Mix of old and new faces for Hodag track team

On the day when the Rhinelander High School winter sports season officially came to a close, the spring sports season got underway. 

The Hodag track team began preparations for its season on Monday. With more than 100 athletes registered and some changes in the coaching staff, head coach Aaron Kraemer said there is plenty excitement heading into the year.

“Grateful for the amount of kids that we had today. It’s a little different for all of our kids and obviously new coaches come in, which is fantastic to have a different perspective,” he said. “I’m excited to start testing tomorrow and moving into seeing what the athletes are capable of.”

Kraemer adds a co-head coach to his staff this year in former Three Lakes head coach Andy Wyss. He’s been tabbed as the head coach of the girls’ squad and will also work with the entire program’s sprint and horizontal jump athletes. 

Wyss is the husband of RHS volleyball coach Jayme Wyss, who has also joined the track staff and will focus on distance and vertical jumps. 

“I’m coming in fresh. Being that my wife was the volleyball coach, I’ve seen some faces, but I know hardly any names,” Andy Wyss said. “So that’s going to be an uphill battle for me, is learning everybody but I’m looking forward to it.

“The fact that coach Kraemer has built this program is not lost on me. I know what an awesome job he’s done. So I’m hoping that, you know, he’s built the fire and I can come in and be the gasoline and that we can work together really well and just take everything that he’s done and take it up to another notch. So it’s going to be a good thing.” 

With roughly 45 girls and more than 55 boys out for the program, Wyss said the biggest difference for him than his previous stops at Division 3 Three Lakes and Marshfield Columbus is just the sheer size of the program. 

“In track, a lot of it is a numbers game,” he said. “It’s can you fill the events? Can you cover everything and can you do it well? So the fact that we’re starting with a base of depth, we have enough to go around to fill the events. We can start to build the technique and the skills we need to succeed in those events. So, yeah, having the numbers is great for us today.”

Meanwhile Kraemer, who is also the Hodag head football coach, equated Day 1 much like the football team’s switch from a pro-style offense to the Wing-T a couple of years ago. Athletes needed to learn some different terminology and different ways of doing things. 

“Every time you learn something new or you try something new and learn from a new coach, they have different types of languages and types of things,” he said. “So I was more of a translator today, trying to translate what we’ve done in the past into coach Wyss’s language, but I think that he has done a fantastic job really.” 

Not all the athletes registered were at practice on Monday, mostly giving those who had just wrapped up their winter sports a little bit of a breather instead of jumping right into the spring season. Next week figures to be a little down as well, as it coincides with spring break for the district. 

For those who have been at practice this week, the main objectives have been getting back into a track mindset and evaluating everyone’s skills.

“I mean a lot of it is shaking off rust,” Wyss said. “For our returners, just kind of getting back into the swing of things, remembering how to compete. For our freshman, it’s getting a lay of the land. You know, what happens at a meet, what are we supposed to do, how they function, the order of events. There’s just a lot of basics that they don’t know.

“We want to see what our athletes can do in a bunch of different events,” Kraemer added. “I think it’s about exposure ... Something that maybe we didn’t do a lot in the past years is trying to expose them to a bunch of different events and get them, especially in field events, and get them comfortable or get them exposed to something, maybe they didn’t know that they were good at.”

Though virtually all of the team’s workouts on Monday were done inside the Hodag Dome, record-high temperatures helped to get the team eager for the spring season.

“It is always nice in the dome but, just for their own mindset, to be able to go outside and be 60 degrees, that’s huge,” Kraemer said. “And I hear we’re going get even better as the week goes on, so that’s great.”

The team’s first competition takes place this coming Thursday in the Wisconsin Rapids Indoor meet. It is one of four indoor meets planned for the squad in the early portion of the season.

“Really it’s the very first meet is honestly just a glorified practice, just to get ready to get going,” Wyss said. “Especially since we’ll be on spring break, we’ll have limited numbers, so we’re just going do what we can and make it a good experience for those that are able to be here and go.”

The first full meet of the season for the Hodags will be the Oredocker Invite March 25 in Ashland.

Track and field is the first WIAA-sanctioned spring sport that could begin preparation for the upcoming season. Softball practice starts next Monday, baseball and girls’ soccer start March 24 while boys’ tennis and boys’ golf begin March 31. 

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].