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Lots of winning moments in the last 365 days

Lots of winning moments in the last 365 days Lots of winning moments in the last 365 days

2022 IN REVIEW

Saturday will change to Sunday this weekend, just like it does every seven days. Only this time it comes with that demarcation point where one tends to look behind at the ups, downs, surprises, disappointments of the last 365 days and look ahead with optimism to the next 365 days.

Views, opinions and recollections of the year 2022 of course differ for everyone. Personally, I’ll most remember watching my daughter Abbie walk across the stage on graduation night May 27 and then move into her dorm room at UW-River Falls on Sept. 3 as well as watching my son Dylan grow about a foot and pretty much equal me now in height. Keep in mind, he’s in seventh grade.

And of course I’ll never forget my strange last two months of 2022. More on that in a bit.

From the sports perspective, it was quite a year around here. As I took the annual trip through our newspaper’s back issues Friday, I came up with a full legal-sized sheet worth of moments and accomplishments that certainly could be described as being above the ordinary. It’s amazing how the older a local sports editor gets, the more that look through the back issues becomes necessary because of how stuff just gets blurred with how fast life keeps moving.

As always, though, there were moments that no fan could forget no matter what.

The teams

There were a handful of high school teams in Taylor County that stood above the rest in 2022.

One of them was Medford’s boys basketball team of 2021-22. The Raiders didn’t win the Great Northern Conference due to a couple of off days against Rhinelander and Northland Pines in January, but they did make an important breakthrough in March and, when it comes down to it, that’s when you want to make an impact in the sport. The Raiders won the WIAA Division 2 regional title in dramatic fashion March 5 at Fox Valley Lutheran, then made the breakthrough five days later by earning the program’s first WIAA sectional semifinal win since 1983. Medford proved Rhinelander’s

Matt’s

Bleacher Shots

Matt Frey 55-49 win on Jan. 4 was a fluke in the sectional game, pounding the Hodags 56-29 in Antigo in a game that was never close.

It was an awesome sight on March 12 to see Eau Claire North’s Doghouse filled with Raiders fans young and old and from far and nearby, hoping to see history. La Crosse Central was just a little too good that day and won 56-47, but it was a reminder of how a magical March run can pull a community together.

Medford’s girls cross country team continued to dominate, winning the program’s sixth straight GNC championship and fourth straight WIAA Division 2 sectional championship, if you gloss over the 2020 Division 1 Covid mess. The Raiders didn’t skip a beat while going through a coaching change and actually built depth through their youth while finishing seventh at state on Oct. 29. These Raiders aren’t going anywhere for awhile with runners like Meredith Richter, Ella Daniels, Ella Dassow, Mallory Richter, Morgan Liske and Lindsay Kahn all slated to come back.

Another force that just kept right on rolling was the 2021-22 Medford gymnastics team. The Raiders clinched their fourth straight GNC Small Division title at Antigo on Feb. 19 and the division championship was their fifth in six years under head coach Steve Cain. That was a foregone conclusion because the Small Division, in all honesty, had gotten pretty thin on team depth outside of Medford. But the Raiders just kept focusing on themselves and it paid off in February and March with a new team record score of 135.175, achieved Feb. 12 in Ashland, a fourth straight WIAA Division 2 sectional championship on Feb. 25 that included a school-record 35.275-point all-around performance from Kate Malchow and a seventh-place state finish at Wisconsin Rapids on March 4, that included another school-record performance from Malchow. This time it was an 8.85 on the uneven bars.

All indications from December show the Raiders should make another run at the end of this season, barring bad injury luck or something like that.

Another nominee for the team of 2022 would be Medford’s boys soccer team, which stormed its way through the Great Northern Conference for the program’s first outright league title. When it was on, the Raiders could be a dazzling combination of shooting, passing, defense, ball control and just flat-out understanding its role with a huge senior group that has played together for years. It was pretty much state or bust, which, unfortunately did not come true when Rhinelander rallied from an early 2-0 deficit in the Oct. 27 WIAA Division 3 sectional semifinal. More on that night shortly.

As he had planned before the season, head coach Nathan Bilodeau’s resignation from the head coaching position has been submitted after a fine four-year run that included two GNC titles, four regional final appearances with two titles and a Division 2 state appearance in the Covid year of 2020.

Shoutouts also have to go to the 2022 Medford and Rib Lake baseball teams as well as the Medford softball team. Medford shared the GNC softball title with Antigo and Mosinee, with an injury to UW-Green Bay-bound pitcher Martha Miller having something to do with that, and won its second straight WIAA Division 2 regional title.

Led by second-team All-State standout Chubs Guden, Medford’s baseball team went 22-6 overall against a pretty stacked schedule and went 10-2 in the GNC to take second behind Mosinee. Again, an off-day against Northland Pines was the culprit in the GNC title chase. At face value, Rib Lake’s records didn’t wow you at 13-8 overall and 7-3 in the Marawood North, but the Redmen were one of those fun stories where a team peaks at the right time and makes a run. An 8-1 stretch carried them all the way to the WIAA Division 4 sectional final in Gillett on June 7, where their season ended in a 5-0 loss to Columbus Catholic.

One of those late wins, a 12-1 win at Spencer on May 23, was the 500th of Dick Iverson’s head-coaching career. He may tell you that number only comes with longevity, but you have to be pretty darn good at what you’re doing to hit 500, especially since there weren’t 26-game seasons in the first half of his tenure.

The moments

Upon further review, my goodness there were a lot of “wow” moments in 2022. Too many to mention, but I’ll try to randomly hit the highlights.

  For pure drama and what was riding on it, not sure any moment beats Joey Sullivan’s shot that beat Fox Valley Lutheran 68-66 at the buzzer in the WIAA Division 2 boys regional. Big win for fourth-seeded Medford over the topseeded Foxes, who had the momentum after storming back from a late deficit behind the unreal shooting of Josiah Butler. I’ve been doing this since 1995 and I can probably still count on one hand the number of game-winning shots at the actual buzzer I have seen in person. What an atmosphere in that gym that night.

  The walk-off moment that could match Sullivan’s shot was the blast Medford’s Laurissa Klapatauskas sent bouncing off the glove of Antigo centerfielder Jenna Czerneski and over the fence in the bottom of the seventh inning to give the Raiders softball team a 2-1 win over Antigo and the regional championship on May 26. The homer capped a big regional week for Klapatauskas, who held Lakeland to three hits and hit the goahead three-run homer in the sixth inning of the regional semifinal in a 5-2 win two days earlier.

  A couple more basketball moments –– Logan Baumgartner set a school record with 10 3-pointers in a win over Lakeland on Jan. 21 and hit the 1,000-point mark for his career in a win over Rhinelander on Feb. 8. Knock on wood, he’ll have another moment soon as he enters this week’s Sheboygan North tournament 107 points away from Peyton Kuhn’s school record of 1,464.

  Speaking of Sullivan, he closed his track and field career at Medford with two astounding finishes in the WIAA Division 2 state 1,600- and 3,200-meter runs on June 3-4, rallying in the last laps to take third and fourth in those races and smash Medford school records in the process at 4:16.62 and 9:24.06.

  The state track weekend was a good one overall for Medford and the Gilman Pirates. Gilman sophomore Bailey Angell nearly won the Division 3 girls shot put title with an opening throw of 38 feet, 6.25 inches. She led for some time before settling for second. She medaled in the discus. Teammate Gracie Tallier medaled with a fourth-place finish in the 100-meter dash. Medford’s Meredith Richter got a sixth-place medal in the girls Division 2 800-meter run while winning the slow heat and Jaylin Machon just missed a medal in the pole vault. If the weather is good, the state track meet remains one of my favorite events, except when your hotel reservation gets screwed up.

  Medford came out on the short end June 1, but what an unforgettable WIAA Division 2 baseball regional final with Mosinee. With the game tied 0-0 in the bottom of the sixth Mosinee scored four runs, including rare back-to-backto- back home runs. Medford answered with a stunning six-run rally in the top of the seventh. The Indians tied it, Medford took an 8-6 lead in the ninth, then Mosinee won it with three in the bottom half. So many twists and turns and big plays in those last four innings in a rivalry that is getting testier by the year.

  Another rivalry match that stood out was the Medford wrestling team’s 39-37 win over Tomahawk on Feb. 1 that clinched a share of the GNC title for the host Raiders. This was a big one for an extremely young Raider squad, who won the first six matches to go up 33-0 and then lost the next seven to trail 37-33 going into the last match. Medford, though, had one of its best, Thaddeus Sigmund ready for the final 113-pound bout and he took care of business, pinning Jack Derleth in 30 seconds.

  How was this for a rarity? On Thursday, April 28, our local teams combined to throw four no-hitters.

In Medford, Tanner Hraby needed 34 pitches –– that’s right, 34! –– to no-hit Marshfield in five innings 11-0. Across the parking lot, Martha Miller no-hit Tomahawk’s softball team, striking out nine in a 10-0 five-inning win. Miller threw another five-inning no-hitter against Northland Pines five days later.

In Prentice that Thursday, Rib Lake swept the host Buccaneers behind a fiveinning baseball no-hitter from Logan Blomberg, who struck out nine in a 16-1 win, and a four-inning softball no-hitter from Danielle Mann, who struck out five in a 15-0 win.

  Had a blast on July 15 covering the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association’s All-Star Game for eight-player


Rib Lake’s Logan Blomberg slides around the tag attempt from Newman Catholic’s James Bates and swipes home plate at the front end of a successful first-inning double steal with teammate Andrew Wudi during the team’s 6-1 win over the Cardinals in a WIAA Division 4 sectional semifinal held in Gillett June 7.MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS
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