AFTER THE MICKEY VANDEHEY YEARS…AUBURNDALES 31-GAME STREAK PART 2 1970-1971

The next season, 1970, Dick Varsho was back along with star running back Rich Weiler to start the 1970 season. With Chris Linzmeier gone the previous season’s top linebacker/offensive end, Bob Bassuener took over as the starting quarterback. Bob played well but he was hurt for several games. Despite those hurt’s he still earned all-conference honors as he tossed 11 touchdowns and five conversions. Rich Weiler, who gained 887-yards with 14 scores in 1969 earned the 1970 Marawood Player-of-the-Year honors as he carried 141 times for 1,301 yards and 14 touchdowns on the ground. He added 15 receptions for 286yards and seven more scores. With two two-point runs he totaled 130 points on the year.

Week 5 of 1970 found the Apache alone atop of the now 10-team Marawood with a 5-0 record after they beat Stratford 34-0, the fifth of seven consecutive shutouts to start the season. With the 20-0 defeat of Stratford in the season finale in 1969 they would have an eight-game shutout streak. Pittsville, Nekoosa and Stratford were now all 4-1 and Auburndale was now ranked #1 in the AP Little Ten poll. The team was averaging nearly 40-points per game but then Bassuener was injured and could only play a limited role at quarterback as well as defense. Game 6 should have been another blowout against Athens, but it was close, a real close 6-0 victory. Athens would be 2-4 after the loss but they were able to key on Weiler and it took a flea flicker play to get the Apache on the board. Bassuener came in and tossed the ball to Jerry Weber who then threw the ball to end Terry Paul for a 51-yard touchdown with two and a half minutes left in the game. That same day Nekoosa tuned up for week 7’s matchup with Auburndale with a 42-6 win over Rib Lake. It didn’t help as back-up quarterback Larry Sholes came off the bench to toss three touchdowns and to lead the team to victory.

A close 12-6 win over Pittsville was a defensive battle as the Apache stopped the Panthers on their six-yard line on a fourth and one rushing attempt that was for no gain with 90-seconds left in the game. The next and final week of the season had Stratford hoping for an Auburndale loss to Spencer. Stratford was 7-1 going into their final game and in second place in the Marawood but they tied Athens who was playing great defense, 0-0. Spencer fell to the Apache 28-14 for the schools 27th consecutive win (Or, 29th , depending on if you were reading the newspapers). In the victory Weiler ran for 166 yards and three scores on the ground and caught another score via a pass reception.

The AP would name Auburndale the #1 small school team, but things were different in the United Press International poll. It was sort of like the 1969 AP polls. UPI had, after week eight, Gale-Ettrick as #1, Auburndale #2, Kohler was #3 and Darlington was #4 as all four teams were 8-0. The next and final week poll had Gale-Ettrick (8-0) still at the #1 spot, Kohler (8-0) moving up to #2, Darlington was now 9-0 and in the #3 spot and Auburndale had dropped to #4 even with a 9-0 record. This was a head scratcher but that’s how it ended. 27-consecutive wins but again no love in the polls. End Terry Paul, offensive tackle Greg Haupt, quarterback Bob Bassuener and the Weiler, the POY in the Marawood, were all first team players.

1970 Auburndale Apache’s (Marshfield News Herald)

Dick Varsho didn’t come back as the head coach in 1971 as he took the head coaching football position at Marshfield High School and later at Cornell as he taught history there. He was replaced by Bill Silvertsen, at least the sixth head coach at the school in 10-years. Despite losing a number of stars and having to reload they were favored to again win the Marawood title and were rated atop the AP poll. The newspapers finally had the win streak totals correct as they started out with the actual 27 consecutive wins. The Apache won their first four games before they lost to Stratford who was 3-1 t the time. The Tigers held Auburndale to 21-yards on the ground and 110-yards in the air. They lost three fumbles and tossed an interception as they tumbled 18-0. The streak was over. They didn’t regroup the next week, losing 14-6 to Nekoosa but then they won the final three games to end 7-2 and surprisingly, honorable mention in both the press polls.

Now, I could end but I have a little bit more about Auburndale but not dealing with football. Going back to the summer of 1970 the Apache won the WIAA summer baseball state title, going 18-0 under the tutelage of Dick Varsho. Back in 1960 they won the spring season state title. Summer baseball began in 1965 and lasted until 2018 when spring ball became the norm. Auburndale is the only school to ever win both the spring and summer titles. Quite a feat for the small school. In 1970, star quarterback Chris Linzmeier and Don Vruwink pitched and hit the team to the title. Linzmeier was 11-0 on the mound with a 0.40 earned run average, 140 strikeouts in 70 innings as well as batting .370. Vruwink was 7-0 with a 0.29 ERA in 49 innings along with 95 strikeouts. He led the team with a .433 batting average. He hit a career total of 12 home runs including one each in the team’s 3-1 win over Melrose-Mindoro in the semi-finals and the one against Sussex Hamilton, 4-0 victory.

So, to end, you can now have a look at the streak:

AFTER THE MICKEY VANDEHEY YEARS…AUBURNDALES 31-GAME STREAK PART1 1968-1969

I did a blog on the great athlete, Mickey Vandehey, back on January 25, 2021. Mickey had been a fabulous career as a multi-sport star from 1960-64 who played football, basketball, baseball, track and even golf at Auburndale. He is a Wisconsin high school legend.

The years after Vandehey graduated were not lean ones but, not to the heights that he had taken the Apache to when he started. Mickey had a 26-4-1 record as the starting quarterback. From 1965-68 there were a series of head coaches with middle-of-the-road records. Being in the Marawood Conference meant that they were facing tougher, overall competition each season than when they were in a lesser conference (The defunct C-3) prior to 1963. When they joined the Marawood had eight teams but later added two more teams so that by 1970 there were ten members.

In 1967 Vic Bundgaard was the head coach and the Apache were 5-3 (4-3 in the Marawood). He played a lot of younger members of the squad and that set the stage for the beginning of the streak.

The season began with convincing wins over two non-conference foes, Fall Creek and Colby, before they lined up with their seven Marawood opponents. In 1967 undefeated (9-0) Stratford was rated #1 in the Associated press poll until week nine when they squeaked by Spencer in a 14-13 and they then dropped to #2 in the final “Little Ten” rankings. In a preseason poll of Marawood coaches Stratford and Auburndale were rated even for the conference title. Stratford had 12 returning starters with a total of 34 boys out for the football team.

Auburndale had 14 returning starters and an incredible 54 players start practices considering that the town’s population was only about 400.Stratford had a 15-game win streak and the game eight date for the battle between the two teams was highlighted on both teams’ calendars.

Stratford started with two non-conference wins over Neillsville and Adam-Friendship and then three conference wins before they played Pittsville, always a tough foe. Stratford led 13-8 in the fourth period. Pittsville then scored a touchdown and missed both of the extra points. A misplay earlier by Stratford on a bad snap on a punt that went into their end zone for a safety. That late Pittsville score made the score 14-13 in their favor. Stratford did drive to the Pittsville six-yard line but was stopped on a fourth and one play. Thus ended their 20-game win streak.

The next week Stratford blew out Edgar 60-7 and looked like they were back on track but then they faced Auburndale and they lost again, 20-0. The Apache dominated the game out gaining Stratford 239-yards to 193 and 15-9 in first downs. Auburndale’s season ended with the win. They were 9-0, their best season ever. Stratford had a later finale against Spencer and tied 14-14 to end 6-2-1. Stratford had been ranked #1 until the Pittsville lose but for some reason the polls didn’t show any love for Auburndale. They earned only a number 7 ranking in the final AP rankings.

Five players were named to the all-conference team with offensive guard Jerry Willfahre also earning a spot on the defensive line. Jim Mann was named as a defensive end. Bob Weller earned a spot as on offensive tackle and junior Chris Linzmeier was named to the quarterback spot. They ended 9-0 and they had a lot of young players coming back for 1969. It also ended coach Vic Bundgaard’s final season as the head football coach at Auburndale. He was also a very successful wrestling coach and after the winter season he would announce that he would be moving to Colby, 30-miles north as the head wrestling coach and as an assistant on the football team.

NOTES: I must digress now to explain that my research was done mainly based on using the internet stories of the Marshfield News Herald newspaper. Prior to the mid-1970’s it seems to e that the paper didn’t spend a lot of space for some aspects of sports…statistics, pre-season previews, post season recaps and all-conference stories. The game reports had minimal stats or even scoring recaps. It was hard to get information on the players and even know who the coach was. I weaved through the stories and was able to piece together needed information. This seemed to change sometime in the late spring/early summer of 1970.

1969 brought in Richard “Dick” Varsho as the new head coach. Varsho had been an assistant for the football team and head baseball coach. Now, the name Varsho might sound familiar. Dick passed away in 2020 and his obituary showed only the names of immediate family members. Former baseball major leaguer Gary Varsho and current MLB player Daulton Varsho are both from Marshfield. Same last name as Dick. Maybe their uncle? Nothing mentioned in the paper for a lead.

1969 began the same as the previous season. Two successful victories over non-conference foes, Fall Creek and Colby again. There was no mention in the paper leading up to the game or in the newspaper story on the game about coach Bundgaard coming back to face his former team. Fall Creek fell the week before, 8-7 in a real battle between two fine teams. Five plays into the game the Crickets scored a touchdown and kicked the extra point. In the second quarter Chris Linzmeier ran three -yards for the score then passed to end Bob Bassuener for the two-point conversion and what would turn out to be the win. Fall Creek would end up 7-2 in 1969.

NOTE: The two-point pass or run after a touchdown was new in 1969 as before then when those plays were worth only one-point.

The Colby win was 18-7 but the Apache were in charge all the way and now were ready for the Marawood season. The conference opener was against troublesome Pittsville, a 20-12 win followed by wins over Spencer and Edgar. After the Spencer win Auburndale had entered the Little Ten polls at the #2 spot. However, ranking were strange. Auburndale had kept winning but dropped for some reason to #3 by game seven. In game number six against Athens the team gained a huge 645 yards. They had a semi-close game #8 vs. Marathon, a 20-6 win but all the teams in the Little Ten were having a close game or two. The season ending game would be against Stratford. Durand was ranked #1 followed by Gale-Ettrick (they didn’t become Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau until 1972) at #2 and both were 7-0-0. Auburndale was #3 with an 8-0-0 record. Both of those school were in long win streaks as was #10, Port Edwards (7-0-0).

NOTE: All the newspapers in the area…Marshfield, Wausau and Wisconsin Rapids…had Auburndale with an 18 or a 19-game win streak when it was really 17 going into the season final match with Stratford.

The win over Stratford was a blowout, if you can call a 20-0 victory, as they outgained the Tigers 323-yards to 92. Stratford ended the season with a 7-2-0 record (An earlier loss to Pittsville was their only other loss). The Wausau Daily News had both Stratford and Pittsville with a season final record of 7-1-1 but that wasn’t correct. They were 7-2-0.

Coach Dick Varsho discusses strategy with quarterback Chris Linzmeier during 1969 20-0 win over Stratford (Courtesy of the Marshfield News-Herald)

Here is the AP Little Ten poll before the Stratford game…Oct. 23, 1969

A few days later, Oct. 29, 1970, the final Little Ten poll was released and as you can see, there was a lot of movement.

Note: The AP had not updated Auburndale’s season record which was 9-0-0. Durand’s 36-game winning streak ended with a 20-14 loss to River Falls.

Again, the team earned six spots on the Marawood Conference first team. Offensive end Dennis Raab also was named as a defensive back on the squad. Cliff Altman was named as an offensive tackle; George Swetz was on the defense as a tackle and Bob Bassuener was listed as a linebacker. Chris Linzmeier was a repeat at the quarterback spot. Chris would also garner spots on the Wausau TV-Channel 7 All-Area first team and noted as an honorable mention all-state. Linzmeier posted, the best I can piece together, passing stats of 148-83-1421-14 with eight two-point conversion completions. He gain about 400-yards on the ground and scored eight touchdowns on the ground and even caught a 31 pass for a score against Athens. The senior was a true leader and well respected and a multi-sport star.

The first two seasons of the streak were now complete. Next time, the final part of the streak.

UPDATE ON A PAST POST

Last fall I did a series of stories on females in high school football. I have three specific additions, out of many, to the list of females playing the game that I find interesting. I did my “BREAKING BARRIERS” series on females last October.

In January I went down” the rabbit hole” …not to be confused by the upcoming Kiefer Sutherland tv show on Paramount+ since that starts March 26. I started to do some national research on some teams that claimed the 1935 mythical championship. How I started is a long story but in doing so I ran across an interesting story from 1935.

While looking up scores in Newspapers.com for the 1935 Knoxville (TN) High School team (The school didn’t print a yearbook for me to reference scores that year because money was tight due to the Depression) I was forced to look at the Ashville (NC) Citizen-Times for a score that wasn’t in the Knoxville newspaper. Knoxville played Ashville, in Ashville, and the story of the game was in that paper. Right below the game story was an intriguing headline from the November 5 edition.

Going back to my blogs on females playing football I told the story of Luverne “Toad” Wise from Alabama who I declared that in 1938 was the first female to play high school football. Well, that’s almost true. Wise played on a varsity football team for two seasons. The story I found had the headlines “Girl Center Leads Connecticut Grid Team To Victory.”

The story concerned a girl from Middlefield (CT), playing for a team called the Middlefield Air Cadets named Esther Burnham, three seasons before Wise. The Associated Press story hinted that she was in a high school game. But here is where the story gets muddled. Esther was a freshman in high school at state powerhouse Middleton High School. The “CENTER” of attention lived just outside of Middleton but as I learned she attended the high school there, but the question was “Who were the Middlefield Air Cadets?” Middlefield is only about three miles from Middleton. The village had their own high school so why was she playing for the team? The newspaper stories that were available, were sparse as there aren’t a lot of Connecticut papers on Newspapers.com to review. The initial AP story that I found in the Ashville paper was also posted in several other papers around the country. Several additional stories that were written by the Associated Press made it seem that Esther attended high school in Middlefield. She did not as the initial story noted that she was attending Middleton. I couldn’t find any additional information about the Air Cadets, so I think they were a collection of students that didn’t play varsity football for any of the area high schools. Sort of like an older baseball little league team. They did play a few smaller high schools but also several “All-Star” teams.

Esther didn’t end up playing in her last three high school years for the Middlefield Air Cadets nor for the Middleton High School. In fact, other than a few local stories or articles posted by the Associated Press in 1935, I find no further record of Esther. The story that caught my attention mentions that this was Esther’s second season on the team so it must have been an All-Star team of their own. She started playing as an 8th grader. There may have been a few other females nationally that played football, Luverne Wise probably was the first be on a high school varsity team. I’m not putting in the AP story that I found in the Ashville paper but one that appeared in a more local edition, The Meridian Journal (CT) November 4, 1935, a few days after the AP story, dated November 2, 1935. (Sorry for the blurry picture)

The one aspect of playing on November 3 against Fall River was that The Meridian and other local papers had made such a big deal about a female playing football that Esther sat in her parents’ car for much of the game before the coach called her to enter. So many fans had shown up she with so many cameras she was nervous. But with the game scoreless at the half, she joined her teammates and was able to block a punt that led to her team’s 6-0 victory. As the game wound down, she ran off the field asking people to leave her alone and to not take her picture. She just wanted to play football and not make a scene. There would be several ore games left on the schedule and she played in them both after having overcome her fear of the publicity. She was a novelty of the time and wasn’t ready to be in the limelight.

Today, females seem to be more at ease with the crowds or the press as their coaches are their buffers.

There had been a number of females in high school football who had been kickers, and several were truly very good. A number were profiled in a 2012 MaxPreps.com article… Top 10 greatest female kickers in high school football history - MaxPreps.

Recently, one such kicker named Allison Chang of Iolani High in Honolulu (HI) made some headlines in the 2021-22 seasons as she kicked 98 extra points and 15 field goals. Allison saw herself as a role model for other girls who want to participate in the sport. She knew that playing other positions would be tough, but she liked the way a predecessor, Mika Makekau, had played for the team (2015-18) as the star kicker and she was drawn to the game. In several 7-on-7 scrimmages Allison had played defense and knew how to tackle but her size led her to staying with kicking. She was on the team for four seasons, but it was her last two when she started. In 2022 she was named to the Special Teams Player of the Year on the Cover2 Hawaii Awards. Besides being a role model, she wants to be known as a good person and student who can do more than just kick. She earned respect from her teammates and others for being the good person she is.

Place-kicker Allison Chang (Image credit: Nick Abramo/Bedrock Sports Hawaii)

Another standout is Bella Rasmussen of Laguna Beach (CA) who not only scored two rushing touchdowns in a game against Godinez High in a 48-0 win on October 14 but played in seven games over two seasons as a backup running back. But more notoriety came her way after her senior season completed.

Bella Rasmussen Photo by Michael Goulding/ IMAGO from Sports Illustrated Magazine

Bella is a raved Los Angeles Chargers fan and after the October 14, 2022, game she was suddenly in the spotlight not only in California and also nationally. The Chargers supported her after finding out she was a fan and that led to a major change in her life. She was picked to be in a prime Super Bowl commercial sponsored by the NFL titled “Run With It” featuring the Mexican national flag football team and their star Diana Flores. She also became the first girl as a high school football player in California to sign an NIL contract. She signed a contract with KeyWise which is an app that focuses on people’s mental health.

Read the entire Sports Illustrated story for a more Indepth story at: How high school football star Bella Rasmussen made it to the Super Bowl - Sports Illustrated

While Esther Burnham was a forerunner to Luverne “Toad” Wise leading to today’s female players…Allison Chang and Bella Rasmussen. They have taken up the gauntlet as role models for those who follow.