08/28/2026
There are high school athletes who are remembered because they were great at one sport.
Then there are athletes like Jim Manning, where the numbers are so ridiculous that it is hard to believe basketball may not have even been the sport he cared about most.
Before Ewen-Trout Creek existed, Manning was putting together one of the greatest scoring careers in Upper Peninsula basketball history. As a junior in 1959-60, he averaged 33.8 points per game and became the first U.P. player to surpass 600 points in a regular season. That same year, he exploded for 69 points in one game against Amasa, a total that still sits among the biggest individual scoring nights in Michigan high school basketball history.
Then he came back and somehow improved. Manning averaged 34.4 points per game as a senior, finishing with 757 points in 22 games. By the time his high school career was over, he had scored 2,137 points in 84 games. He earned All-State honors as both a junior and senior, and he did every bit of it in an era with no 3-point line.
Those numbers alone should have been enough to define his legacy. A 2,000-point scorer from a tiny U.P. school, back-to-back seasons above 33 points per game, and a 69-point masterpiece would normally be the kind of résumé that ends the discussion.
But basketball was only part of the story.
Manning was also an elite baseball prospect, and by most accounts, baseball was his first love. He had basketball scholarship opportunities, including one from Wisconsin, and was reportedly prepared to pursue both baseball and basketball at Minnesota. Instead, the Minnesota Twins signed him straight out of high school for a reported $20,000 bonus.
His professional climb happened almost absurdly fast. In 1961, Manning pitched only 12 games for Wytheville in the Class D Appalachian League, going 2-2 with a 4.40 ERA. One of his teammates that season was future Hall of Famer Tony Oliva. Manning entered spring training the following year with little expectation that he would make the Major League club.
He made it anyway.
On April 15, 1962, Jim Manning took the mound for the Minnesota Twins at 18 years and 268 days old, becoming the youngest player ever to appear for the franchise. Just over two years earlier, he had been a high school junior in Trout Creek scoring 69 points in a basketball game. Now he was facing Major League hitters.
His big-league career would last only five games, all with Minnesota, but that hardly diminishes what he accomplished. Thousands of athletes have starred in Upper Peninsula high school sports. Very few ever reach a major professional league. Manning did it before his 19th birthday.
That is what makes his story so uniquely U.P.
Jim Manning scored 2,137 points, averaged more than 33 points per game in each of his final two seasons, and once scored 69 in a night.
And somehow, basketball may have been his second-best sport.
