Marshfield, Wisconsin is a peaceful town in the north central part of the state, about 212 miles northwest of Milwaukee. On Sunday afternoons in the fall, most of its nineteen thousand residents are parked in front of their television sets watching the Green Bay Packers, who make their home at Lambeau Field, 106 miles to the east as the crow flies. Marshfield has pretty much always been a Packer town, but these days the locals have a particular interest in seeing the team do well.
Back in 2000 they would show up, as they always did, to support the various athletic teams of their beloved Marshfield High School Tigers. In particular, one young athlete stood out…in three different sports. His buddies called him “Steno”, a shortened form of his last name, Stenavich. No matter what the season, Steno seemed to be in the middle of it, as a left tackle for the football team, as an inside force for the basketball team, and as a left handed pitcher and first baseman for the baseball team. As graduation approached, there wasn’t much doubt as to which sport he would pursue at the next level.
His football coach at Marshfield, Len Luedtke, called him “one of our best offensive linemen ever”. Good enough to attract major college scholarship offers from several schools, including Wisconsin. “He was an excellent leader in the weight room, so he was a good role model for the kids behind him. He was a class act. He was the kind of kid you wanted your seventh and eighth graders to look up to,” Luedtke told the Marshfield News-Herald.
Steno broke a lot of hearts in his home town and his home state when he chose to play his college ball at Michigan. He would be a four year letterman in Ann Arbor, voted all Big Ten twice. However, NFL scouts were apparently not impressed. He went undrafted in 2006, but his drive and determination would not be quelled. He signed as an undrafted free agent with the Carolina Panthers, and drifted in and out of training camps and practice squads for three other teams, including the Packers. He even spent a season playing for Amsterdam in NFL Europe. Much to his bitter disappointment, by 2010 his playing career was drying up.
Undaunted, his determination and passion for the game he loved compelled him to keep trying to find something, anything, to stay in football. He went back to Michigan and took a job with the Wolverines strength and conditioning program. Not as a coach. As an internal.
That was 2011. What would take place in his career over the next ten years is nothing short of meteoric. In quick order, he advanced to graduate assistant, then got the offensive line coach job at Northern Arizona, jumped to offensive line coach at San Jose State, leaped into the NFL as assistant O-line coach with the 49ers, hired by Matt LaFleur as O-line coach for the Packers, and this offseason was named offensive coordinator and run game coordinator for Green Bay.
Steno had found his niche, big time. In ten years, he went from handing out towels for college players in the weight room, to being in charge of one of the best offenses in pro football. His ability to design the run game helped Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon become just the second tandem in Packers history to both achieve over 1,100 yards of total offense in a season. (John Brockington and MacArthur Lane in 1972) He has been masterful at mixing, matching and plugging holes in a Green Bay offensive line that has been decimated by injuries.
Just 39 years old, he has been so good at what he does, that when previous OC Nathaniel Hackett got the head coaching job at Denver, he worked hard to lure Stenavich out of Green Bay to be the offensive boss for the Broncos. This time, unlike after his senior year of high school, Steno decided to stay home. That was welcome news for the folks back in Marshfield, who are not at all surprised by the rapid rise of their home town boy. “What stuck out to me was his leadership skills, specifically in football,” his old high school teammate Chris Fischer told the Marshfield News-Herald. “When you get to that professional level of coaching, everybody is really good at X’s and O’s and fundamentals, and I think with Adam there’s probably another level of leadership where he’s a really good leader of men, he’s a really good leader of personalities.”
Steno, LaFleur and the entire offensive staff will need all of the leadership and play designing skills they can muster this season, as the Packers face the challenge of maintaining that high standard of offense. They must replace the production of Davante Adams with a mix of veteran receivers who, to this point, have only been role players, and young pass catchers who lack experience. They are likely to rely heavily on the running game to set up most everything they do. Fortunately, that’s where Steno excels. It’s a good bet he will get the most out of what he has to work with. Maybe even enough to help his team win a Super Bowl.
If that were to happen, guys like LaFleur and Aaron Rodgers will become legendary figures statewide, maybe even world wide.
But they’ll never be the number one hero to the good folks back in Marshfield. Not as long as their shorthand is still in the team photograph.
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