Colby High’s Mateer is setting a high bar

Colby High’s student-athletes enjoyed an extremely successful winter sports season in 2021-22. The Colby Hornets boys basketball team played in a regional title match for the first time in a decade, compiling a record of 17-8.

A pair of Colby/Abbotsford wrestlers, senior Carter Grewe and sophomore Tanner Halopka, competed at the WIAA state tournament, placing fourth in their respective weight classes.

But what some people might not know is Colby High also had another participant in a state tournament this season.

Colby High freshman Veronica Mateer capped off her first season as a member of the Medford/Colby gymnastics coop with an appearance at the WIAA D-2 state gymnastics meet in Wisconsin Rapids on March 9.

“It’s kinda cool, but also it’s kind of awkward because I’m the only person doing the sport from this school,” Mateer says about representing Colby in gymnastics. “But next year there should be someone else coming up from eighth grade.”

This is Mateer’s first year with the Medford gymnastics team, but she’s already an old hand at the sport, getting her start when she was nine years old. Athletics runs in Mateer’s family, with her older brother Matt, a senior at Abbotsford High, and an all-conference runner for the Abbotsford/Colby boys crosscountry co-op this past fall.

Mateer, on the other hand, chose to go to school at Colby in order to pursue her love of gymnastics, and while practices were in Medford, Mateer found plenty of familiar faces there.

“Gymnastics was one of the reasons I came to Colby,” Mateer admitted. “But I knew pretty much all of them because they had been in club with me.”

Mateer’s background in junior gymnastics helped her this season, but she also saw that the competition and expectations are a lot more fierce at the high school level.

“[Doing juniors] kinda helps because it gets you used to competing, but there is a big difference between high school and club,” Mateer said. “In club, it’s normal to score in the high nines, but in high school that’s pretty rare. Normally, eight is pretty good.”

It helps that Mateer is coming into an extremely successful gymnastics program, with Medford winning numerous conference and sectional titles. In fact, while this was Mateer’s first year at the WIAA D-2 state tournament, it was the programs fourth straight appearance.

“It was pretty exciting,” Mateer says about her state experience. “We got to meet a lot of different teams from different areas that you don’t normally see.”

Mateer spent time on the varsity team for much of the year, competing in vault, floor and beam. Her skill set is already pretty strong, and she made big improvements in her game, but admits she’s still got plenty of work ahead of her, especially with varsity spots being limited.

“I’m definitely going to work on my vault and upgrade it so that I can land it better, and just work on upgrading my beam and my floor passes so that I can start a little higher.”

Mateer said she’s eager to keep improving and hopes that in the future she can continue to compete at state and perhaps one day bring home a state title.

“I want to keep helping the team at state. . . . and upgrade my skills so that I can score higher and making sure those skills are done well because I want to keep my varsity spots.”