North Shore Storm boys’ and girls’ cross country coach April Wahlstrom was voted Section 7A coach of the year. Both of Wahlstrom’s girls and boys squads qualified for the state cross country meet this fall.
April Wahlstrom was named the 2017 Section 7A Cross Country Coach of the Year, an honor well-deserved for the seven-year coach who took both the boys’ and girls’ teams to state this year.
Wahlstrom is as busy as a bee. She teaches science at Cook County I.S.D. 166 and is the secretary of the teachers’ union. She coaches the envirothon and varsity knowledge bowl teams, and in the spring is the head track and field coach. Also, she is the head coach of the combined Two Harbors/Cook County North Shore Storm cross country team.
Plus, she and her husband Tom are the proud parents of a busy two-yearold boy, Soren.
Whew!
Coaching two squads of boys and girls is difficult enough when they are all in the same school. Coaching boys and girls teams that are located 85 miles apart requires help and is an excellent testimony to Wahlstrom’s ability to find balance in her frenetically busy schedule.
This year Wahlstrom’s varsity boys’ and girls’ teams won conference titles, and the boys won the Section 7A title while the girls finished in a tie for second. The boys also won the Single-A Swain meet cross country team title.
“I have great assistants in Two Harbors, Dan Hebl and Sara Shield,” said Wahlstrom. “They do an awesome job. We get together for practice once a week. About five years ago I started doing a camp for the second week of practice, and that has brought the two groups together.”
In testimony to her coaching, virtually every member of both teams dropped their 5K times this year at the end of the season. The top five boys were all under 18 minutes for the 3.1-mile distance, and a young girls’ squad saw some of the better runners knock more than a minute off of their times from the start of the year. Getting runners to peak at just the right time is difficult for any coach to do. Getting runners located 85 miles apart to peak at the same time, now that’s a mark of great coaching.
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