50-years ago this November, the Roncalli Jets won the first-ever high school football championship in Wisconsin. Tomorrow members of that special team will reunite at Timeout Sports Bar And Grill to celebrate the accomplishment. The 1969 team defeated Chippewa Falls McDonell in the title contest at Lambeau Field.
Head Coach Ron Klestinski says that the W-I-S-A-A started a playoff system by selecting the 4-best private school teams in the state, with Milwaukee Pius the number-1 seed, McDonnell 2nd, Prairie Du Chien Campion 3rd, and Roncalli 4th.
“We had to go to Milwaukee and Marquette Stadium at the time and play Pius, that was a very good game with a 14 – 7 win for Roncalli. They had a very good team, there was a full back that went on to play at Wisconsin and so forth. To me, that was really the toughest of the two. Then we went to Lambeau Field and took on Chippewa Falls McDonnell and defeated them” Klestinski said it was “truly a dream team.”
“A coach could not ask anything more, we were not the biggest we were not the strongest but each one of those kids had hearts like you wouldn’t believe and they gave you everything they had.”
Klestinski, who would serve as the head football coach for 25-years at Roncalli, said in the first season of fielding a 4-year team in 1968, the Jets were just 1-7-&-1. The following year they lost only once. The difference? “I went in with a weight training program with Bill Twichell at Lincoln High School. We worked together and we had a weight training program going. The next year, when we started in 1969, we played De Pere here in Manitowoc and all of a sudden the game starts and they drive the field and I thought ‘oh no, not again’, well these kids stopped them on the 1 yard line, took the ball over, drove the field and scored. With that momentum, it just kept on building.”
The ‘venerable’ coach and former Dean of Students often visits with several of the players on that championship squad after 7:30 Sunday Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Parish. He’s very much looking forward to having team members back in town this weekend from places like Raleigh, North Carolina and Deland, Florida.
