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Menomonie Broadcaster Building MHS Football Record Book
By Layne Pitt
Menomonie has always backed their high school football team. Whatever iteration – Mustangs, Indians, Maroons, the Cardinal, or when John Ohnstad assembled the first team in 1895 – fans have been there for the team.
Menomonie has sponsored football for 130 years, but sometimes keeping track of the history of the program and the record book has been scattershot with historical information all over the place.
Chad Zutter intends to change that.
Zutter has been broadcasting the Menomonie Mustangs football games since 2019. He started with iHeart Radio on WMEQ and has transitioned to covering the Mustangs via live stream, currently on YouTube channel Mustangs TV. Zutter heads up the Mustangs streaming efforts, but is also an assistant coach with the Menomonie High School baseball program.
“As an avid sports fan, I’ve been grateful to be part of one of the most passionate high school football fans I’ve ever witnessed,” Zutter said. “When I first began broadcasting MHS football, I noticed that fans would beat me to the game, which I have never encountered before coming to Menomonie High School football games.”
But while prepping for games, Zutter was having a difficult time coming up with Menomonie High School football history and an official record book.
“This past football season, I began game prep early in the week and was looking for the all-time record of Menomonie versus River Falls,” Zutter explained.
Zutter sent his request to the Leader-Telegram sports department, which at that point was a one-person operation. And that reporter was leaving in a week to return for a job in his home state of Florida. The reporter did not have the information.
So Zutter, a local entrepreneur living in Downsville with his family, took it upon himself to start building a Menomonie football record book with the goal to include and verify all games scores going back to 1895, along with dates and locations, as well as a comprehensive list of head coaches.
A 2003 Economics graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Zutter got his start in sports by working in the Lawrence sports information office for director Joe Vanden Acker, helping to build the Vikings’ football record by compiling all-time records, statistics and organizing season and career individual records.
That on-hands background came in handy for Zutter.
“My research included online sources such as newspapers.com to verify game scores, dates and locations,” Zutter said. “I’ve also talked with former sports editors, most notably (former Leader-Telegram sports editor) Ron Buckli, who covered MHS football from the 1960s until 2017 and provided a treasure trove of MHS football history. The Dunn County Historical Society, Menomonie City Library and UW-Stout Archives were other sources that have aided in my research.”
The research already paid off during the 2024 season for Zutter and his MHS football on-air broadcast partner, Joe Zydowski, who is also the School District of Menomonie superintendent.
“The research has been very educational, especially for my broadcasting,” Zutter said “It has helped me understand the full history of MHS football – coaches, players, special seasons and, of course, all-time records versus opponents.”
The record book is a work in progress and currently resides on a Google Drive document, but after hours and hours of digging through yearbooks, microfilm, dusty pieces of paper, progress is being made.
“My goal is to complete the MHS football record book by the start of the 2025 season,” Zutter said, “so the most passionate high school football fans this side of the Mississippi can have access to all the information once scattered throughout print media, yearbooks and other sources.
“I’m hoping my research will help encapsulate 130 years of MHS football and take former players and coaches on the memory trip of high school football.”
Anyone that may have additional information of the Menomonie High School football program can contact Zutter at: chad_zutter@msd.k12.wi.us
Zutter is not the only person to work at putting together Menomonie High School record books. Over the years, Dunn County News sports editors were the key to keeping the books, as well as many times supplying the game statistics. Radio broadcasters over the years also supplied game statistics to the schools.
A very helpful resource for digging into both Menomonie High School and UW-Stout sports history was a scrapbook kept by town barber Ingwold “Inky” Nesser. If you wanted to talk local sports in Menomonie from the early 1900s to the mid-1960s, you went to Nesser’s Main Street barber shop to get your hair cut and your fix of local sports. Nesser religiously updated a scrapbook, clipping articles mostly from the Dunn County News, but occasionally from other regional papers. If the newspaper stories did not include all of the information he deemed necessary, Nesser added details on the edges of the page.
Zutter is not alone in accessing the Nesser scrapbook. UW-Stout utilized it in the mid-1970s and about 10-15 years ago, Keith Moessner spent many, many hours hunched over the microfilm reader to update the Menomonie High School boys and girls basketball record books. The booklet has been kept updated by the boys and girls basketball head coaches since then. Moessner, who played at MHS in the early-1950s, holds the school single game scoring record with 47 points, scored in 1952 against Osseo. Moessner is currently fifth on the career scoring list with 1162 total points, playing during the 1950-51, 51-52, and 52-53 seasons.
Layne Pitt is the retired UW-Stout sports information director and also worked more than a decade at The Dunn County News.
The story Setting the Record Straight by Layne Pitt is licensed under a CC BY SA 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
