get up nearly every morning during my college years and get some kind of update,” Cousins said laughing.
When it became clear that Cousins had a chance to be drafted, the Holland Sentinel became NFL Draft Sentinel. They were looking at mock drafts and writing about potential landing spots, only to be shocked on draft night when he was picked by Washington, who had selected Robert Griffin III in the first round.
“We expected him to be drafted, which was not something that happens every day in Holland,” Babbitt said. “There was a lot of excitement and anticipation about where he was going to end up.”
Babbitt handed coverage duties over to D’Addona before Cousins turned into Washington’s full-time starter and signed a contract with the Vikings in 2018 but he beamed talking about having covered Cousins’ high school and college days. Prior to Cousins the only NFL player he reported on was ex-Michigan tight end Jay Riemersma, who played with the Bills and Steelers.
“It still stops you every once in a while,” Babbitt said. “It’s always fun to say, ‘I covered that guy.’ And I didn’t think I would have another NFL player after Riemersma. He was a good NFL player but he wasn’t a quarterback. Kirk is the only quarterback that I can say I’ve had the privilege of covering before he’s in the NFL. Not every sports editor has something like that that they get to carry with them.”
When I asked D’Addona and Babbitt about their perspective on Cousins’ personality from the time he was a teenager until now, they both had very similar answers: He’s the same Kirk from Holland.
“What’s nice is from what I have seen with Kirk is that he is the same guy that he was before and that is pretty cool,” Babbitt said. “It’s authentic, it’s who he is and he hasn’t let the allure of success change him and how he treats people.”
“When I see him I don’t see an NFL quarterback, I just see a really genuine person from town,” D’Addona said. “Which has to be unique.”
“I’m fortunate to have grown up in a town that had a Holland Sentinel,” — Kirk Cousins
Cousins hasn’t stopped reading Holland’s newspaper, albeit he doesn’t run to the local gas station to get it anymore. He logs onto the Sentinel website every Saturday morning during football season to see how the Maroons played the night before.
“I have joked with my teammates that when I retire and move back to the Holland area I’ll get a subscription and I want it delivered to my doorstep and that’s the way it’s going to be,” Cousins said.
Hopefully that can be the case. A lot of things about the newspaper industry have changed over the years and not many for the better. The paper has dwindled from four full-timers and one part-timer working the sports desk to just D’Addona. He said that the Sentinel has 15,000 fewer subscribers than when he first started but he’s hopeful that the industry is finally figuring out how to operate behind paywalls with online subscriptions, like the one Cousins uses to read about his Maroons.
D’Addona is going to keep fighting the good fight though. Because the Sentinel is under the USA Today umbrella, he has editing duties for all Michigan sports, which allowed him to move up the ladder without actually changing jobs and it doesn’t hurt when it comes to job security. He also moonlights as managing editor of Swimming World magazine. Mostly, he just loves covering Holland area sports.
“I have sports friends all over the place who say, ‘how is there always so much happening here?’ It’s the best place to be,” D’Addona said. “You can’t get this type of news about your community anywhere else. We’re small enough for that but big enough where big things are happening. It’s the perfect balance. That’s why our paper is doing numbers wise better than a lot of other papers. I’m sure it helps that we have Kirk.”
Babbitt still talks with D’Addona during sports events at Hope College and they talk about the industry and the challenges that a one-man band faces in a place with lots happening. He hopes the Sentinel continues to rebound. He remembers getting his picture in the paper as a high school baseball player and can relate to Cousins’ feeling of flipping through to the sports section to see the recaps.
“With a small town paper you have an opportunity to write some stories that are meaningful and with the high school coverage you hope you write something that people will want to look at 10 or 20 years later and have the local paper be the historic keeper of that game,” Babbitt said. “That’s all you are hoping for and it’s fun to see them go to college and if you get a few in the pros that’s even better.”
Whatever happens with Cousins in the future, the people of Holland are going to read about it in the Sentinel. And Cousins feels lucky to have had a paper like that in his life.
“I’m fortunate to have grown up in a town that had a Holland Sentinel,” Cousins said.
