Hall of Fame coach Stan Yazawa honored by wrestlers on Alumni Night

By Kelly Fenton

The Denmark News

DENMARK – The seemingly arbitrary arc that describes the life of Stan Yazawa is maybe not all that different from most people’s. 

You start off heading toward the thing you want but something intervenes. Maybe the timing isn’t right. You try something else in the meantime, still with your eye on that original prize. But then you find yourself settling into something entirely different. Maybe you are carried far away from home base, maybe across an ocean, maybe doing something that wasn’t even remotely on your radar when you started out. 

For most people, the series of railroad switches that careen us toward the lives we end up living are not of our own choosing. 

And yet, Stan Yazawa’s own track – Hawaii-born to Hall of Fame wrestling coach in Denmark, Wisconsin – seems exceptional indeed.

In mid-December, Yazawa, who lives in Green Bay with his wife, Karen, made a rare return to Denmark for the annual Alumni Night.

More than a hundred former wrestlers showed up to pay tribute to the legendary coach who mentored close to a thousand Denmark wrestlers over a nearly five-decade career. Along the way, he coached, according to long-time assistant coach and Denmark wrestling archivist Lennie Shefchik, 16,169 matches. The list of accomplishments within that total are even more astonishing and too long to list here. 

Among the most notable in the team category: 10 conference titles, eight regional and two sectional championships and 34 overall tournament championships. His teams compiled a 475-219 dual match mark. Individually, Yazawa oversaw 306 overall tournament champions; 119 conference champions; 108 regional and 36 sectional champions; 70 state qualifiers; 45 state place-winners; and three state champions.

“It was a real honor,” Yazawa says of being recognized during Alumni Night. “It was nice to go back and see everybody again.”

How does a man who never wrestled in his life and never really knew a lot about the sport other than what he learned as a physical education major reach such heights? How does he develop such prowess in something he’d never paid attention to?

Shefchik says the answer is pretty simple.
“Jerry Leiterman, who was the athletic director when they hired Stan, handed him a book and said, ‘Coach wrestling,’” says Shefchik, who spent the final 29 years of Yazawa’s career at Denmark as his assistant. 

For the next 48 years, Yazawa did just that – and at the highest level. 

Tim Kapinos, who took over when Yazawa retired after the 2012-13 season, said Yazawa certainly learned the ropes of the sport over the years but pointed to his ability to mold young athletes as the primary factor in his success.

“He was all about high character,” Kapinos says. “He was about being a good teammate and a student athlete. He understood young people and how to coach them. He always stressed to his teams the importance of doing things the right way, on the mat and off it.

“A lot of what I tell my guys has come from many of the conversations I’ve had with him.”

Looking Up Denmark on the Map

Stan Yazawa was born in Maui and after graduating from Lahainaluna High School following a prep career that garnered him baseball, football and track-and-field letters (he was also Student Body President), he ended up at UW-Lacrosse, where he graduated in 1965 with a double major in Physical Education and English. 

“I went to California hoping to get a job teaching there but they wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t have any experience,” Yazawa says. “By luck or fate, I got an interview in Denmark. So I took out a map and borrowed a friend’s car and they hired me as an English teacher, an assistant football coach and the wrestling coach. 

“I thought I’d stay four years and get some experience and go back to California but four years turned into 48.”

Yazawa coached football under Hall of Fame coach Jerry Leiterman and Yazawa himself would be named to the Wisconsin Football Coaches Hall of Fame in 1993, nearly two decades before he would earn Hall of Fame status in wrestling.

“I stayed because I like it here,” Yazawa says. “I made a lot of good friends. But Coach Leiterman would introduce me to the other coaches and it would be freezing cold or snowing and he’d say, ‘You see this guy here? He’s not so smart. He left Hawaii for this.’”

Former wrestlers describe Yazawa as a disciplinarian but not in the loud or aggressive mold. Rather, he commanded respect without ever demanding it. 

“He lived across the street from my aunt and uncle and it seemed he had an inside track on everything I was doing and I could not get away with anything,” Jay Welsing remembers, laughing. Welsing wrestled for Yazawa in the mid-90s. “He was tough but everyone respected the way he coached and the way he ran his classroom. We all knew he was the best around. The big part with Coach Yazawa was the way he instilled the mental part of the sport in you.”

Tim (Bimbo) VanGroll, who made three straight appearances in the state tournament from 1976 through 1978 and who came up with the idea for honoring Yazawa at the alumni event, also remembered Yazawa for the way he made his wrestlers conduct themselves, calling him even-tempered.

“He didn’t force anything on you,” VanGroll remembers. “You never saw him blow up. He just had that effect on you. He didn’t scream; he just gave you whatever medicine you had coming to you. What impresses me is by the time I was there he had read up on wrestling and he was well-rehearsed in moves and technique and he coached all these guys up. That just freaks me out that he didn’t ever have a wrestling background coming into it.”

VanGroll tells a story that seems to highlight Yazawa’s toughness, resourcefulness … and sense of humor. VanGroll had either cracked or bruised his sternum on a Thursday match and was still in considerable pain for a match the following Tuesday.

“You couldn’t even touch my chest, it was so sore,” VanGroll recalls. “So Coach Yazawa cuts a hole in a piece of rubber and tapes it to my chest. The whole top half of my body is taped. I look like a mummy.”

The problem was, the tape was constricting VanGroll’s breathing, something he realized 30 seconds into the match. 

“Stan is looking at me like, ‘Suck it up,’” VanGroll says, able to laugh at the memory. “Thank God I was able to win late in the first round and it was, ‘Get this thing off me.’ And while Stan is cutting the tape he’s kind of smiling and he says, ‘Guess we can’t do that again.’”

Shefchik, who is also in the wrestling Hall of Fame and who wrestled for Luxemburg-Casco in high school, recalls an incident that speaks to Yazawa’s sense of honor and respect, both for the sport and for his wrestlers. During the Freedom tournament, Denmark wrestler Zak Peterson had been dropped on his head and under the rules, if Peterson had chosen to halt the match due to injury, he’d have been credited with the win and reached the finals in his weight division. 

Turns out Peterson was in no condition to continue after the fall but Yazawa also didn’t want to accept a victory in that manner.

“People all the time would take advantage of that situation and even if they weren’t hurt at all would accept the forfeit,” Shefchik explains. “But Stan calls over Zak and they both agree they didn’t want to win that way. So Stan tells the referee he wants to resume the match but Zak is going to take bottom position and then Zak immediately forfeited. Stan was just an extremely honorable guy. He wanted to earn everything he got.”

Yazawa credits much of his success to the Denmark culture. 

“These were hard-working farm boys,” he says. “Coming from a farming background, they were not afraid of hard, physical work. It was a lot of lives, a lot of kids and I enjoyed them all.”

‘... They Really Showed Up.’

Interestingly, one of Yazawa’s first classes produced the school’s first and, until 2021, only four-time state qualifier in Ron Dworak (1967). Ethan Schwartz accomplished the feat from 2018-21. Four other Vikings made it to three straight state tournaments: VanGroll (1976-78); Matt VandenBush (91-93); Mark Thiem (2003-05); and Brock Bergelin (15-17).

Five wrestlers from Yazawa’s very first team were on hand for the special Alumni Night – Shawn Peronto, Bill Enz, Terry DeWane, Roy Anderson and John VanDerKinter.

VanGroll had recently visited Yazawa and decided they should honor the man for whom the wrestling room is now named. 

“I just got the idea then, why don’t I pick him up and take him to Alumni Night?” VanGroll says. “And then I thought, let’s make this a bigger production. In no way did I think it was going to be as big as it was. When they heard Stan was coming back they just really showed up.”

Kapinos, the current coach whose mom was taught by Yazawa at Denmark High School, was happy to have the Hall of Famer back. He estimates it had been 10 years since he’d last been there.

“He spoke at the event when we named the old wrestling room after him,” he says. “It was such a nice event. And then we all used to meet up with him at the state tournament each year or he’d come with the coaches. But it’s probably been five years since he last came down for that.

“Stan is somebody who has garnered so much respect in the wrestling community,” he adds. “And he was well liked by his wrestlers and the other coaches.”

For VanGroll, the idea that popped in his head during that visit to see his former coach was worth all of the hard work that went into it.

“Jeff Kralovetz was taking pictures of each of the wrestlers with Stan and printing them out and he couldn’t hand them out fast enough,” VanGroll says. “It was just really neat. 

“And Stan, he had a smile on his face the whole night.”