There was a time when many Historical Black Colleges had swimming teams. The late Robert ‘Fish’ Jenkins benefited from that era and then he spent much of his adult life lifting up youths in Detroit.

• Robert ‘Fish’ Jenkins Sr. was a longtime Detroit educator and coach who created opportunities for young people.
• Jenkins led teams to 24 championships in less common sports like swimming, golf, and soccer.
• He mentored countless students who went on to become community leaders, doctors, and educators.

The celebration of Black History Month throughout February provides an opportunity to share stories about Detroiters that have positively impacted the lives of others in a variety of ways.

And included among those stories that have been shared this month is a “Fish” story that is unique, without exaggeration. 

That is because this story is about the late Robert “Fish” Jenkins Sr., a longtime Detroit educator and a groundbreaking coach, whose superpower was his ability to create life-changing opportunities for young people in unconventional spaces.

In 1969, Jenkins arrived at Detroit’s Northern High School as a physical education teacher and coach. During Northern’s heyday, the high school, formerly located on Woodward Avenue at Owen in the city’s North End, produced a host of high-profile sports stars, including basketball greats Bill Buntin — a two-time All-American center at the University of Michigan during the 1960s — and Derrick Coleman — the first overall pick in the 1990 NBA draft. And record-breaking sprinter Marshall Dill, Track & Field News’ High School Athlete of the Year in 1971, who set world records in the 300-yard dash while running for Michigan State University.

However, Jenkins specialized in coaching sports that were a little less popular among young people in Detroit, particularly Black students. Jenkins coached teams at Northern — and for one year at East English Village Preparatory Academy after he retired from teaching in 2001 — to 24 Detroit Public School League championships in swimming, golf and soccer. 

“No matter what the sport was, he had the formula to make a team a champion,” Robert Jenkins Jr. said about his father, who died on Jan. 14 at the age 86.

“But more than that, my father had a profound impact on the minds of every student he touched. He brought golf, and all the lessons golf teaches, to the North End. And, in the summer, he had members of the swim team teach the younger kids in the neighborhood how to swim, which taught his swim team members how to give back to the community.”   

During the evening of Feb. 22, Robert Jenkins Jr. took pride in sharing stories about young people who were coached and mentored by his father across multiple decades that went on to become “doctors, educators, business leaders, and parents” that have made positive contributions to the city of Detroit.

Robert Jenkins Jr. also described some of the friendly interactions that his dad had with notable people like U.S. Olympic sprint champion Wilma Rudolph and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Dick Barnett at Tennessee State University, where the elder Jenkins received the education and training that he needed to teach and coach student-athletes in Detroit.

But earlier that day, an equally compelling “Fish” story was told by another community member.  

“Mr. Jenkins was a very important person in my life and he is one of the reasons why I have always tried to do my part when it comes to providing opportunities for young people in our city,” said Gary Peterson, who has coached young swimmers in Detroit for 47 years, including at Detroit’s King High School, where he coaches boys and girls swimmers today. 

Long before Peterson coached high school swimmers — and youth swimmers of virtually all ages when he was a full-time swimming instructor for the city of Detroit’s Recreation Department — Peterson was on the swim team at King High School (Class of 1974), when Robert Jenkins Sr. came into his life. 

“There were coaches at other schools that helped young swimmers that wanted to improve and go to another level, and Mr. Jenkins was one of those coaches,” said Peterson, who was coached at King High School by Clyde James, a lifelong friend and teammate of Jenkins on the Tennessee State University swimming team during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they brought national attention to the school’s swimming program.

“Mr. Jenkins would make his pool at Northern available to students from other schools that wanted to get in extra practice. Then, as I got closer to going to college, Mr. Jenkins was the person who introduced me to the colleges that were recruiting Black high school swimmers.

“At that time, there were more than 20 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) that had competitive swimming programs. Today, there is only one (Howard University in Washington, DC). But back then, Mr. Jenkins wanted to make sure we had the opportunities and exposure, which included sending a small group of us to South Carolina State for a recruiting trip.

“Afterwards, Mr. Jenkins even came over to King from Northern to present me with my scholarship to South Carolina State, while I was sitting in a King classroom. I couldn’t believe it and I was ecstatic, but everything that he did for me and other young swimmers in the city he did so willingly. And that’s what I always thought I was supposed to do as a coach.” 

Peterson said he would do even more with Jenkins when Peterson returned to Detroit from Orangeburg, South Carolina, after graduating from college. 

“In the late 1980s, a team I was coaching at Johnson Recreation Center and Mr. Jenkins’ team at Northern, traveled to Washington DC as one team in February to compete in the Black History Invitational Swim Meet. And that tradition of Detroit competing as one team at that meet continued every year until COVID,” said Peterson, who also recalled that Jenkins coached softball and even junior varsity football for a time, in addition to swimming, golf and soccer.

“Just as Mr. Jenkins thought it was critical for us to come together and take our kids to DC for that swim meet because it was the biggest showcase for Black swimmers, he wanted all the young people he coached to have good training and exposure. And in my case, as the son of sharecroppers, I can say that Mr. Jenkins inspired me as well, as a swimmer and a coach.” 

Every time Peterson walks into King High to coach the current group of swimmers at the school, he said he is reminded of Jenkins and other important people that paved the way for Black swimmers in Detroit.

For example, in 2023, the natatorium at King was rededicated as the Clyde James Natatorium by the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Peterson says the renaming was not only a salute to James, who was a finalist in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Championships in the 100-yard butterfly during the 1960-61 season while swimming for Tennessee State, but also a tribute to the fabled swimming program that was once housed at the Brewster Recreation Center, which helped to develop James, Jenkins and many other Detroit swimmers that competed nationally. Brewster’s early swimming program was led by the legendary Clarence Gatliff, an all-city swimmer at Cass Tech during the 1920s.

Another pleasant reminder of the history and evolution of Black swimmers in Detroit that Peterson sees when inside King High is 54-year-old Robert Jenkins Jr., an educator like his father, who is teaching personal finance this school year at King and hopes to honor his father’s legacy this summer by offering a swimming and golf program to students.  

“I want to make sure that Detroiters understand my father’s legacy,” said Jenkins, a 1989 graduate of Northern High School, who explained that his father and mother (Norma Jean Jenkins) taught him and his sister (Dr. Marlo Rencher) that “we don’t half do anything.”

And that includes community service.

“My father was a servant leader and he would offer encouragement to any young person he was around, not just the students he coached. And paying it (that support) forward was a lesson he always taught in the process.” 

Scott Talley is a native Detroiter, a proud product of Detroit Public Schools and a lifelong lover of Detroit culture in its diverse forms. In his second tour with the Free Press, which he grew up reading as a child, he is excited and humbled to cover the city’s neighborhoods and the many interesting people who define its various communities. Contact him at stalley@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @STalleyfreep. Read more of Scott’s stories at www.freep.com/mosaic/detroit-is/. Please help us grow great community-focused journalism by becoming a subscriber. 

• Amy Andrews posted on Instagram that for now, “my focus is following my doctors’ guidance so that I can return safely and consistently” to work.
• Andrews told viewers, “I miss our mornings together more than I can say.”

Fox 2 Detroit (WJBK-TV) morning news anchor Amy Andrews took to social media on Thursday, Feb. 26, to share with viewers why she has been off the air again.

Andrews posted on Instagram that she is on a “physician-directed medical leave” as she continues treatment for dysautonomia, which she described as “a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that affects things like heart rate, blood pressure, and circulation.”

Wrote Andrews, “For me, it can cause significant dizziness, vision changes, brain fog, and sudden drops in blood pressure, making live television unsafe until it’s properly stabilized.”

According to the Dysautonomia Project, a nonprofit collaborative effort to provide education on the condition, an estimated 70 million people across the globe have some form of dysfunction to the autonomic system that regulates “functions that are automatic in nature such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, excretion, perspiration, temperature regulation, pupil dilation, circulation, and respiration” and more. 

“Often dysautonomias are invisible illnesses. Patients may not look sick, and yet they have symptoms that make it difficult to work, go to school, and perform activities of daily living,” the collaborative effort says.

Andrews explained on her post that she doesn’t take her decision to step back from work lightly “I love what I do, and I love serving this community. Right now, my focus is following my doctors’ guidance so that I can return safely and consistently.”

She added, “I miss our mornings together more than I can say. Please know I am working hard, I am not giving up, and my goal is to return as soon as I am medically able. Thank you for the incredible support so many of you have shown me over the years. It means everything.”

Andrews received several supportive comments to her posting, including from Local 4 News (WDIV-TV) anchors Rhonda Walker, Karen Drew and Jason Colthorp.

More: Fox 2 Detroit anchor Taryn Asher speaks out after 3-month absence

“From your friends and competitors across town: Get well soon. Hope to look up and see your face soon,,” wrote Colthorp.

Andrews, who is an anchor of “Fox 2 News Mornings,” returned to work in September 2025 after an extended absence for what she said at the time on social media were health issues, describing symptoms like “extreme dizziness, balance issues, brain fog and blurred vision.”

Before that, in July 2025, she wrote online to thank staffers at the Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders (which has several locations in metro Detroit) for taking “amazing” care of her and wrote shortly afterward in August 2025: “My neurologist was able to rule out what would’ve been a devastating diagnosis! … However, that means I move on to different specialists and different tests until we figure this out.”

Andrews has been open about her medical challenges in the past and is also an advocate for mental health awareness. Through social media, she revealed in 2022 and 2024 that she had taken medical leaves to deal with depression and anxiety.In 2021, she underwent back surgery to remove herniated disc fragments in her lower back after an injury suffered during a vacation in Florida.Andrews is an alum of Indiana University, Oakland University and the Specs Howard School of Media Arts. She worked at TV stations in Colorado, Nevada, California and the Flint and Saginaw market before joining Fox 2 Detroit in 2011.

She is involved with many community causes including Gleaners Community Food Bank, C.A.T.C.H Children’s Charity, the Crohn’s Colitis Foundation of America, Habitat for Humanity, the American Heart Association and Angels of Hope, according to her Fox 2 Detroit biography.Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

LANSING — Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said she was both excited and inspired by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s State of the State address Feb. 25, especially the plans Whitmer announced related to literacy and housing.

Sheffield spoke to the Detroit Free Press just outside the House chamber, immediately after Whitmer’s final State of the State as governor and Sheffield’s first as mayor of Detroit.

Sheffield said the governor hit on many “kitchen table topics that matter to not just Michiganders, but everyday Detroiters as well.”

Whitmer has made literacy a key topic for the last year of her final term, proposing in her recent 2027 budget a record investment in literacy coaches, new school curricula, and other initiatives, supported by a one-time $645-million surge in literacy funding.

“The literacy piece is big because Detroiters want a mayor that focuses more on education,” Sheffield said.

She said she wants to see more after-school programming and safe spaces where Detroit children can read.