Despite COVID bumps, transition nearing completion in Rib Lake

It certainly hasn’t been the easiest school year for a transition process, but the passing of the athletic director position in the Rib Lake School District is nearing a successful completion.

After a 24-year run at Darien-Delavan High School in southern Wisconsin, 1989 Rib Lake graduate Paul Yanko has returned to his alma mater as a physical education teacher and coach and has been gradually taking over as athletic director from Mike Wudi, who plans to retire from all of his duties at the end of the school year.

“Right now, it’s kind of a shared thing,” Wudi said Friday. “Officially (Yanko’s) name is on most things right now. Officially I’ve been kind of off the AD clock since January, at the start of the second semester. The advantage is we do have a common plan period. We’re pretty much still meeting daily right now just to work through some things. He’s taken on a lot more stuff. He’s gotten a lot more involved with scheduling and hiring umpires and some of those kinds of things. He’ll be ready to hit the ground running solo next fall.”

“I’ve been learning a lot,” Yanko said. “I wanted to come back here to teach and to coach. The AD wasn’t like a dream of mine to come back and do. It kind of went along with the job. Mike’s been mentoring me. It’s a lot to take in.”

Wudi and district administrator Rick Cardey both said Friday the athletic department will be in good hands.

“Mike was a very good athletic director and we’re fortunate because Paul is going to be a very good one too,” Cardey said.

Wudi has been Rib Lake’s athletic director for more than a decade. He started out sharing duties with Kevin Weiss in 2008 before taking it over fully soon after that. Wudi also was the head basketball coach for Rib Lake’s girls basketball team for the past seven seasons.

“My intent is to step away a little,” he said. “It’s been 29 years in the classroom. I think it’s like 34 overall. Out of those 34 I think I’ve coached a winter sport 32 of them at some level. Coaching is probably the hardest one to be stepping away from. You build those relationships with your players.”

As an athletic director, coach and also an official in this area, Wudi has gotten to experience high school athletics from pretty much every angle. He said the people he met along the way made that side of his journey in education enjoyable.

“You’re working with pretty good people,” he said. “ADs and coaches, for the most part, they’re good people. They’re interested in providing opportunities for kids, working with kids, helping them grow and develop. There’s some long hours. The scheduling nightmares, that’s not fun. I wasn’t a great athlete in high school, but I was involved in sports and it’s been a way to stay involved. You stay in touch with a lot of really neat people here and throughout the league. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t have stuck with it.”

From the athletic director standpoint, Wudi said there will be plenty of ups and downs to remember. Rib Lake teams have had some successes in all sports that he was able to oversee and some rebuilding years. Some springs have been nightmares due to poor Wisconsin weather and the hours needed to devote to the job certainly extended beyond the one class period per day typically given to him to do athletic director work around his social studies classes.

“There’s been lot of stuff,” Wudi said. “From some weird weather in a couple of those springs, just horrible springs as far as getting on fields and getting games in to obviously the whole boys basketball thing last year (when a potential run to state was stopped by the pandemic) was one of the big things from the negative side. We’ve had a couple of state tournament baseball teams in that time. We’ve had a team go to cross country state, we’ve sent some individual runners, we’ve sent some individuals to state track quite often. There’s been a few conference championships across the board. Highs and lows. You see both sides of it.

“(The 47-minute time block) was never enough, especially in spring,” he added. “Spring has always been the worst where all the time you get to 2 p.m. and is it, ‘are we going to play?’ You’ve got an eighth-hour class and it’s raining outside. You’re calling people. People are calling you. That was always a tough one.”

Nothing could top this year, however, as far as challenges to keeping athletics running as smoothly and safely as possible.

“There was no way to prepare for (COVID),” Wudi said. “You do all this over the summer, you go to meetings, you read releases from the WIAA, you talk to the health department about guidelines and this and that. There was just no way to prepare for that in terms of dealing with the guidelines, the masks, the social distancing, the cleaning, spectators and all that. We got kicked a couple of times. Opening day of football, we got shut down. Opening day of girls basketball season, we got quarantined. Those are just horrible to deal with. I can still see the football players when we called them out or the girls basketball team when we met them to tell them, ‘we’re not playing tonight, we’ve got a situation.’ That’s so frustrating and so disappointing.”

Fortunately for Wudi and Yanko, there is a positive outlook for the spring season, which will be held this year, unlike last year, and being outdoors should relax some of the COVID stress, though nothing is guaranteed.

Yanko comes home possessing a wealth of coaching experience gained during his time at Delavan-Darien. He assisted Wudi with the girls basketball team this past season.

“I did a lot of coaching, especially baseball and football,” Yanko said. “I did JV football for about 10 years. I coached baseball the whole time I was down there. I was head coach for about 15 years, middle school basketball, stuff like that. I even did a year of wrestling.”

Yanko said he began considering a move north a few years ago and, not long after that, it happened.

“Actually I was talking to (Dick) Iverson a couple of years ago,” Yanko said. “ We were sitting on the hill watching a ball game in the summer. He just said he didn’t know how many years he was going to have left and that I should come back and take his teaching job when it opens. That kind of put it into my head. I always knew I wanted to get back up here, whether it was after I retired or whatever. I liked it up here, so that got me thinking about possibly making the move up here.

I saw the high school position opened up last year, so I threw my name in there, just see what happens.”

“I think he feels a little apprehension, but he’ll do fine,” Wudi said. “He is organized. He knows sports. He’s a local guy, a Rib Lake alumni, so he’s well-connected to the community. That helps so much with communication when you have to deal with parents and businesses. I think he has a real nice advantage in that he is a known quantity.”