Little Fleet

World Cup fever grips Leelanau; global soccer offers antidote to imperialism

Business Feature, Letter to editor/Opinion, Sports/Adventure

Mike Sheldon, owner of River Club Glen Arbor, flew to Los Angeles to watch the U.S. national team play Turkey on June 25. Gary Jonas, co-owner of Farm Club and The Little Fleet in Traverse City, hit Dallas together with his father and his son on June 27 to witness Argentina’s date with Jordan. Greg Graetz and his son scored tickets to a friendly match between the United States and Germany at Chicago’s Soldier Field, just prior to this summer’s World Cup. Venues including The Little Fleet and River Club are packed with enthusiastic crowds gathered to watch the world’s greatest sporting event, co-hosted this summer by the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Crowds hush and gaze at the television as footballers send creative passes and move in unison up the field. Hundreds of voices crescendo into a roar as the ball cannons toward the goal.

July 1, 2026/by editor

Former Gilchrist cooks Jackson, Tootla compete on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef”

Food/Organic Living, Investigative Article, Local Personality

Leland resident and former Gilchrist Farm Winery chef Jennifer Lee Jackson found herself once again in the racetrack pit during the opening episode of “Top Chef”—just as when she cooked burgers and fried chicken sandwiches as a teenager at the racetrack her father operated in rural Georgia. But this time she honed her craft in front of hundreds of thousands who watched her on television. Jackson and her partner, Detroit native Justin Tootla, are competing in Season 23 of the popular Bravo show, which premiers March 9. Competing on the show “was so much harder than we thought it would be,” Tootla told the Glen Arbor Sun. “We’ve been huge fans of the show and have watched it since Season 1. For 20 years we’ve played ‘Monday morning quarterback,’ judging contestants as much as they were judged on the show. “But when you’re in the mix, when the clock starts and you’re cooking, it’s intense! Being in other people’s kitchens, you have to adapt on the fly.”

March 9, 2026/by editor

Confessions of a once reluctant Michigan Wolverine

Letter to editor/Opinion, Sports/Adventure

I admit it: I tried hard to not become a Michigan football fan. As a freshman in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1996 I found myself turned off by the manic, even cultish obsession with the team and the worship that transpired each autumnal Saturday. This wasn’t what attracted me to choose U of M for college. No, I wanted the great university, the vibrant college town, the oasis for radical politics. Then a funny thing happened. The following season Michigan ran the table and won every single game. What I experienced during the Rose Bowl-bound team’s 20-14 victory over Ohio State on a cold late November day at the Big House wasn’t about football, or even sports. It was the power of unity, of euphoria among strangers, of a trance as thousands of us move together in the same rhythm, with the same objective. I felt it again, albeit this time as an adult, when the Wolverines won the national championship last week. We are in our mid-40s now—adults with responsibilities—but we still need that youthful kinship, that unity.