February 20, 2023 at 9:46 a.m.
Mayo: Hodag swimmers' success a story to celebrate
Mayo: Hodag swimmers' success a story to celebrate
The Division 2 team state champion did not come from the swimming-rich Madison or Milwaukee suburbs. It came from a tiny Northwoods town of barely more than 8,000 people.
Rhinelander's state championship was an unprecedented result. The Hodags became the first team from the northern third of the state to win a team boys' swim title. Just don't get unprecedented confused with fluke, because it was far from the latter.
Rhinelander's championship was the culmination for a program steeped in history and tradition, and one that has been on the rise over the last decade. It was the also the result a group of 10 swimmers hyper-focused on a goal and pushing themselves to the limit, and beyond, to achieve it.
One could contend Rhinelander's 2023 state title began 364 days before Friday's meet, when the Hodags finished third in the 2022 state meet with a group that had nary a senior swimming.
"This team is going to be really strong next year," team member Daniel Gillingham told us at the conclusion of last year's state meet. "We're going to have guys working offseason really hard. We're really going to push this next season, it's going to be great."
That's a promise Gillingham and the rest of the squad lived up to.
"Last year we watched Edgewood get their trophy. We watched them jump in and we formed a goal," senior Marcus O'Malley said. "We wanted to be on top. We wanted to be the ones jumping in the water. That's what we were talking about before this meet started. That was our goal from the very end of this meet last year. That's what we trained for all offseason. That what we did every single morning. That was on our minds every single practice. Every practice we showed up and we did what state champions do. We trained our butts off."
Sure, some things broke the right way for the Hodags. Edgewood, last year's champion, was decimated by graduation and transfers and was not a factor on Friday night. Cedarburg, last year's runner-up, bumped up to Division 1.
Yet the Hodags had their own bumps along the way with a shoestring-thin roster of 10 swimmers. Nine of them competed in Waukesha on Friday night and seven of them ended up on the podium, placing in the top six in at least one individual or relay event.
"Even after last year, I did well individually but, individually, we didn't reach our goal and, as a team, we made a new goal for the next year that we were going to go out there and put up our best performances and win the state championship for the Rhinelander Hodags," said senior Jack Antonuk who finished fourth last year in the 100 breaststroke, setting a school record in the process. "Even though we didn't necessarily have a full team this year, we didn't have the year before due to graduation and other circumstance, we still showed up. We still did what we needed to do and we won that state title."
Antonuk put it all on the line Friday night, swimming back-to-back in the 100 breaststroke and the 400 freestyle relay to close out the meet. Frankly, everyone on the Hodag squad did. There was Carter Gaber, who likely sacrificed an individual podium finish in the 100 backstroke - he was eighth, only 0.06 seconds outside the top six - by swimming a leg of the state-winning 200 freestyle relay just minutes prior. The parents of one of the team members told me their son passed up on eating his own birthday cake, not wanting to put any unhealthy food in his body before the state meet.
Those are just a couple of anecdotal examples of the sacrifices each of these young men made for the betterment of the group.
Furthermore, the Hodags' state title was won not only by this year's team, but the squads that helped lay the foundation before it. The Hodags were third in 2022 and 2019 - the 2019 squad helping put Rhinelander back on the map as a legitimate contender on the state scene.
Joseph Heck and Devon Gaber, the older brothers of seniors Charlie Heck and Carter Gaber, were on that 2019 squad that started Rhinelander's run of five straight Great Northern Conference and WIAA D2 sectional titles. They were also on the state-championship winning 200 freestyle relay that year that set a school record that stood until Friday night, when the Hodags broke it with another championship performance.
Joseph surprised Charlie at the meet, flying in from college in Arizona to be in the stands on Friday. He was not the only Hodag alum and brother of a current swimmer in attendance.
"It instantly got me more motivated and it was just another one of those guys who just helped paved the way for us to be the great swimmers that we are," Charlie Heck said. "It's awesome seeing those guys here - Devon (Gaber) is here. David (King) is here too. It's awesome seeing those guys. They were the one who helped us fall in love with swimming. They're the ones who pushed us every day and now we're here to give it to the underclassmen and they can carry it on."
Certainly this story cannot be told without the Hecks, a family synonymous with Rhinelander swimming. Charlie's father, Ken, is a Hodag Hall of Famer. His mother, Jenny, is now a two-time state-champion coach after guiding the Hodag girls to the 2020 D2 state crown. His uncle, Dave, swept the state titles in the 50 and 100 freestyle back in 1988.
And lest we forget, it's the Heck name that adorns the pool at Rhinelander High School. That was thanks to a substantial donation following the passage of a 2010 capital improvement referendum that helped fund a major renovation of Rhinelander's aging pool. The pool and the Hodag swim team were on the chopping block, if taxpayers had not passed that referendum.
Since then, the Rhinelander Swim Club and, by extension, the Rhinelander High School swim teams have been on the rise. The two teams have combined for 12 GNC titles and nine sectional championships since. There have been 11 individual state winners in that span, a WIAA D2 crown for the girls' squad in 2020, a runner-up finish for the girls in 2021 and now the boys' title in 2023.
"When you want something so bad and it's all you think about and dream about and visualize, when that works out and you can bring it home to you community (it means a lot)," Jenny Heck said. "The Rhinelander community has been so awesome. They've been so supportive, so great. The swimming community is great. We have a great club bringing up, raising great swimmers. These swimmers don't come out of nowhere. They've been swimming for years."
Throw on top of that all the success the Hodag girls had in the 1990s and early 2000s, the run of success for the Hodag boys in the late 1980s and early '90s and, of course, the string of four straight runner-up finishes RHS boys' team had at state under hall of fame coach Bob Smith from 1965-1968.
All of it added up to a program that was long overdue for its time in the spotlight. The Hodags finally got their moment Friday night.
Perhaps no one was more aware of all of this than Dan Jesse, who watched the teams of the 1960s growing up, was a standout and school-record holding swimmer for Rhinelander in the 1970s, coached the Hodag teams of the late '80s and '90s and is still helping out as an assistant for this year's squad.
"It's hard to believe, with the program we've had, this is the first state championship that Rhinelander boys have ever had," he said. "It's so fun to be a part of it."
So what's the moral of all of this? It's that in a time when - thanks to open enrollment, specialization and access to off-season training - the scales of competitiveness in high school sports are tipping more and more in favor of the public and private schools centered in metropolitan areas in the southern half of the state, a bit of hard work, sacrifice and dedication to the success of the group over the success of the individual can still achieve the ultimate result.
The 2022-23 Rhinelander High School boys' swim team will forever be a reflection of those tenets. For that, we congratulate swimmers Jack Antonuk, Shawn Denis, Mathias Fugle, Carter Gaber, Daniel Gillingham, Charlie Heck, Zacha King, Eli Lundt, Dolan O'Malley, Marcus O'Malley, head coach Jenny Heck and the entire swim program.
You have all made us Hodag proud.
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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