Just off the main drag in Wausa, a couple commemorating their 73rd wedding anniversary sips on a pair of celebratory Michelob Ultras. With the sounds of local news and touch screen games in the background, the bar’s owner, Bill Schumacher, sits down with them and offers a congratulatory greeting. 

The conversation shifts toward whether the nearby school has a shot at winning another state title.

“Matthew Nelson’s boy really surprised me this year,” Schumacher says. “He’s really come into his own.”

Just a few blocks from the bar in this town of roughly 600 people, a couple with 55 fewer years of marriage under their belts is making final preparations for district competition.

“How you perform tonight is a direct reflection of how you’ll perform tomorrow,” Wausa Public Schools Superintendent Brad Hoesing, a former college football player with the gait to prove it, tells his troops.

Hoesing and his wife, Sheila, are gearing up for a run at another state championship appearance, their 19th straight. The pressure is on to win a 16th state title.

But when they return the next morning, they won’t be packing up cleats or athletic tape. They’ll be loading a trailer with risers and spray-painted trees and boarding a bus packed with students, makeup and elaborate costumes. 

“Make sure you hit your consonants,” Sheila Hoesing orders. 

“Don’t give them any reason not to put you first,” Brad Hoesing barks in accompaniment. “Don’t open the door. At 11 (a.m.) when you guys are done, I want everyone in the place to go, ‘Oh, this is over.’”

The Hoesings’ instructions came at the start of a two-hour rehearsal for a 30-minute play that will be performed , at best, twice more:  Once at the next morning’s district competition in Neligh and again a week later at state in Norfolk’s Johnny Carson Theatre.

The Nebraska School Activities Association, which conducts state championships for sports and activities, first awarded a state title for one-act play production in 1975, seven years before the Hoesings were born. Despite that, the Hoesings have now coached a state qualifying team in 38% of the state’s play production championships. 

Only Gretna’s 34 consecutive state appearances tops Wausa’s 19, four of which Wausa shared with Osmond during a brief co-op. 

None of the Hoesings’ four children has known a time that Wausa was not a state champion.

Their oldest child, Braydon, was born in 2007, one year after his parents led Wausa to its first-ever state one-act crown. Like his siblings and teammates, he refers to his parents as Mr. and Mrs. Hoesing or “our coaches” at rehearsals.

“They coach like nobody else in the state,” Braydon says. “They push us on nights like tonight, but when it’s time to perform, they let us shine.”

Rehearsal this night starts later in the evening to accommodate other practices — a bunch of the kids are on the basketball team, Brad Hoesing notes. It won’t wrap until just after 9 p.m., roughly seven hours before many of them will groggily roll into the parking lot to leave for Neligh.

The spotlight operators are missing altogether —  they are competing for the wrestling team.

“All of them have other activities,” Brad Hoesing says proudly.

Just over two decades earlier, neither of the elder Hoesings could have imagined such a championship-yielding collaboration.

In the spring of 2004, Brad Hoesing was completing preparations for his fourth year as a college offensive lineman at Wayne State College. Hoesing had participated in drama and music at Laurel-Concord High School. When the theater department announced it was putting on a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the education major decided to give it a shot.

He and another lead actor, an Osmond native at that point going by the name of Sheila Vinson, found themselves paired in many scenes. 

“I thought he was a jerk,” Sheila said of her now husband.

By the end of the production, the two were an item. The undersized lineman remained on the Wildcat roster, but he also found himself in yet another production with Sheila.

After a brief stint at Bancroft-Rosalie Public Schools for Brad, the Hoesings relocated to Wausa. Both joined the teaching and coaching roster, taking on the one-act team together.

It took exactly one year in Wausa for the Vikings to bring home a state crown, something Sheila Hoesing, a theater major at Wayne State, embraced immediately.

“I am not like a lot of really theater-based people just because they sometimes get angry, like ‘this shouldn’t be competitive; this should be about the art,’” she said. “Everything about fine arts is competitive. You have to fight for a role. You have to fight for a part. You have to fight to get heard. I don’t understand why competitiveness in the arts isn’t a good thing. It makes you better.”

Of Wausa’s 19 state championship-qualifying teams, 15 performed plays written by Sheila Hoesing, including this year’s production. The director’s newest play is titled “Torn, the Seven Deadly Sins.” 

“It wasn’t common at first, but it’s becoming a little more of a thing that people are doing,” she said of school directors crafting their own plays. 

The couple’s efforts to build the school’s arts and humanities education offerings has expanded beyond the theater stage and into a television studio, with the pair having built a broadcasting program at the Class D school five years ago. The push was aided by significant grants from the local community foundation, which pumped $14,000 into the broadcasting and family consumer sciences programs.

“In a school our size, we want our kids to be multifaceted,” Brad Hoesing said. “We may not be able to offer maybe as in-depth of curriculum as a Class A school in some of the electives, so our point is we’re going to offer multifaceted areas to our kids.”

Wausa won its 19th straight district title on Dec. 4, punching its ticket to state. It was a first for first-year assistant Kaylee Koch, a Crofton native who frequently found herself on the losing end to the Hoesings as a student.

“That was kind of fun today,” Brad Hoesing said of Koch’s reaction at districts. “Just watching an assistant coach that’s never had that kind of success and to see that excitement, it kind of reinvigorated us.”

The Hoesings know that one day they will have to turn the program over to a new leader. 

One of their other assistants, Wayne State College student Tyler Baue, could be a contender. Baue won three state championships as a performer under the Hoesings. He also worked on the crew while in seventh and eighth grades.

“Sheila said she’s got a death grip on me,” said Baue, a music education major. “She says I’m going to take over when she retires.”

“I literally told him, ‘I’m tired,’” Sheila Hoesing said. “Your turn. Tag.”

Neither knows when, or if, that time will come, however. Nor do they know when Wausa’s dominance will end.

At state, a near-capacity crowd fills the 1,234-seat Johnny Carson Theatre to watch Wausa, the second-to-last performance of the evening Wednesday. 

A nearly flawless performance, choreographed and rehearsed to near-hypnotic levels, suffers a rare stray tech cue toward the end of the production, leaving muted whispers in the auditorium. But the cast remains unfazed, and at the end of the night, everyone in the auditorium reaches the same conclusion.

“It’s Wausa,” one performer from Potter-Dix says after the night’s final production.

That doesn’t keep the nervous energy from charging through those wearing Wausa’s purple and gold.

“This has been the most stressful season,” Jaime Andersen says.

Andersen’s daughter, Jessie, has been part of Wausa’s one-act team all four years of her high school career, but this is her first year with a major speaking role.

“I’m just ready to be done,” Jaime Andersen says. 

She paces the auditorium lobby for five minutes while her daughter and her teammates receive notes from the event’s judges.

“This is my favorite part,” Sheila Hoesing says in between enthusiastic hugs with her parents. “It’s over.”

At 7:45 p.m., nearly two hours after their final performance of the season, Wausa learns its fate.

“Wausa High School,” MC Angie Stenger announces.

The Hoesings and their team climb the stage to receive their NSAA-branded medals. Koch hugs cast member after cast member.

“We’ve all been taught that strange things can happen,” Jessie Andersen said of the cast’s resilience toward the end of the performance. “The best thing the Hoesings taught us is to keep going.”

Braydon Hoesing claims one of two awards presented to the most outstanding performer, sharing the honor with Falls City Sacred Heart’s Ethan Neddenriep. 

“He’s a pretty strong actor,” Brad Hoesing said. “Takes after his mom.”

Jessie Andersen also wins an award for her performance, while the Vikings claim outstanding crew. Braden Bloomquist and Jake Munter are named top crew members.

“It’s kind of bittersweet because that’s the last time I’ll perform with that cast,” Jessie Andersen said.

A trailer full of props and sets now must make room for a trophy, a 16th for the school’s one-act play program. But before they make the 40-minute drive back to Wausa, they must celebrate the win with a trip to Pizza Ranch.

“You can find community in anything you do, but there’s something unique about the arts,” Baue said. “It’s so vulnerable and there’s no hiding who you are and expressing yourself … You take it seriously, but at the end of the day you’re just playing with your friends.”

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