Hodag Sports Club receives Club of the Year award from Wisconsin Wildlife Federation

The Hodag Sports Club was founded in 1946 by a group of diehard fishermen. The original purpose of the club was to secure easements for boat landings around the Rhinelander area, thereby creating more access for anglers. The group can be credited with adding a great number of launch ramps around the Rhinelander area. Eventually the group grew to well over 700 members and this year it was named Club of the Year by the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation.

The honor is a testament to what can be accomplished by people who are passionate about the outdoors. From its beginnings as a few men looking for places to fish, the club started to expand into other pursuits.

“Eventually some of the guys wanted to shoot trap,” club member Virgil Davis said in a 2020 interview. At that point, the club leased eight acres of land on Highway C near Rhinelander, where the trap range is still located. Somewhere around the mid 1970s, two men came to the club and asked if they could shoot trap with them. Those two men were Speck DeByle and Jim Birginal. The two paid their $1 membership fee and became members.

Shortly thereafter, DeByle raised a concern about the club shooting on leased land. He purchased the 40 acre parcel on which the clubhouse now sits and sold off the house that was on the parcel along with three acres to pay for the purchase. 

Those humble beginnings have boomed into over 1,000 acres of land and the Hodag Sports Club now offers many types of ranges to meet the needs of its members. The club consists of two range locations and offers ranges for shotgun, trap, skeet, sporting clays, 5-stand, pistols, rifles, SAAS, three-gun and archery. 

The Rhinelander High School trap team also calls the shotgun range home. The Hodag Sports Club hosts regional competitions as well.

The shotgun and archery range sits on over 1,000 acres and includes five trap fields, one skeet field, a 5-stand field, a 15-station sporting clay course and archery targets. The rifle and pistol range comprises over 400 acres and contains five separate shooting bays.

The club also supports local educational opportunities. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) offers hunter safety classes as well as other classes at the club and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, as well as Nicolet College, use the facilities for educational purposes. 

All of the land owned by the club is enrolled in the Managed Forest Law (MFL) program with the vast majority of it being in Open MFL. This means the 1,300 acres enrolled is open to the public for hunting, fishing, snowshoeing and snowmobiling.

Most of the work done by the club is still done on a volunteer basis with their annual banquet as their largest fundraiser. Tickets to the banquet usually sell out and it is touted as one of the largest banquets of its kind in the area. To learn more about the Hodag Sports Club, or to become a member, visit their website hodagsportsclub.com. 

To learn more about the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, see their website wiwf.org.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].