Muskego’s athletes set the bar high
The bubblers in the hallways certainly look standard.
And yet, the last year for Muskego athletics has prompted the question plenty of times: “What’s in the water over there?”
There’s an answer to that. Standing just outside the weight room on the lower level of the high school, outfitted in a black t-shirt that reads, “Nobody cares, work harder”, Dan Mlachnik is quick to mention that it’s not what is in the water at Muskego, but who is drinking it.
“Right now, we’ve got the best kids and the most committed kids there are,” said Mlachnik, the Warriors strength and conditioning coach.
In just one year, Muskego has reached unprecedented heights and emerged as the premier athletic program in southeast Wisconsin. The Warriors have filled out the glass trophy cases on display in the west wing of the school, with six WIAA team state championship trophies in 365 days — the most in the state in that span.
“I’m an eternal optimist, so I never believe we’re going to lose. I mean
ever,” Muskego athletics director Ryan McMillen said. “Now, I’m realistic about it. Obviously losing and growing from that is part of the athletics process, but anything’s possible.
“Now, did I know we were going to win six titles in 365 days? No, not at all.”
As recently as two years ago, the Warriors were a competitive member of the Classic 8 Conference, but by no means a state power. Outside of its dominant gymnastics co-op with Franklin, Oak Creek and Whitnall, Muskego had won five WIAA team state championships.
The school has doubled that total since last July.
It started with the baseball team’s extra-inning, walk-off win in the final summer baseball state title game.
After that, girls cross country delivered one of the best performances in any division this century, and football toppled the Kimberly dynasty at Camp Randall Stadium.
In the winter, the gymnastics co-op, which included four of its seven statequalifying athletes from Muskego, won its eighth state title in the last nine years .
To cap off the year in the spring, it was once again the Warriors girls’ programs taking command as girls track and field and girls soccer emerged with their first state championships.
There were individual state titles, as well. Ben Gabbey won the 100-yard breaststroke in boys swimming. The boys 800-meter relay and girls 3,200 relay each took first in track, with the latter nearly toppling the state record it set in 2018.
Times are good at Muskego. Coaches want to coach there. Nearly every team believes it has a chance to compete at the state level. Athletes are flocking to the weight room in record numbers. The gold balls are piling up.
“It’s — I don’t know what other word to use — it’s exciting,” McMillen said.
There’s lots of talent
Make no mistake, McMillen points out. There’s no equal substitute for natural talent.
“First and foremost, if you don’t have talent, if you don’t have the kids and families and the parents, you have no shot,” McMillen said. “So anybody out there working in athletics that’s telling you they’re winning because of themselves, they’re misguided. You’re winning first and foremost because of the students you have.”
Muskego athletics is brimming with gifted athletes. Varsity depth charts are littered with talent. Cracking a starting lineup is no easy task.
Take standouts Kate Jochims and RJ Bosshart, for example. They’re arguably the most decorated female and male athlete, respectively, in school history. They both graduated in June, but the Warriors don’t expect to miss a beat in any of their sports, with two of the area’s top class of 2021 athletes stepping into their roles.
Kate Sperka, a two-time state cross country runner-up, should emerge as No. 1 in both cross country and track. Alex Current, the 2018 USA TODAY state offensive player of the year and teammate of Bosshart’s on two top-two track relays, will assume lead running back and relay-anchoring duties.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
“It’s not that we all of a sudden got these top-class athletes that we’ve never had,” McMillen said. “But the quantity of great athletes, we haven’t seen this.”
Five-hundred and fifty athletes have stepped foot in the weight room during early-morning lifting sessions this summer.
Parlaying that increase in athletic participation in recent years into greater success in the win column has become the focus of McMillen and the Warriors coaches.
“It’s places like Muskego where I’d argue that the talent has always been there,” McMillen said. “What’s the culture growing that talent, combating the individualism and some other things that come from athletics, in general, and putting the team first? That’s our job now.”
‘If we had an edge, it was speed’
Muskego has sought to take advantage through its strength and development program, the backbone for all of the Warriors’ success.
“I think we’ve had some special athletes come through,” Mlachnik said. “I think we’re also developing those athletes better and developing them in larger numbers.”
Mlachnik is the point man for the entire strength program. He communicates with coaches and specializes workouts for each sport. He’s in the weight room, watching nearby and offering encouragement as athletes push themselves. Also a teacher at Muskego, he uses days off to listen to expert speakers talk about human performance.
“He’s the face of that whole piece underneath the sports programs and, really, the student body in general,” McMillen said. “He does a great job, just a phenomenal job. He’s all in.”
Monday through Friday, athletes from seventh grade and up go to the high school for upwards of two hours for workouts ranging from speed and agility to strength and explosiveness work. Wednesdays are dedicated to preventative maintenance, including yoga, isolated flexibility and hydrotherapy.
As a whole, the emphasis of Muskego’s training sessions has shifted from when Mlachnik first took over.
“Way back, everyone thought maybe the lifting is the most important thing, building that bulk,” Mlachnik said. “We’re training explosive athletes. Overall at the school the last three years, our team speed in every sport is just really starting to rise. And that’s where we start to see a lot of success.”
The Warriors demoralized opponents in nearly every sport with their speed. In cross country and track, it directly led to state titles. In football, they were among the most prolific rushing teams in the state. In soccer, it created a dangerous attack.
“If we had en edge, it was speed,” said Current.
The base of the athletic pyramid is the same for every sport, emphasizing strength and explosiveness with lifts centered on squats and cleans. In the weight room, the work was the same for Jochims as for 300-pound all-state defensive lineman Nate Stewart.
“Being an athlete at Muskego we don’t really have necessarily soccer players or basketball players or track runners,” girls cross country and track and field head coach Richard Raney said. “We have athletes. We’ve established an expectation to compete in as many sports as possible and Mlachnik has done a great job catering to that with our lifts.”
In addition to the athletes reaping the benefit of their work in the weight room on the field, they see it off of it.
“It builds a lot of friendships and relationships from lifting,” Bosshart said. “Everyone in there wants to work harder and has the same goals, so naturally you’re going to gravitate toward those people. That’s where I spent time with most of my friends.”
A farewell to complacency
At Muskego, there is a firm belief that culture breeds success.
Ken Krause, the 2018 Wisconsin Football Coaches Association’s coach of the year, noticed a tangible shift in that tide after Muskego’s 2016 football season. The Warriors, coming off back-toback Classic 8 championships, went 5-4 and missed the playoffs.
The previous offseason, he felt, had been characterized by more complacency than earlier years.
“That was a real turning point,” Krause said. “The next three senior classes each said, ‘This isn’t happening again.’ The intensity of the 2017 team was something like we hadn’t seen. Now, each class of kids doesn’t want to be the team that misses the playoffs for us.”
Muskego reached Level 4 of the playoffs in the fall of 2017, part of a string of Warriors teams coming close to state titles before ultimately falling just short. That push included the girls soccer team losing in the state semifinals five straight years from 2014-18 and boys basketball losing in the state title game against the Stevens Point dynasty in 2016.
Now, coaches find that they aren’t having to motivate their athletes to train regularly in the offseason given all the other factors driving them.
“If you want to get playing time on a varsity team at Muskego, you better be in here lifting and developing that explosiveness and preparing your body in the summer,” Mlachnik said.
Said Krause: “What I’ve noticed is that they’re policing each other. They’re saying that this is what we do instead of me getting on them in the offseason. It’s a program thing.”
The emphasis on culture doesn’t start and stop with the football team, either.
“It’s an unbelievable culture,” girls soccer head coach Lance Matthews said. “It stems from the weight room. It stems from the coaches just sharing a similar philosophy of building the overall athlete. It’s not just one sport. It’s ‘One Warrior’ and we just look to continue building together. It’s everyone.”
The phrase “One Warrior” is the overarching motto at Muskego.
An initiative brought to the school by McMillen when he took over as athletic director in May 2017 after a successful tenure as Oconomowoc’s head football coach, One Warrior represents the idea of combining forces throughout the athletic department to create overall excellence and togetherness.
“It’s just trying to break down the silos of individual sports and the competitiveness or possessiveness that comes with each of those things,” McMillen said. “Whether that’s sharing athletes, sharing facilities, talking to each other, students getting out and supporting other students.”
The motto pairs well with the strength and conditioning program with its emphasis on developing wellrounded athletes over single-sport training.
“All the coaches are super supportive of being multi-sport athletes and doing things year-round,” head athletic trainer Sara Carey said. “Maybe your thing is you only play soccer, but you do weight room and everything else with other teams. So they’re doing stuff and using their bodies all year-round. It makes for good athletes.”
Part of the One Warrior initiative is “Women of Will.”
“We have the saying ‘Women of Will’ to push girl athletes to be better and step up as a whole,” said Summer Malinauskas, whose 76th-minute goal in the state soccer final gave Muskego the lead. “We want to be known for our athleticism and strength.”
Taking the name from a campaign by Under Armour, the official apparel of Muskego teams, a group of Muskego’s women of will convened and crafted a statement to define their athletic programs.
“We are women and we are One Warrior,” it reads. “We know that we are not strong for a girl; we are just strong. We aim to support every girl together and will empower each other well, shattering stereotypes. Please understand that strong is the new pretty. And our hard work will garner recognition. We aim to be champions in life and will live like a champion in our daily lives. It doesn’t matter what others think, it matters what we believe. We believe we are Warrior Women and we will what we want.”
By the time 7 a.m. rolls around on those summer mornings five days each week, the sun is not yet beating down on southeastern Waukesha County, but upwards of 160 Women of Will are already pressing away in the Muskego weight room.
“What they’re doing is they’re saying that it’s OK to be an athlete and do certain things and break some of the societal norms that are placed upon the young female,” McMillen said.
The next step
Muskego has forced its way to the top.
Now what?
Other than seeing more and more students come out for various sports, the Warriors hope that their answer to that is “nothing.”
“We have to go about business like we’re not at the top,” Raney said. “At cross country and track, we just have our philosophy that each day, we can get better or worse. We’re going to worry about ourselves, preach that and hope that good things happen.”
Krause prefers his team’s current status compared to the other side of the coin and expects his players to be even more dedicated because of it.
“It’s a great honor to know people respect our program,” Krause said. “We’d rather have teams come after us than schedule us for their homecoming game. You’d rather be the team that’s hunted than the one teams want to play because they circle it as a win.”
The athletes also seem to embrace all that comes with being the top dog.
“There was for sure a bigger expectation as I got older,” Bosshart said. “Each year with more success, the bar is set higher from the school itself, to the coaches, to the pressure from other schools that know you’re on the pedestal and want to take you down.
“The pressure definitely builds. I like it and I think people around here do, too.”
So will this many teams from Muskego win a state title each year going forward?
“There’s so many things that have to go right to be successful,” McMillen said. “Athletics is a small microcosm of a student’s 24-hour days. You’re maybe taking up a couple hours depending on what they’re doing. The rest is trying help handling everything else that’s going on in their sphere as a young adolescent, then managing all those pieces to be able to set out school and community up for success.”
The next chapter for Muskego athletics officially began in mid-June with the end of the 2018-’19 academic year.
After receiving the state championship trophy, the Warriors girls soccer team mingled with a throng of supporters just outside the field at Uihlein Soccer Park. Pictures were taken, hugs given and congratulations exchanged for over half an hour before it was time to depart back to Muskego.
On the way out of the stadium, gold ball in possession, one Warrior turned to a friend and girls cross country runner and offered a parting message fitting for the past year in Muskego.
“You’re on the clock.”