Logan celebrates life of Steve Hole, names fieldhouse after longtime educator and coach

A year after he died unexpectedly, longtime public educator and coach Steve Hole had the fieldhouse at Logan High School named after him with a ceremony Thursday.

Hole was at Logan for 32 years and 41 within the La Crosse School District, where he served as teacher, coach and athletic director but so much more.

“He did all the things behind the scenes that were necessary, all the areas that most people would not be aware of,” Logan principal Wally Gnewikow told WKTY. “If we had something that needed to be done at the school. He would take whatever that was left, him and his wife, who is still with us — they were both like that. They were selfless people, who would do anything they could for you.”

Gnewikow said Hole started a leadership program at Logan that expanded throughout the Mississippi Valley Conference, bringing around 20 area students to the fieldhouse now named after him.

“He had tremendous character and he wanted to try and build character in all of our students and our student athletes,” Gnewikow said. “(He would) bring in speakers and try to develop leadership in the area. Character was extremely important to him.”

Gnewikow also spoke about what characteristics he tried to emulate from Hole.

“What I took from Steve, was the fact that nothing was ever too small for him,” Gnewikow said. “He would help people with the littlest thing necessary. He would go out of his way to see, ‘Is everything handled here? Is everything taken care of her?’ The way that he treated people is what I took the most from him.”

A school motto at Logan is “Always a Ranger,” which Gnewikow said Hole may as well have been the model for that way of life.

“If he would have lived to have been 100, he would have been here volunteering his time. He would have been helping out a new generation of students. He would have tried to mentor teachers and coaches. He would have come into the main office and said, ‘What do you need help with Wally?’ The ‘Always a Ranger’ really characterizes that man, himself.”

Hole was 72 when he passed away. The fieldhouse was dedicated to him in a ceremony between the rival Logan-Central boys and girls basketball games.