Leaving it all on the mat

Hanna Errthum chases her dream with such discipline and humility that she tends to dismiss the notion she lives anything other than the ordinary lifestyle of a junior in high school at Mount Horeb.

But there was one circumstance recently that even she couldn’t brush away as normal. When Errthum woke up one morning in December and went to check her phone, it took a moment to register that there were no message notifications waiting for her - a pretty much unheard-of occurrence for any 16-year-old.

She soon realized why.

Errthum was in Poland, seven hours ahead of her still-sleeping friends back in Wisconsin, preparing to wrestle in a major international wrestling tournament. That’s where a gold-medal showing vaulted her to the No. 1 national high school ranking in her 132-pound weight class — yet another positive affirmation as she chases a spot on the U.S. age-group national team later this year, a berth in the Olympic trials in 2024 and a place on the medal stand at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

Yeah, there’s nothing normal about that.

For Mount Horeb’s most accomplished high school-age athlete, talent and commitment are matched only by self-sufficiency. Errthum manages a 20-to-30 hour per week training schedule. She drives more than an hour each way to evening practice at an elite training facility outside Muscoda multiple times per week, juggles her class schedule to partake in high-level workouts against women in their 20s in Madison during the school day, organizes her weightlifting routine, and takes full ownership of her dietary regimen, including meal planning and meal prep – right down to using a gram scale to ensure she’s getting the right mix of carbohydrates, fats, proteins and calorie load.

“It’s the drive to see how good I can be,” Errthum explains. “There are no limits on that right now. And I want to be the best.”

Carving her own path

With a dad who wrestled on scholarship at the University of Wisconsin after a state-championship high school career at Boscobel, and a mom who came from a wrestling family and served as team manager in her high school days in Mount Horeb, you might think it was predestined that Hanna would be right where she is.

But that’s not how Mike and Jackie Errthum approach things.

“We’ve always said that this has got to be her decision,” Jackie said. “We’ll be with her every step of the way, but she’s got to want to do it.”

They introduced Hanna and her older sister, Kaylee, to all types of opportunities, and Hanna enjoyed playing youth soccer and swimming for the Mount Horeb Gators summer program when she was younger. (When boys in her class tried recruiting her to play football, she pitched that, too - it’s the one idea her parents nixed.)

Wrestling was always part of her life; she started in kindergarten and, with a dad who coached youth wrestling, she spent many nights and weekends on the mat, competing regularly in tournaments around the area and state under his guidance.

It wasn’t until middle school that Errthum started to realize her potential and the depths of her interest and decide to make a larger commitment to the sport. She’d attended a number of camps and marveled at older, more established female athletes like Kylie Welker of Waterford and Macey Kilty of Stratford, who this past summer each finished as runners-up at the U.S. Olympic Trials. When she saw Helen Maroulis make history as the first American woman to win wrestling gold in 2016, that sealed the deal.

“It was always something I wanted to do.” Errthum said. “I just didn’t know how high a level I could reach.”

Middle school was also when Errthum started to realize that girls who want to excel in wrestling face a more difficult path. The boys she’d competed against for years were starting to gain an edge developmentally, which meant it was harder to find evenly matched training partners because there aren’t many elite-level girls. As a result, she was driving as much as three hours away to participate in two-hour practices. Errthum also noticed that fans began to patronize her at meets, congratulating her after losses for the mere fact of participating. That wasn’t an easy pill for someone who hates losing.

Still, Errthum continued on what has been the traditional path for female wrestlers, continuing her club association while also joining the Mount Horeb high school wrestling team as a freshman. Competing against the boys at a mid-range weight class put Errthum in a tough spot, because she found herself wrestling primarily older, stronger, more experienced adversaries. The WIAA didn’t introduce a girls tournament until this year, so she wrestled against the boys in the postseason and finished fifth in the regional meet.

“All the boys on the Mount Horeb team are really nice, and I’ve known them for years because we wrestled against each other in middle school,” she said. “They were all really welcoming. They never kicked me out of anything or were super mean. So it was nice to have that support.”

“I knew wrestling 132 was going to be really hard because I knew the opponents I’d be facing. Some would be good matches — but some guys were just that much better than me.”

Full-time focus on freestyle

It was more than mixed results that convinced Errthum and her family that high school athletics wasn’t her path forward. The folkstyle form used in the U.S. differs from the freestyle used in international competition, which awards more points for takedowns that involve throws and doesn’t offer points for wrestlers in the bottom position. Although there is a lot of crossover between the styles, specialization in freestyle — and mixing in Greco-Roman training, which focuses entirely on using the upper body for moves — offers a chance to reframe your mindset and develop skills more effectively and efficiently.

It turns out that one of the only elite gyms in the country that offers girls the opportunity to train full-time in freestyle is located in Blue River, a village of 434 people just south of the Wisconsin River in Grant County. Lucas Steldt opened Combat Wrestling Center in 2004 with the goal of developing international-caliber teen wrestlers full-time, eschewing the high school path. As he explains: “If you have a kid in school who’s a savant, you don’t keep him in pre-algebra – you make a Doogie Houser out of him.”

Steldt carries an impressive résumé. He coached the U.S. team at the 2017 World Junior Championships, has been named the USA Wrestling National Developmental Coach of the Year, and regularly serves as a guest instructor at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Steldt was already coaching his high school-age daughter, Avery, and Kylie Rule of Mineral Point, in addition to a host of boys, and the Errthums were interested in having Hanna join them. Only one problem: “He actually didn’t want me at his club,” Hanna said, laughing.

Remember how we said Errthum doesn’t like losing? As a result, she’d often let her emotions get the best of her.

“When she was younger, she’d get so worked up about a loss that she would typically lose the next match also,” Mike said.

That’s particularly costly in wrestling, where at big events like the World Team trials the roster spots are decided by a best-of-three finals format.

“I’d seen Hanna throw fits after losing, and that made me gunshy,” Steldt said.

Eventually, a friend of Errthum convinced Steldt to give her a shot, and he began working with her on a casual basis. Liking what he saw, he put Errthum to the test in a tournament, pitting her against a talented opponent who promptly beat her by technical fall. A few minutes passed and Steldt approached Errthum to see how she was doing.

“If she had been crying, or making excuses, I would have been done with it,” he said. “But she was really calm. I said, ‘You can come full-time. The way you handled that loss, I want you now.’ ”

Nearly two years later, Steldt still marvels at the way Errthum transformed her approach.

“She recognized an issue she had mentally and focused on fixing it,” he said. “Nobody does that.”

There’s much to like about Errthum’s other attributes, too.

“She’s special – any idiot could coach her,” Steldt said. “She’s naturally super athletic; her dad was the same. She’s super strong, and well-developed muscularly. Her No. 1 asset is her parents, who were secure enough to step back and find someone who could coach her.”

A notoriously hard worker, Errthum’s focus these days is on refining her footwork; learning to operate in space as opposed to the physical, hands-on style that comes naturally; making adjustments based on the various body types she’ll square off against, whether taller or bigger or stronger; and training herself to slow down and control match tempo.

“I’m proud to see how she’s progressed,” Mike said. “She’s doing way better than I ever did.”

A ‘role model’ with work ethic

Last summer, Errthum had a breakout performance at the premier youth tournament in the country, the USA Wrestling Junior and 16U National Championships in Fargo, N.D. Competing in two brackets, she placed third in her age group field and second in her classification (cadet) and vaulted to the top of the national rankings.

That earned her an invitation to a late-summer FloWrestling showcase event called “Who’s No. 1?” Errthum was slated for a six-week break from activity after Fargo, but didn’t want to pass on the opportunity. So, she squeezed in three weeks of training and traveled to Dallas to face second-ranked Janida Garcia, whom she’d beaten, 11-6, the previous year. This time, Garcia registered three early takedowns and prevailed 16-8.

“I came back a few weeks early, and it was hard to get back on the mat,” Errthum acknowledged. “It was a lot of pressure.”

That was one of a handful of difficult losses Errthum absorbed last year, including a semifinal match in Fargo where she got pinned after an errant takedown attempt while holding an 8-0 lead. Steldt watched with pride as Errthum used those setbacks as motivation to regroup in the fall and dominate in her first international competition, the HEROS Lady Open in Boguszow-Gorce, Poland.

“She was flawless,” he said.

The rise of COVID-19 cases in Europe has thrown some uncertainty into the competition calendar of late. Errthum got some great news over the weekend, with tournaments in France and Sweden back on after being temporarily scratched a few weeks ago.

Steldt is working to add some international tournaments or showcase events, potentially in eastern Europe. His goal is to battle-test his trio of top-flight girls ahead of the U.S. World Team trials in May in Fort Worth, Texas. They’ll leave right after that event for a competition in Croatia.

“Too many student-athletes don’t give themselves a chance at something more than what they’re doing,” Steldt said. “There’s something to be said about a girl in this sport who says, ‘I believe in myself and I’m doing this.’ Almost nobody has that in them. She’s so self-confident. She’s taking a chance on herself.”

The Mount Horeb Area School District is wholeheartedly supporting that decision. Hanna and her parents met with high school principal Cody Lundquist and athletic director Kolleen Nesheim last summer to discuss whether she could flex her schedule to take advantage of that daytime training opportunity with seasoned women wrestlers.

Their answer was a resounding yes, so long as Errthum maintains her high grades and keeps up with classwork (she’s on track to graduate a semester early, in January 2023). The three of them communicate regularly via email to plan around absences to compete internationally, such as Poland, and the opportunities in France and Sweden that are back on the calendar.

“As an athletic director, I use her as an example when discussing work ethic with athletes,” Nesheim said. “She is somebody that works ALL OF THE TIME to be a better athlete. No excuses! She is so committed and more athletes should use her as a role model. 

“We are also so lucky to have her work ethic in Mount Horeb so that young wrestlers can look up to her. Specifically, I want other female athletes to know that anything can happen if you want it bad enough.”

In the athletic director’s office is an autographed, professional poster of Errthum in her competition singlet. They have a deal: Errthum promised to deliver Nesheim a new poster in U.S. team attire when she makes it to the Olympics.

With her new No. 1 ranking, her work ethic, access to an elite training environment, and the unflinching support of her parents, family and community, Errthum has put herself on track to achieve that dream.

“It’s kind of unreal,” she said. “It’s really cool to know I’m one of the best in the country at my age level. It’s cool to know I have the resources to do what I need to do to win.”