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The 15 includes a handful of wrestlers, a single athlete with four wheelchair track and field titles to her name, a record-setting pole vaulter, and the first football state champ from the area since 2009.

Fifteen was also the largest number of state champs from the area going back to at least 2010, a year in which two ����Vlog��ý Craig gymnasts won individual state titles, Whitewater won the boys track and field state championship with multiple individual champs, and Milton won the girls swim state championship with multiple individual champs.

Let’s take a look back and relive some of the championship moments from throughout the year.

Winter

The year’s first state champions all claimed their titles at the WIAA individual wrestling tournament in late February.

Aeoden Sinclair, then a Milton High School junior, capped off a 49-0 season with four wins in the Division 1 220-pound bracket at the Kohl Center for a second consecutive state championship (his first came as a sophomore at 170 pounds at the end of a 52-1 season in 2022).

Evansville’s Danny Heiser, who was a sophomore last season, also won his second consecutive state title as a 132-pounder in Division 2.

Both Heiser and Sinclair are wrestling this year to join an elite group of 75 wrestlers to have ever won three individual state championships in Wisconsin. Heiser could one day join an even more exclusive group of 26 who won four championships.

Wisconsin held its second state girls wrestling tournament in 2023, and Lake Geneva Badger put two wrestlers atop the podium.

Carley Ceshker, a Badger freshman last season, entered the tournament with an 8-0 record and stayed perfect to win the title at 126 pounds. Ella Creighton, a junior at the time, advanced all the way through the 185-pound bracket, finishing her season with a 29-4 record and a state championship.

Spring

Athletes from Rock Valley Conference schools made all the state-winning noise in the spring season.

After posting impressive marks all season long, Walworth Big Foot junior Kaden Rambatt won the Division 2 boys pole vault with a height of 15 feet, 2 inches, more than a foot better than the second-place finisher.

On the track, five runners from Whitewater took home championships. Sophomore Jack Hefty won the Division 2 boys 1,600-meter run in 4 minutes, 16.47 seconds, and seniors Madelynn Buehler, Emma Weigel and Kindyl Kilar and freshman Sydney Schilt comprised the state-winning 800-meter relay team in Division 2, finishing their championship race in a time of 1:42.95.

Also at the state track and field meet, Beloit Turner won a team wheelchair title thanks to the work of senior Rachel Cleaver.

She was the winner in the wheelchair 400-, 800- and 1,600-meter races, and she also had the best shot put mark.

Her four first-place finishes produced all 40 points the Trojans scored in the team competition. It was a repeat of her four-win performance at the state meet in 2022, though instead of the 1,600, she won the 100-meter race that year instead.

The weekend after the state track and field meet in La Crosse, pitchers Mckenna Young and Ava Risum and the rest of Brodhead softball team finished their spotless run to the Division 3 state championship.

The Cardinals duo shut out both their opponents at state — the same way they shut out every postseason opponent they faced. It was the first time since at least 2011 that a team did not allow a run in a softball postseason.

In the championship game against Mayville, the teams played to a scoreless deadlock through seven innings. In the bottom of the eighth, Jerrica Schwartz came through with the walk-off hit to score Taetum Hoesly and bring Brodhead its second state softball title.

Young has since joined the softball team at Division I South Dakota, while Risum, who had a 0.37 ERA as a sophomore in 2023, will be a key figure in Brodhead’s title defense next spring.

Summer

����Vlog��ý established its reputation as a baseball town in the 1970s and ‘80s, and while both the city’s high schools won state titles in those decades, the success of the American Legion summer team formed the foundation.

The local squad won its first state title in 1968 and added another trophy in 1970, won three more each summer from 1974-76, and won again in 1983 and 1989.

Outside a runner-up finish in 1999, the years since the city’s last Legion state champs had been void of any significant postseason success for the squad.

That was until this summer.

Under co-coaches Kerry Michaels and Andy Gregg, Post 205 boasted a pair of 2023 high school conference players of the year — ����Vlog��ý Craig’s Jake Schaffner (Big Eight) and Edgerton’s C.J. Dupuis (Rock Valley) — and added plenty more talent around them to return ����Vlog��ý to the state tournament for the first time since 2011.

Once there, Post 205 lost its first game to Appleton before the offense blew up, leading ����Vlog��ý to wins of 11-0, 10-4, 10-0 and 6-1 to reach the championship game from the loser’s bracket.

����Vlog��ý manufactured four runs in the title game and survived a late charge by Eau Claire to win 4-3 and advance to a national regional tournament in Michigan.

Fall

Of all of the year’s area state champions, the one this fall — Lake Geneva Badger’s triumph in Division 2 football — might’ve been the least expected.

That has less to do with Badger, which was the undefeated champion of the Southern Lakes Conference, and more to do with the perceived strength of other teams in the division. The Badgers were a No. 2 seed in their quadrant of the Division 2 playoff bracket, seeded behind defending D-2 champion Kettle Moraine, which had not lost a game all season.

Elsewhere in the bracket, Sun Prairie East had a strong season, finishing as Badger Large Conference runner-up behind Waunakee.

The Cardinals should’ve been the No. 1 seed in their bracket quadrant over Milwaukee King, while the Warriors went undefeated and spent much of the season ranked No. 2 in Division 2 behind the Lasers.

None of that mattered to the Badgers, their coach Matt Hensler, their quarterback J.P. Doyle or their running back Landon Nottestad.

They went to Wales and ran over Kettle Moraine on Nov. 3 despite Hensler having to be transported from the stadium by ambulance after suffering a heart attack during the game. Then, with Hensler back with the team after a short hospital stay, they went to Oconomowoc, where they did the same thing to East on Nov. 10 to earn a spot in the Division 2 title game against Waunakee at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison.

The teams played in a classic shootout on Nov. 17. They scored touchdowns on all of their second-half possessions, and the final score was decided when the Badgers repelled a Waunakee two-point conversion attempt with less than a minute to go in the game.

Badger won 34-33, and Hensler was named the state’s football coach of the year by The Associated Press.