'We were never unprepared,' said Dan Rustin, part of three team championships from 1974-78 and later a Big Ten singles champion at Iowa. Not bad for a standout football player who suited up for the University of Wisconsin and whose father was head football coach at Florida and Michigan State. He also developed a pipeline of tennis talent that kickstarted a six-decade run for Nicolet as one of the state's tennis hotbeds. 29 at age 93, is remembered as a coach who could foster team identity in a largely individual sport even while overseeing a hyper-competitive practice environment. His daughters, playing for rival Whitefish Bay, laid claim to two doubles titles and a singles crown, plus the 1971 team title in the first year the WIAA sponsored girls tennis.īachman, who died Oct.

His individual players won 30 combined titles. The architect of Nicolet High School tennis oversaw an incomprehensible 21 boys and 13 girls team state championships in his 41 years of coaching, with eight combined runner-up finishes, to boot. Cary Bachman built one of the greatest high school sports programs in Wisconsin history, and he did it in a sport he'd never played before he started coaching it.