CHAMBERLAIN, S.D. — Before he could walk, Nash Hutmacher learned to fish. His dad, Joe, carried young Nash in a car seat, stuck the pole in his hand and waited for the walleye or bass to bite.
He hunted, too, riding on Joe’s back into deer blinds. Once, long before Nash grew to flatten foes in football and wrestling and deadlift 600 pounds, he reached around his dad’s shoulder and slapped the stock of a muzzleloader just as Joe squeezed the trigger, imploring him to “hurry up and shoot it.”
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That’s Nash, always looking for his next target.
Today, he’s simply “The Polar Bear,” a larger-than-life figure in South Dakota and around the upper Midwest, renowned most for his utter dominance on the mat. But Hutmacher, aiming this month for freestyle and Greco-Roman titles at the U.S. Marine Corps Junior Nationals in Fargo, N.D., is set this winter to wrestle his final match; he plans to focus on football at Nebraska, to which he announced his commitment June 29.
“I’m obviously going to miss it a lot,” he said.
The sacrifice, Hutmacher said, is worthwhile because of his burgeoning love for football and the connection forged with the Huskers over the past year.
Hutmacher, a 6-foot-5, 305-pound defensive tackle, chose Nebraska over Wisconsin and Oregon after also visiting Iowa and Iowa State. His pledge provided second-year coach Scott Frost and his staff with another victory inside of their sacred 500-mile radius. With the addition of Hutmacher and Carroll (Iowa) Kuemper Catholic outside linebacker Blaise Gunnerson to a 2020 class that features Bellevue West receiver Zavier Betts and Lawrence (Kan.) Free State offensive tackle Turner Corcoran, the Huskers continue to flex their recruiting muscle close to home.
In Hutmacher, Nebraska gets an accomplished competitor with Ndamukong Suh-like size who’s eager to test his skills in football against worthy opponents.
“He doesn’t see a lot of competition at our level, to be honest with you,” Chamberlain football coach Jeff Rademacher said.
Chamberlain plays in the smallest of four 11-man classifications in South Dakota. The school of about 300 students never has produced an FBS-level scholarship player. The closest? Joe Hutmacher, Nash’s dad, who suffered a torn ACL as a senior in 1986 as a coach from Nebraska visited to evaluate him. Joe landed for one year at Division II Northern State in Aberdeen, S.D. — but we’ll get to his story.
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First, there’s Nash, who holds 19 school records in football, wrestling and track at Chamberlain. He wrestled on the high school varsity as a seventh-grader, qualifying for state at 285 pounds, then placed fifth in eighth grade before starting a 123-match winning streak that includes three consecutive state titles.
Hutmacher pinned every opponent he faced as a junior on the high school circuit, including four in less than two minutes total at the February state tournament. His heavyweight competitor in the final lasted nine seconds.
“I can’t beg people to get on the mat with him in practice,” Chamberlain wrestling coach John Donovan said.
The standard for success jumps exponentially from the prep fields of South Dakota to the Big Ten. No doubt, Hutmacher, despite his abnormal strength, remains raw in football. On top of the 600-pound deadlift — he does two reps at 560 — Hutmacher benches 420 and squats 610. As a junior, he collected five sacks and 15 tackles for loss.
Donovan said he’s not worried about Nash’s ability to adjust to a much higher level of competition. In wrestling, he regularly sees elite talent. Hutmacher won a 16-and-under freestyle national title two years ago in Fargo. He placed second in freestyle and third in Greco-Roman at junior nationals last year, and won a folkstyle championship in March.
As a seventh-grader, he beat a highly ranked senior from Wyoming at the Rapid City Invitational. As a freshman, Hutmacher won his first state title with a 3-1 decision over senior Eddie Miller, the defending champ who’s now a lineman at South Dakota State. A year later, Nash pummeled fellow unbeaten Nick Casperson, a senior who moved up two weight classes for the much-hyped match. And in December, Hutmacher pinned Chase Dockter, the defending North Dakota heavyweight champion who was expected to pose a challenge.
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“He’s a natural student,” Donovan said. “Nash does the right things. And when the time comes to step up, he’s always there.”
The Missouri River runs slowly here, through the middle of South Dakota. It’s wider than on the eastern edge of Nebraska, more shallow, and separates Oacoma, a town of about 400 on the western banks, from Chamberlain, which is about six times larger.
The Hutmachers live in Oacoma. Nash likes to wade out into the river near home in search of walleye. He spears carp and shoots them with his bow. And his favorite destination for largemouth bass sits about 15 miles upstream at Big Bend Dam. It’s where Nash escaped the noise with his dad after he committed to Nebraska last month.
For a small-town kid, the attention can get overwhelming, he said. It’s not like he had an older teammate on whom to lean for advice about the recruiting process.
Hutmacher, who works in maintenance at the elementary school during the summer, last Monday stopped for a drink at a gas station near Interstate-90, which runs just south of Chamberlain. He noticed a car with a Nebraska license plate. Inside, a man in a Husker shirt stopped him.
“Are you Nash?” he said.
“He was literally just passing through town,” Hutmacher said. “It’s kind of cool. Obviously, a lot of people want to talk to me.”
Nash Hutmacher (right) is 6 feet 5 and 305 pounds; next to his dad, though, he almost seems small. (Mitch Sherman / The Athletic)
Joe Hutmacher, who is even larger than Nash, listens intently as his son talks of his experiences, adding to the conversation only when questioned. Joe and wife Laura pushed Nash in no direction as he made his college decision. They provided him with the information; Nash made the choice.
“Joe laid it all out for him,” said Donovan, the wrestling coach.
After his one year of college football, Joe, raised in Oacoma, returned to Lyman County and prepared for a career in law enforcement. At age 21, he went to work as a sheriff’s deputy. He spent 16 years as the police chief in Chamberlain, retiring last October. The elder Hutmacher briefly tried substitute teaching but found a fit at St. Joseph’s Indian School as a safety and security coordinator.
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Joe also competed in powerlifting. He moonlighted in the 1990s as a football coach and weightlifting instructor at the high school and once attended a seminar run by Boyd Epley, the legendary innovator of Nebraska’s strength program. “I’ve always been a fan of Boyd Epley,” Joe said. “He’s one of the best, in my opinion.”
Five years ago, as Nash prepared for seventh grade and weighed more than 200 pounds, the high school wrestling coach approached Joe about moving Nash immediately into the lineup at heavyweight.
“Donovan thought he could do pretty well,” Joe said. “So I said, ‘All right, you teach him to wrestle. I’ll make him strong.’ ”
That summer of 2014, Joe jump-started the strength and conditioning program for middle school and high school students in their shared building next to the Chamberlain water tower.
“Cub Power,” they called it, named after the school’s mascot. And after Epley’s Husker Power.
Occasionally before Nash wrestles, a rival high school coach approaches and asks him to go easy.
“Please don’t slam my kid.”
Nash gets it.
“You can’t underestimate anyone,” he said. “But I know. I’m not out to hurt people. I want them to wrestle. I want them to love it. It’s not my place to demoralize them.”
Nash Hutmacher owns a 123-match winning streak, which includes three consecutive state titles, in wrestling at Chamberlain High.(Courtesy of Joe Hutmacher)
Donovan said he’s seen Hutmacher get angry only twice. Three years ago, a teammate punched him in the mouth at practice. Nash flashed a look that alarmed the coach, who stepped in with help from an assistant before ugliness ensued. A year later, a competitor hit him open palm in the face and pushed Nash’s head off the mat.
“Nash could have made it very painful,” the coach said, “but he went out very nicely after that and pinned him. Nash is a very good guy to keep everybody light. He has a personality that’s unique.”
On the gridiron, Nash once chased a small running back downfield at an angle that set them on a collision course.
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“Nash could have just trucked him,” said Rademacher, the football coach, “but that’s not who he is. He just stopped and put the kid down.”
Coaches are constantly impressed with Nash’s demeanor. In a phone call while recruiting Nash, Ohio State wrestling coach Tom Ryan thought briefly that he was chatting with Joe.
Nash encourages teammates, no matter their talent or levels of strength. “He doesn’t care if you’re benching the bar,” Rademacher said.
On Nash’s his official visit in early April, Huskers coaches took the Hutmachers out to a pond near Lincoln. Frost went, along with defensive coordinator Erik Chinander, defensive line coach Tony Tuioti and running backs coach Ryan Held. They fished for largemouth bass, some better than others.
Wisconsin tried to repeat the experience two months later. But Nash “never quite got that same feeling at other places,” he said.
He planned originally to wait through junior nationals and commit in late July.
But in the last full week of June, after he returned from a wrestling tournament in Tulsa, Okla., Nash felt he was ready. He told his parents on a Monday night, called Frost on Wednesday and tweeted his announcement on Saturday morning before jumping into Joe’s Dodge Ram with their fishing gear.
Go Cubs, and Go Big Red!!!!! @coach_frost @CoachTuioti92 @CoachRHeld @CoachChinander
#COMMITTED #GBR #skers pic.twitter.com/NPIKzdxxON
— Nash Hutmacher (@Nashnation72) June 29, 2019
He said he felt a connection to the coaches in Lincoln and several of his future teammates — like Garrett Nelson, an outside linebacker from Scottsbluff, Neb., the first player to commit in the 2019 class. Nelson enrolled in January and has positioned himself to play right away on special teams.
He and others on the roster provided a sense of familiarity for Hutmacher.
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“I didn’t even know them,” Hutmacher said, “but I felt like I could talk to them. And with Lincoln, it’s a big city, obviously, compared to here, but it feels like home.”
Before he gets to Lincoln, the South Dakota high school record of 48 consecutive pins, set by 1984 Olympic gold medalist Randy Lewis, sits within reach. Gone are his days of running on the 4×100-meter relay team, but he won the shot put and the discus at the state track meet this spring.
His list of high school accomplishments and Power 5 scholarship offers place Hutmacher in elite company in his home state. He’s pushing in the years ahead to join the likes of Lewis and Lincoln McIlravey, a three-time national champion wrestler at Iowa, Chad Greenway and Riley Reiff of NFL fame and NBA retirees Mike Miller and Eric Piatkowski.
The Polar Bear moniker? Well, look at Nash. The mother of a wrestling teammate in middle school first used the name. “It caught on.” he said.
Two years ago, Hutmacher figured his future beyond high school involved wrestling. Now he’s more certain than ever about football.
And about Nebraska.
“I didn’t know squat about football as a freshman, but it’s kind of taken over,” he said. “The more I learn, the more I love it. It’s the same mentality as wrestling, just a different kind of battle.
“You’re going out there to dominate the guy in front of you.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Joe Hutmacher)
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