MILWAUKEE – Dave Schuelke has a couple of jobs. His day job as president and chief executive of Spring Bank in suburban Milwaukee is more important in the grand scheme.
But it's his other job — that one that takes him to Lambeau Field for each Green Bay Packers home game — that catches people's attention.
Schuelke is the person who controls the radio receiver in quarterback Aaron Rodgers' helmet that lets Coach Mike McCarthy tell him which play to run.
Actually, Schuelke turns on and off not only the sound device in Rodgers' helmet, but also in the opposition quarterback's helmet and the helmet of the one defensive player on each team who also is allowed to hear a coach's orders remotely from the sideline or booth before a play.
He is what the National Football League calls the "coach-to-player" official or operator. He's been doing the job for more than 20 years.
"I even hate to call it a job, but you get paid for it," Schuelke said. "You take pride in doing it well. It's all part of this big production — the NFL. You want to do it well."
On a day-to-day basis, running a community bank is Schuelke's top priority and passion. Spring Bank is the last totally new bank to be opened in Wisconsin, or, as Schuelke says, it's the state's youngest bank. It was started by Schuelke and investors in 2008, just before the Great Recession erupted in earnest and started sucking the life out of the U.S. economy.
Even though the timing may appear very unfortunate, a brand-new bank had one big advantage over its competitors: It had no bad loans on its books. So instead of looking inward to try to clean up existing messes, as other banks were forced to do, Spring Bank was able to look outward and seek careful growth.
