North Cedar’s recipe for track

STANWOOD - Hard practices, Kettelson's A Skip and B Skip rules and Grandma Gute's cookies make a great recipe for the North Cedar girls' track and field team.

After many hours at a track meet, the North Cedar girls take down their tent and load up their belongings. All the girls are tired, but the one thing they can always count on after a day of healthy food and warming up is Grandma Gute's cookies.

Sharon Gutwiler, senior Rachel Gutwiler's grandma, has adopted all the track girls as her own granddaughters.

'I thought the runners needed something after a meet,” she said. 'I baked one time for my grandson Jesse's meet and this lead to another and then it continued to other sports.”

The tradition started when Jesse Gutwiler was a freshman and it has continued for 10 years. Gutwiler's chocolate chip cookies have been a favorite not only for the runners, but also the parents, who are treated on occasion.

Last year, Gutwiler's husband encouraged her to change the recipe a little so she started making the cookies with white chocolate chips.

'When Rachel, my granddaughter, was in eighth grade she asked, ‘Grandma are you going to be here when I get to high school?'” Sharon said. 'I guess I have fulfilled my promise to Rachel.”

It was Rachel's team members who affectionately started calling Gutwiler 'Grandma Gute.”

'I'm going to miss the girls,” she said, 'because the kids have given me so many memories.”

Gutwiler, who has worked for North Cedar for seven years, has resigned - or as she says I'm hanging up my apron. 'Grandma Gute's” cookies will be missed next year, but not as much as her presence at school and school events because, as Gutwiler said, 'I do it for the kids.”