GAME CHANGER

from Bison Game Day October 16 2021

Youngstown State freshman QB among FCS Week 6 award winners

NDSU linebacker helped alter the football culture of a small town in Wisconsin

By Jeff Kolpack The Forum Fargo

Sparta, Wis., declares a population of 9,717 and for the longest time there were 9,000-plus residents who didn’t care much for their local high school football team. There wasn’t much to care about.

Losing will do that. As sure as the nearby La Crosse River in the southwest part of the state flows out of the Mississippi River, the flow of victories for the Sparta Spartans nearly stopped every year. It reached the point where there was a term for it: “Sparta Good.”

“That is you’re good enough to start for Sparta, but it doesn’t matter because you’re going to get killed anyways,” said head football coach Adam Dow.

Dow is in his seventh year in the program and third as the head coach. The Spartans won two games in his first year when he was an assistant.

“And it felt like the Super Bowl for the kids,” Dow said. “I think it was the first conference game they had won in a certain number of years.”

Change was on the horizon and perhaps it started with a couple of brothers with the third-mostcommon surname in Poland.

Ryan and Cole Wisniewski helped alter the landscape of Sparta football.

Cole is a sophomore linebacker at North Dakota State who is making an immediate impact in his first two years in the program. Ryan is a senior wide receiver at NCAA Division III power Wisconsin-Whitewater who leads the team in receptions.

Both the Bison and Warhawks are 5-0, with the Bison heading to Illinois State on Saturday for another key Missouri Valley Football Conference game. Cole has been a major contributor on defense, stepping in for injured starter James Kaczor.

NDSU did not lose a beat in the switch. Wisniewski (pronounced Wiss-nes-ski) had six tackles and a quarterback sack in a 34-20 win over Northern Iowa last week. For the season, he’s fourth on the team in tackles and is tied for the team lead in quarterback hurries with two.

The nearly instant success doesn’t surprise NDSU linebackers coach Grant Olson. He said Wisniewski is the type of player who will go home on Tuesday night and watch every play from that day’s practice. Wisniewski often takes notes to double down on avoiding the same mistake twice.

That’s how Wisniewski was part of a game-changing atmosphere in Sparta.

“That attitude alone is the type of guy who is going to change a culture and change a program around,” Olson said.

The change started at Sparta when Cole was a freshman and Ryan was a senior. The Spartans went 7-2 and qualified for the state playoffs for the first time in almost three decades.

Sparta Good no more.

“It was insane what the atmosphere turned into from the years before that,” Cole said. “Not only from the community but from the school. Kids started taking pride in the football team.”

It wasn’t just the Wisniewski brothers, either, who spurned the resurrection. Caleb Schauf is a senior backup tight end at South Dakota State. Madden Connelly is a defensive lineman at Division II Northern State (S.D.).

In all, eight players from the last five years of Spartan football have gone on to play college football at some level.

“When you look at the overall impact, it was kind of a mind flip for the program,” Dow said. “We shifted the mentality and both Ryan and Cole were a big part of it. When you go from never making the playoffs to playoffs in three of the past five years, there definitely was a change in something.”

The change was felt in the community. On Friday nights in the fall, the high school football field became the place to be instead of not caring about the team. Cole said everywhere he went in town, people wanted to talk football.

Sparta over the years was always one of the smallest schools in the Mississippi Valley Conference that had a difficult time beating the bigger programs.

“When you’re the small school in the bigger conference, a lot of times kids don’t see success,” Dow said. “Seeing on their faces and watching all of the time and effort and adversity they had been through to get there, it was something neat to see. And for the community something to be proud of. Those kinds of times in a smaller community are something special.”

Still, Cole wasn’t sure about his prospects for college football for the longest time. It was why he had the maturity at a young age to take school seriously, so much that he became the valedictorian of his 130-member senior class.

Driving back from a campus visit to the University of North Dakota one day, he and his mother began discussing whether they should start touring Division II schools.

“We weren’t sure we were going to get a scholarship offer,” Cole said.

That thought didn’t last. He got his first offer in March after his junior season. Last season, with the Missouri Valley moving to the spring because of the pandemic, he played as a true freshman with NDSU.

Small town, big-time ready.

“I thought when he came in, honestly he looked like the type of guy you thought was from the best high school program in the Midwest based on how ready he was in a lot of areas,” Olson said.

Moreover, Sparta Good has been buried in the past.

“Sparta Good is the epitome of average,” Cole said. “It was not acceptable at all. Every single morning one of my coaches would say we’re not trained to be second. You heard that forever and ever and ever. We were never second, we were last, and that’s where it was for years. Finally we were able to kick it into gear.”

BISON GAME DAY NORTH DAKOTA STATE AT ILLINOIS STATE inforum.com the forum | Saturday, october 16, 2021 | SPORTS | F3