GETTING HIS CALL TO THE HALL

Gilman’s Brian Phelps to be inducted on Feb. 11

One of his first goals in applying for the job was to bring some stability to a Gilman softball program that, at the time, was going through a period of single- season coaches. Almost 30 years later, it’s safe to say Brian Phelps has brought more than stability to the program.

Since taking over in the 1993-94 school year, Phelps’ Pirates have won 390 softball games, they’ve put 12 WIAA regional championship plaques and three sectional championship plaques into the school’s trophy case. He’s coached 54 All-Cloverbelt Conference players, 21 Wisconsin Fastpitch Softball Coaches Association All-Stars, been a part of six All-Star Game coaching staffs and made Gilman a small-school team that potential opponents are looking out for in most Mays when the WIAA tournament brackets are released.

On Saturday, Feb. 11, Phelps will become Jenson, who went into the Wisconsin Football Coaches Hall of Fame in 2013.

“My first reaction was I know who’s in there and I don’t belong with those guys,” Phelps said. “A couple weeks ago, coach Jenson and I ran into each other outside the school and he congratulated me and I looked at him and I said, ‘you know I know who’s in there and I honestly don’t know if I belong in that group’ and he looked at me and said, ‘we all think that. You belong in there.’ That’s what everyone has told me as far as coaching contacts and friends.”

What many of those coaching contacts will tell you is Phelps’ induction isn’t all about the wins and losses and on-field success. It’s about the time spent not only with his high school team, but the entire program and the facilities, which are among the best in the area for a Division 5 program with three fields, the baseball field, a concession, a new pavilion and adequate parking.

“I use phrase diapers to diplomas,” said Kurt Rhyner, the current head coach at Thorp and previously an assistant coach for several years under Phelps in Gilman. “When you’re in a district our size, you don’t just coach the high school team. Legitimately if you want to be successful at the high school level, you need to be involved in the youth program. If you don’t have a booster club or a bigger community where they’ve got their own league, you are it. It’s what you do.

“Besides that the facilities, the time and effort that has gone into fundraising, coordinating, getting donations, getting people signed up to help build” he added. “A lot of that stuff they have out there is donated, but who coordinated all that? Brian did. Yes other people contributed financially, they contributed their time, but all of that needed to be spearheaded and coordinated and Brian is a humongous part of that.”

“When I started here and I started as the coach, my goal was that our kids wouldn’t have to experience going win-

a WFSCA Hall of Famer.

Phelps is part of a four-member induction class of 2023 that includes Todd Felch, most known for his decade of Great Northern Conference dominance at Mosinee, Jane Briehl, also a 30-year veteran who currently coaches at River Valley, and Bill Greskiw, a successful 20-year-plus head coach at Burlington Catholic Central, who retired in 2018.

The Hall of Fame banquet will take place at Chula Vista in Wisconsin Dells.

Phelps said he was shocked at getting the recent call from WFSCA president and his good friend Brad Ceranski, who now coaches at Fall Creek and the reality of joining the list of Hall of Famers, many of whom Phelps has competed against or built strong relationships with was still sinking in.

“I was in shock, speechless, which is pretty odd for me,” said Phelps, who will be presented by his wife Kathy and children Kelly and Nick Phelps.

Phelps will become the school’s second Hall of Fame coach, joining Duane

“It always comes back to the kids,” said Gilman’s Brian Phelps, who will be part of the Wisconsin Softball Coaches Hall of Fame Class of 2023 on Feb. 11. He is pictured with (above) catcher Grace Grunseth and pitcher Katie Webster at the 2019 WIAA state tournament, celebrating a home run with Addy Warner in 2021 (middle) and celebrating the 2019 WIAA sectional title with Mykell Podolak.

less in a season,” Phelps said. Even when I was an athletic director or coaching wrestling and softball, I always believed if you look good, you play good. If you have nice facilities you can be proud of, you’re going to perform better. That’s something I really worked hard at is making sure of that and our school’s been great. I mean rarely do they say no to something that we need.”

While Phelps retired as a social studies teacher at Gilman last spring, he will begin his 30th season as Gilman’s head coach next month and has no timetable as for when he will hand the scorebook and lineup cards to someone else.

“That’s the ultimate question. I think my best answer is I’ll know when it’s time,” he said. “I’ve always told Kathy if I get to a point where she realizes it’s time for me to step aside, her and I will have that conversation. Kathy and Kelly and Nick have sacrificed a lot. They’ve always been so supportive. They continue to say ‘you know what dad, as long as you want to do it, keep doing it as long as you love doing it.’ I still love the sport. I still love the kids.”

Building the foundation

Phelps grew up on the family farm in nearby Cornell, so the lifestyle wasn’t fancy, but it was dedicated to staying busy.

“When it was family time, they wanted to do stuff as a family and that included playing in the backyard, playing ball, throwing horseshoes, gardening,” he said. They encouraged us to be involved in sports and activities at school, whether it was band or choir, though I can’t carry a beat. They wanted us involved in sports and activities, doing stuff at school and being kids. My dad coached my brother and I in Little League when we came through. They came to our sporting events and supported us. I was really lucky in that way to have parents that did that.”

Immediately after graduating from high school, Phelps was pulled into coaching middle school wrestling and already had been coaching youth ball teams in Cornell. After a few years, it was time for a change.

“Kathy and I were running the group home for the juvenile delinquent boys and the time was coming where we had to get out of that with the stress level and such,” Phelps said. “So I went back to school for my teaching degree and a job opened up (in Gilman) and I got hired for that for social studies and wrestling. It got to be the end of wrestling season and I was like, you know, I would like to coach baseball, and I was like they have six people helping with baseball. There was a softball posting. Well, they don’t have a softball coach. Teri Oberle had retired from coaching about four years before. They’d had like three coaches in a row for one year. I was like, ‘I know a lot about ball, so I guess I could give that a shot.’ I applied, they hired me and that’s kind of where we’re at.

“I walked into the first practice. We had sign-up and we had 25 girls,” he added. “I walked into the first practice and kind of introduced myself and we chatted and said all right pitchers come over here with me and nobody stood up. I went ‘ha, ha, funny.’ The senior girls looked up at me and they were like, ‘no coach we don’t have a pitcher. She graduated.’ I was like, ‘what?’” After starting that 1994 season 0-7, the Pirates eventually found their pitcher in freshman Kristin Welter, who became their ace through her senior year of 1997 when the Pirates made their first big splash. Gilman went 7-11 in that first year, got to .500 the next.

“The third year we really started to take some steps,” Phelps said. “Then it becomes that contagious thing where we start saying ‘we can do this’ and the kids were working at it. Once we started seeing we could compete with some of these teams and the better teams, teams that had beaten us up in the past, the kids started to believe, it was fun. It still is.”

That big splash in 1997 came with Gilman’s run to the WIAA Division 3 sectional final, which it lost 2-1 to Seneca after pounding Cochrane-Fountain City 12-1 in the semifinal. On that first deep run, the Pirates beat nemesis Thorp in the regional final behind a big base hit by Janice (Goebel) Komanec, who was a junior at the time and is now Gilman’s volleyball head coach.

“I can remember at the beginning of that season him taking us into his classroom and talking with us about goals and talking about state being the ultimate goal,” Komanec said. “I can remember all of us kinda being like ‘OK, sure.’ But as the season went on, we were competing in the (Cloverbelt) West. We were winning games with Altoona. We were playing with Stanley-Boyd, who has huge then. As the season went on, we started to buy in. Then once we got to the playoffs and started winning games, we were like, we think he’s on to something. I can remember the playoff game in Thorp and how exciting it was to get that plaque and to know we were moving on and just the excitement of getting to that sectional.”

The 1997 season started a run of five straight regional championships, but also five trips to the sectional tournaments, which were then one-day events, where Gilman came up short of making it to state.

Phelps said he owes much of Gilman’s initial rise to prominence to the help of Mike McMahon and Mike Wirz, two pitching experts he became acquainted with by chance that ended up being fountains of knowledge.

He met McMahon through former Minnesota Twins hitting coach Joe Vavra, whose brother Frank was married to Phelps’ cousin. Phelps and some of his pitching prospects met McMahon for a session in Eau Claire.

“He worked with the girls and I’m standing right behind him the whole time trying to glean anything I can,” Phelps said. “We got done and I said well what do we owe you? He said $25 an hour, four girls that’s $100. I started writing out a check and he looks at me and he goes, ‘are you paying for this yourself?’ I said this is more a clinic for me than it is even the girls. He looks at me and says, ‘OK, I’ll work with you and I’ll work with your girls. But if you ever pay me again, I won’t work with you.’ He said a lot of people had given back to him. So we worked with Mike up through Karyn Halida and Melissa Welch in the late 1990s.”

McMahon unfortunately lost a battle with cancer, but not long after that, Halida was having some control issues and told Phelps her uncle knew a guy that pitched. That led to a meeting with Wirz, who immediately diagnosed Halida’s mechanical issue and has been periodically coming to Gilman ever since.

“He’s still my friend, he still comes to Gilman and talks about the culture up here,” Phelps said. “He loves the Gilman kids up here. Pitching-wise those are the two guys that really helped me out and helped our program out and obviously Mike Wirz still does. I don’t forget those two guys. My coaching hats always have an M& M written inside because without those two guys, we would never have been able to come close to the success our program has had because we learned how to pitch.”

While Phelps said it’s hard to pick favorite moments from 29 seasons, that 1997 run does stand out and, of course, there was the first sectional championship in 2002 when the WIAA went to four divisions and, finally, Gilman broke down the door by winning the sectional in Shell Lake. The Pirates added sectional titles in 2006 and 2019. Who knows what might have happened in 2020 when, on paper, one of Gilman’s most loaded teams lost its season due to Covid. The Pirates lost a 1-0 heartbreaker to then Western Cloverbelt Conference rival Eau Claire Regis in a state semifinal in 2002, lost another 6-5 Division 4 heartbreaker to Belmont in 2006 when the Braves got the benefit of a disputed call at first base in the seventh inning and rallied to win. Blair-Taylor kept Gilman out of the Division 5 title game in 2019.

“All of those moments are special,” Phelps said. “All three sectional wins. Those moments stick out. But some of the coolest things are the memories with the kids when you get invited to weddings and graduations or when you see a kid somewhere and they give you a hug.

“Then there are those times when kids tell you thank you for all the help and helping me with my confidence and those sort of things,” he added. “Then there’s just the goofy laughs we had over the years and the goofy things we’ve done, like practicing in a snowstorm and calling out Mother Nature and saying is this all you can throw at us? It’s the laughs and the smiles and the kids and all of that. There’s so many of them. It’s hard to narrow it down. The most rewarding part is the kids. It always comes back to the kids.”

Thankful for the help

No one gets to a Hall of Fame without help along the way and Phelps said he’s fortunate to have gotten plenty from some of the state’s best.

But the number-one source of assistance is his wife Kathy.

“She has been there every step of the way,” Phelps said. “She’s bought into the insanity. Team photographer, bus driver at times. Van driver, cookie maker and the one that can look at me and be that person to be totally honest. I can be ticked off by what she’s saying, but she’s right.”

Kathy can be seen at most Gilman games with her camera. Phelps said it’s been quite the trip down memory lane looking at thousands of pictures in preparing for his induction slide show, but there was always a purpose for those photos.

“Kathy taking the pictures and us putting the pictures up and promoting the sport and showing the future kids was big,” Phelps said. “Who wants to be the next Missy Kolassa, or the next Kristin Welter or Andrea Welter or Danielle Prasnicki? Who wants to be those next kids coming up? Hey I’d like to have my picture on that bulletin board some day.”

The Hall of Fame coaching fraternity Phelps will be joining has many familiar names. Loyal’s Darrell Laschen, a 2009 inductee was one of his first Cloverbelt rivals in both softball and wrestling and became a great friend. At a coaching clinic in Stevens Point years ago, Phelps met Poynette’s Bob Tomlinson, a 2010 inductee and another of state top coach/promoters of the sport, and they’ve become close. Gilman always had trouble beating teams coached by Altoona’s Jim Turner, a 2013 inductee, but the respect the clubs had for each other in the old Western Cloverbelt days was at a high level.

“That fifth sectional (in a row), losing that, when I got home late that night, I called Jim Turner down at Altoona,” Phelps said. “It was like midnight and I called him and he was like, ‘oh Brian I am so sorry.’ I said, ‘don’t be sorry, I get it, but Jim, what do I have to do?’ He says, ‘Brian we did the same thing. It took us six trips before we won one. Just keep knocking on the door and sometime the ball has to bounce your way.’” Phelps is good friends with Roger Schlieve, head coach of small-school power Horicon and a 2016 inductee, and with 2018 inductee Don Bjelland. Phelps’ teams have played against 2019 inductee Jim Kivisto of Hurley, who Gilman beat in the 2019 sectional final and had a memorable 18-inning sectional semifinal against in 2000, and Gary Haus of Rice Lake, a 2020 inductee. Ceranski, who coached at Thorp before moving on to Fall Creek is one of his closest friends.

“Softball coaches would not be good fishermen because if we caught a fish, we’d tell everybody where we were fishing,” Rhyner said. “We’re willing to share. Brian is part of a really good network of coaches that I personally have the utmost respect for. They’re just so willing to share and be helpful.”

In 30 years, girls softball in Wisconsin has certainly changed and Phelps has had a front-row seat to watching its improvement.

“Women’s fastpitch has come so far,” Phelps said. “The pitching technology, techniques with the fielding, slap hitting and bunting, the small ball. All of that, this game has come so far. You can’t even compare it. Moving the pitching rubber to 43 feet changed the game. I had a pitcher that at 40 feet she was really good and at 43 feet, she got beat up.

“With pitching, you had the idea of throwing a fastball and spotting it,” he added. “Then you add the change-up, then it goes to a rise ball, then a curveball and all the other stuff that we do now. I can remember Darrell Laschen’s speech when he went into the Hall of Fame and him saying the game was really pretty easy. If you could bunt and throw strikes, you could win games and that’s what his teams did. In those early days that was the name of the game.”

“With Brian it was always, and he still does, he shakes things up,” Komanec said. “Back then the pitching circle was closer and we bunted a lot. We slapped when slap hitting was just starting. You had to be prepared for any call with him, whether that was running bases or at the bat. He might call anything. Everyone had to be ready to lay down a bunt. Everything was fast.” Along with all of the coaching assistance, there has also been the support from the small community of Gilman that Phelps said is huge.

“When you come over to Gilman, the passion and support from the school, the administration, the parents, the community is second to none,” he said. “They are so supportive and they’ll do anything they can to help. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, which I’m not real good at doing. When times are tough you have those people that are there to pick you up and remind you why you’re doing it and when times are good, they’re there.

“Plus Gilman Schools has great kids. I’ve been blessed to coach a lot of great student-athletes. They have that good, hard work ethic. They love what they do. We can have fun doing it. I think it’s a culture thing. It’s cool, it’s been cool and it continues to be cool to be a part of.”