ANN ARBOR — Michael Vanderhoof was outside his house about a month ago when three strangers approached and asked to see the back yard.
At first, he didn’t think much of it. Then they started introducing themselves. There was an older man — Jack — his adult son John, and John’s daughter, Alison. It was the Harbaugh family, back to visit their old Ann Arbor home.
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The family wandered around a little, then told stories about John and Jim playing in the street, how they would “beat the hell out of each other” competing.
They never asked to come in.
“I guess they knew what it looked like inside,” Vanderhoof joked.
Cherryl and Michael Vanderhoof now live in the home where Jim Harbaugh grew up. (Max Bultman / The Athletic)Even before Michael and his wife Cherryl first moved into the house in 2014, their real estate agent mentioned something about Bo Schembechler and the Harbaughs having been there a lot. Once they moved in, neighbors popped by to tell them whose house it had been.
To many Ann Arborites, living in Jim Harbaugh’s old house on Anderson St. would be like renting out a slice of Michigan football history. To the Vanderhoofs, it’s just home.
Michael sometimes watches football, but the first time he ever went to Michigan Stadium was in 2010 for his daughter Micah’s college graduation. He watches a handful of games a year, but he’s not the type to schedule his whole weekend around it. Cherryl’s not too connected to the sport — though she too has had her brush with Michigan football history.
She once took a dance class with Vera Embree — a Michigan dance teacher who once suggested to Schembechler that his players take dance classes to help improve their agility and stop getting injured.
“He did, and they stopped having so many!” Cherryl recalled.
For the most part, the couple’s ties to Michigan football stop there. But there are a couple quirky coincidences that are too perfect to ignore.
Michael, for example, is a coach, too. It’s not football, or even dance, but Michael is a wellness coach — and a wellness coaches’ coach, at that. Working for a company called Mannatech, Michael teaches clients how to best use his company’s supplements, while also helping aspiring entrepreneurs build teams of salesmen to distribute the product.
“I look at, how can I help people eat better and supplement what’s missing out of the diet?” Michael explained.
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Get him going, and he talks about glyconutrition the way Harbaugh talks about fullbacks. He can tell you why you should — and how to properly — consume aloe. He uses all the biology terms you’ve forgotten by now, and he coaches others on how to best achieve the elusive state of wellness. It’s a Harbaugh-like passion.
This is a man who, when he was younger, decided the corporate path wasn’t for him. He had all kinds of odd jobs — he attended General Motors Institute for a while, worked at a photo lab, painted, and more. He just didn’t know what would stick.
Eventually, though, he stumbled into the pursuit of wellness. He didn’t immediately make it his business — that came later — but it piqued his interest and set him on the path that led him to renting the house on Anderson St. all these years later.
Along the way, he met Cherryl, a flutist and music and dance teacher at Washtenaw Community College and the Ann Arbor Public Schools. He asked her for flute lessons — he wasn’t hitting on her at first, he says — and their love blossomed from there.
They now spend their days living in the quaint little neighborhood that raised two of football’s best active coaches, in a house with red shutters and an unexpectedly large backyard.
When the Harbaughs stopped by last month, the memories came rushing back for Jack. There was the backyard where they would freeze off a little area and set up a goalie net. There was the incline where, once upon a time, John forgot to put on the Volkswagen’s parking brake and the car rolled toward Packard — only ceasing when it ran into a stop sign. The back of the car, Jack recalled in a conversation with The Athletic, looked like an accordion.
“Those are the kind of memories you have when you come home,” he said.
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