May 25, 2018 at 1:35 p.m.
Champions of the cold
Nearly three decades later, legacy lives on for Fish, state champion Nordic teams
Champions of the cold
Those ties have intertwined this month.
One of the key players in the rise of the United States on the world Nordic skiing circuit, Fish was presented the United States Ski and Snowboard Association's domestic coach of the year award earlier this month. On Thursday, he and eight others will be inducted into the Rhinelander Athletic Booster Club's Hodag Hall of Fame for their role in the Hodags' Wisconsin Nordic Ski League state championships in 1990, 1991 and 1993.
"That's cool that skiing is being recognized, and cross country skiing," Fish said in a sit-down interview with the River News earlier this month. "There's a lot of great athletes that have come out of this town, whether it was (Olympic skier) Chris (Cook), or Mike Webster, the line of athletes is really exciting from a small town."
A close team
Rhinelander has had its share of great teams over the years, but few rivaled the dominance of the Hodag ski teams of the early 1990s.
Rhinelander was the team state champion in 1990, 1991 and 1993 and finished second to Lakeland in 1992.
The common denominators - the last names of Fish and Swank. Wayne Fish and Judy Swank were the coaches of the team back then and both had talented freshmen sons enter the program in the 1989-90 season - Bryan Fish and Adam Swank.
"Adam Swank, in particular, he and I started racing against each other when we were in kindergarten," Fish explained. "Our families were always intertwined. It kind of speaks to this outdoors endurance lifestyle beyond cross country skiing. We're also avid mountain bikers, avid trail runners, kayakers. We do these sorts of adventures together. It started with the families. As kids we were kind of always going to the same events together. Then we kind of took it from there."
"They hung out together a lot," recalled current RHS Nordic ski coach Charil Reis, who was a classmate of Fish, Swank and fellow three-time team champion B.J. Doyle. "Nordic skiing for them was a cult, in a good way."
High school Nordic skiing was still a relatively new undertaking in the early 1990s. The first high school state championship was held back in 1982. In those first few years, the Hodags never quite reached the top - finishing second in both 1986 and 1988, with Rhinelander's Jeff Craig finishing second individually in 1988.
That changed in 1990 when the Hodags took four of the top five positions on the way to the state title. Only a runner-up finish by Lakeland's Adam Wood, broke up a Hodag quartet at the front led by Swank, Noel Versch, Todd Craig and Fish.
As Fish recalls, Swank's 1990 title was a bit of a surprise.
"Adam actually wasn't on our A-team because he had broken his arm," he said. "I believe that was the time he and I were Alpine skiing up at Whitecap and he took a jump and broke his arm. He was on our B-team and he happened to come out of the cast and win state that year on our B-squad."
The Hodags repeated as state champs in 1991 with the same four leading the charge. Fish finished fourth in 1991, followed by Swank in sixth, Craig in eighth and Versch in 11th.
Lakeland usurped Rhinelander for the state title in 1992. "Minocqua surprised us a little bit. They came back and beat us, but it was friendly competition," Fish recalled. The Hodags returned the favor under a new format in 1993 - being crowned double state champs in the freestyle and classic techniques. Prior to 1993, the state meet was only a single-event competition. It was classic only for the first four editions and freestyle only for the next seven years.
That year Swank and Fish finished 1-2 in the freestyle race and 2-3 behind Waukesha South's Chad Tolbert in the classic.
"It was a battle and Adam got me just at the finish line in the skate. I was the bridesmaid in both races," Fish recalled. "We kind of went back and forth a little bit. I think that talked a lot about how much we trained together that we were so competitive and so close in competitive level."
Freshman Matt Frost, who would go on to win individual state titles in 1995 and 1996, placed eighth while Doyle finished 15th.
Additionally, several of the team members competed regionally and nationally on the Junior Olympic circuit and Reis recalls, for as competitive as they were on the trails, they were just as compassionate off of them.
"Every single last one of them was genuinely a nice person and they are still nice people. You remember stuff like that when you're in high school," she said. "They were just genuinely good-natured and a pleasure to be around."
Drawn back to the sport
That bond continued at the collegiate level for many of the Hodags, who went on to ski for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
Fish was ready to put Nordic skiing on the back burner after earning his engineering degree but, as he said, fate and the sport kept drawing him back.
"The coach who was the coach for Noel, Todd, Adam and I had retired immediately after Adam and I had left," he explained. "They were going through some challenging coaching and that following year they called and asked me to help, while I was doing engineering as well. All of a sudden, that became seven years of being a head coach at University of Wisconsin Green Bay as a part-time role while I was engineering."
Fish, who admits he's an ultra-competitive person, said coaching helped him channel that competitive drive in a different way.
"I love the development aspect of it ... passion for the sport, passion for a life-long activity," he said. "I'm a very competitive person and I just express it in different ways now. It's been really exciting to be a part of."
A leap of faith
After seven seasons at Green Bay, Fish received a phone call that completely changed his trajectory within the sport.
When the Central Cross Country Ski Association (CXC) was looking to start a program for elite skiers, they turned to Fish.
"I just took this leap of faith," he said. "I was a first coach and was able to work with another individual to build it from scratch."
His work at CXC eventually led to a call from the USSA and a position as a cross country development coach - a key cog in the pipeline of preparing athletes to one day compete in both Olympic and World Cup competitions.
"Anyone who's not top 30 in the world who's a United States skier, I have some connection with," Fish explained. "My reach is broad. I would work with our National U16 development camp all the way up to our junior and U23 athletes that are scoring World Cup points."
One of Fish's former pupils, Jessie Diggins, was part of the historic women's team sprint with teammate Kikkan Randall that won the United States' first gold medal in cross country skiing this past February at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
While that was going on Fish was leading another group in Norway in the FIS Junior World Cup. He helped coach the Americans to their first medals in the competition a year earlier in Utah and Team USA backed that up with three medals - two silvers and a bronze - in this year's competition.
Hailey Swarbal was the runner-up in the 5-kilometer women's classic race and took third in the skiathlon - a combination of 5K races in both freestyle and classic. Meanwhile the men's team took second in the 4x5,000 relay.
Fish said both his men's and women's 4x5,000 relays were in position to medal late in the final leg. The men came home second and the women came home eighth, but he said both results were equally gratifying.
"It's great to be in a scenario where these athletes have the confidence to excel and the confidence to say, 'Look, I'm going to leave it all on the course and whether I get second or eighth, I was totally proud with those results,'" he said.
Those results have caught the attention of the USSA - an umbrella organization that oversees the national teams for a number of disciplines of on-snow sports from downhill and cross country skiing, to snowboarding and biathlon.
Fish was named domestic coach of the year across all seven of the USSA's disciplines in 2017 and cross country skiing domestic coach of the year earlier this month.
"It's named by our peers. It's fellow coaches throughout the organization and throughout the community. It's nice to get accolades. It's not going to change who I am or what I do, but it's nice to be noticed," he said. "Ultimately, that's really not indicative of what I've done, but what our whole community has done. Like I said in my acceptance speech, I kind of manage that (program) and I look at it as I'm doing a good job, but I'm just one small piece of the puzzle and it's really cool to be part of an organization with a program right now that we have a really forward trajectory."
The best at home
Though Fish's job takes him all over the world, he's still a Hodag at heart. In fact, he still lists Rhinelander as his residence on both his drivers license and passport.
He returns home every so often and keeps tabs on the skiing legacy in Rhinelander that his father, Judy Swank, the Cook family and others helped to create. He believes the Hodag city has everything it needs to become a Nordic skiing mecca.
"There is no reason why we can't make best in the world here," he said. "Best in the world to me is kind of a coin term our organization has, but if an athlete decides they want to be best in the world, they can do it here from Rhinelander. It's one of those things that I grew up in the community, the community, the environment my friends and my parents kind of sculpted and shaped that passion intrinsic to me."
'Shut up and listen'
When Reis took over as head coach of the RHS Nordic Ski program back in 2014, one of the first things she did was put a call into Fish to speak to her athletes and parents on orientation night. She has yet to stop asking Fish for pointers, which he's been more than happy to provide.
"He's very accessible," she said. "He'll answer emails, meet you for coffee. It's a boon to have that access to Bryan directly for information at our level. We've absolutely leaned on that. A lot of times Bryan will fly into town and say, 'Meet me for coffee.' and I'll bring a whole list of questions with me."
And when he answers, Reis said she simply lets Fish do the talking.
"He has an amazing mind. Around here in Rhinelander, it's just like his father," she said. "When Wayne started taking about waxes everybody shut up and listened. Nobody talked and you took a lot of mental notes. Now when Bryan talks about what he is doing with U.S. Ski and Snowboard, the trajectory they're taking and things like that, you tend to just shut up and listen."
During the RHS Nordic ski team's year-end banquet Reis said her team is ready to evolve into developing a culture of competition, having already established a culture of loving the outdoors and a culture of training. That three-step process of devolping culture within a team came straight out of the Bryan Fish playbook.
"Culture is really huge for us," Fish said. "One of the things I always talk about is we cannot create culture as coaches but we can foster an environment for culture to grow ... What we've talked about in culture is working as a team and focusing on pushing one another. When you have that environment and that culture within the team, they push each other every day. It's these little things every single day that continue to evolve our team."
"Bryan comes back to that a lot. It means more and more to me as I see our team developing," Reis said. "That's what we've completely based our Rhinelander programming on and it's pretty much has gotten us where we are today and we're right where we want to be."
Carrying on the legacy
It will be a posthumos induction for Wayne Fish and Judy Swank as their teams are enshrined in the Hodag Hall of Fame on Thursday, but it is clear that their legacies live on through the athletes they coached.
The sport has stayed in the blood of a number of members of that team, Versch helped found Bay Nordic, a youth skiing club in the Green Bay area. Swank still competes at a high level. This past February, he finished 35th overall - and second in the male 40-44 age group - in the prestigious American Birkebeiner ski race in western Wisconsin.
Bryan Fish is now responsible for writing the manuals that USSA uses for coaches to be certified. He imparts those lessons every other year in Cable in a coaches' clinic that bears his father's name.
"I'm not Judy Swank and certainly not Wayne Fish but I'd like to think that, besides skiing, a lot of their personality and life virtues rubbed off on those guys," said Reis, who will present the teams for induction into the Hall on Thursday night.
It's a legacy Bryan Fish said he hopes will continue long after his time with the U.S. Ski Team is over.
"When I walk away from coaching, I guess that will still be in my blood to help in different ways - whether it's local or whatever it may be," he said. "Whether it's cross country skiing or football or cross country running, whatever it might be - athletics is something that can shape (people). If it's coached ethically well and if sport is framed in the right mindset and manner, it can really help grow and flourish good citizens."
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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