If you are a sports fan in New Ulm be it high school, legion or amateur baseball, we all know who some of the record-holders are.

Cathedral softball coach Bob Mertz won his 800th career game this season. Retired New Ulm High School baseball coach Jim Senske won 707 games in his coaching career at NUHS.

We have all heard about them and others.

But there are three people who, without their perhaps hundreds of hours of research individually, sports records in New Ulm may be like a lot other communities — lost, forgotten, ignored or perhaps even dumped because of indifference.

While they are not the record setters, they are New Ulm’s sports enthusiasts who can tell you who, what and when of any sport in New Ulm.

They are “The Record keepers.”

Carl “Red” Wyczawski, Herb Schaper and Ron Reinhart have compiled books and computer files of sports records in New Ulm – be it scoring leaders in a certain high school sport to how many points a relatively unknown player scored in his one year of basketball.

They can tell you how many games an amateur baseball player played for the now-defunct New Ulm Millers baseball team to how many touchdowns a second-string running back for a school had his junior season.

And they do it with accuracy that comes only with dedicated research and a passion for what they are doing. And they can even throw in a story or two about certain players.

“RED” WYCZAWSKI AND HERB SCHAPER: They can both respectfully be called “The Godfathers” of sports records here in New Ulm.

For Wyczawski, his love affair with New Ulm sports started when he moved here from Milwaukee in 1956 following a stint with the Milwaukee Brewers.

“I got into high school sports when I was in Milwaukee because they had a lot of good teams,” he said. “When I moved here there were no [high school] records.”

So Wyczawski spent over 40 years researching high school sports here at the Brown County Museum with newspapers dating back to 1907 when they started basketball. “I did basketball first and then I researched baseball then football”

STORY ONE: Wyczawski said that when researching golf he found out that John Diedenhoffen, who came to New Ulm to manage the theaters in New Ulm and played golf for the Naval Academy, beat Jack Nicklaus when he played at Ohio State in 1958.

He said that he spent an average of four to six hours a week for 40 years researching local sports.

He then researched both the history of New Ulm High School, New Ulm Cathedral and Minnesota Valley Lutheran.

Wyczawski also researched New Ulm Legion baseball from its beginning in 1931.

How complete are Wyczawski’s records? When asked if he could answer who was New Ulm High School’s leading scorer in basketball in 1958?

“I have that in my books,” he said.

Wyczawski’s record books are complete and precise. And numerous.

Wyczawski has had help from Schaper in this project.

“We spent between 15-20 years researching records,” he said.

Schaper started his record-keeping here in 1948 when he was at New Ulm High School.

“I had to write an English composition and I did it on a baseball story,” he said. “That got me into sports writing and records. I got the job as the sports writer for the Graphos, the high school paper.”

Seventy years later, Schaper is still doing what he liked in high school in keeping records. He now shares his interest on his website, New Ulm Sports Central.

And it became more than an obsession for him.

“It became a 24/7 job and right now I cannot keep up,” he said. “I have over 6,000 sports objects on New Ulm sports history and I figure I have total of 100,000 names, records and scores of New Ulm sports.”

STORY NUMBER TWO: Back in 1943, Charlie “Lefty” Johnson was pitching for the Brewers and wanted a new ball. He threw the ball to his catcher but the umpire threw back the same ball.This kept up for three or four times until finally Johnson took the ball and threw it over the grandstand behind home plate and onto German Street. New Ulm Baseball Association President “Count” Tauschek fined him for the baseball.

RON REINHART: When Ron Reinhart went to a baseball game at Johnson Park in the early 1960s he would keep a scorecard for the game.

“My aunt and uncle, Mac and Mildred McIvor, from 1939 until the mid-50s kept scorebooks and all of the scrapbooks and averages for each year,” Reinhart said. “During World War II they would send box scores of games to the baseball players who were in the military. They enjoyed doing that.”

That hobby carried over to Reinhart.

“I did the scorecards and The Journal had the boxscores of each game and I kept them piece by piece,” Reinhart said. “I never thought that I would be as involved in it as I am now with the baseball records. When I think of it now I think this is impossible.”

While he also has baseball records for all three New Ulm High Schools, then-Dr. Martin Luther College his forte is amateur baseball in New Ulm.

“I can go back to 1937 up to the present,” he said. “It was a big task but then again it was not. If you enjoy what you are doing, I have a lot of scorebooks going back to 1937. What happened there is it was done in pencil and the print is kind of fading out.”

Reinhart’s research into amateur baseball is so complete that if you ask him about what a certain player hit for the Brewers back in 1948, he said that he “probably could tell you what is average was.”

New Ulm is lucky and unique to have three people like these. I don’t think there is a town in Minnesota that can boast of people who care so much about their sports history.

STORY NUMBER THREE: After a particularly bad game behind the plate, the home plate umpire was walking up behind Johnson Park with his partner and turned to him and said he was thinking of quitting. His partner — without missing a beat — said to him “You can’t quit, you have too many bad years left.”