John's Journal: Coaches, Officials, Zero Week And Special Moments

A bomb-sniffing dog. A barefoot coach. Arby’s on the sideline. A very sweet Karen. Jump Around.

The first game of the 2024 high school football season in Minnesota took place Friday night at the Vikings’ TCO Performance Center stadium, a slick spot to kick things off.

Exactly 173 games are scheduled for Aug. 29 and 30 as the rest of the teams in the state get going. But Friday’s lone contest, between metro schools Breck and St. Anthony Village, was a reminder of what these Friday (and Thursday and Saturday) night lights provide. The big picture will tell us that St. Anthony Village defeated Breck 39-7, but as we know the scoreboard is only one small part of the big story in high school activities.

This was a Zero Week game, a concept that allows teams unable to fill an eight-game regular-season schedule to start practice a week early, play each other before the usual Week 1 games, then have a bye week later in the autumn. In some years there have been more than 20 Zero Week games in Minnesota, but this year there was just the one. It was the first Zero Week game for Breck and St. Anthony Village.

The Vikings are still putting the details together, but it appears that they may be hosting another half-dozen high school games at TCO this season, with the hopes of raising that number to 10 or 15 each year in the future.

Friday’s final score may have been impacted by the fact that the Huskies of St. Anthony Village went through the standard three weeks of preseason practice while the Breck Mustangs only prepared for two weeks. In addition, the Mustangs only had 18 kids in uniform, which added to the degree of difficulty they faced Friday.

The head coaches, Breck’s Marcus Harris and St. Anthony Village’s Ray Kidd, embraced on the field at the end of the game. Both are in their third year on the job, and their backgrounds are divergent. Harris, a graduate of Brooklyn Center, was an All-American wide receiver at Wyoming, where he was named the nation’s top wide receiver as the winner of the Fred Biletnikoff Award in 1996. Kidd, a graduate of St. Paul Arlington, played football at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and later played basketball at Augsburg University.

Buses carrying both teams arrived before 6 p.m., where a bomb-sniffing canine was led around the perimeter of each vehicle; the dog also smelled gear and humans as they came off the buses. TCO Performance Center, after all, is the home of the Vikings and you can’t be too careful. When I entered the stadium through a security entrance near the locker rooms, a familiar face smiled and said, “Oh, John’s Journal. My favorite guy.” It was a security guard named Karen, who has greeted me in such a warm way in previous visits to TCO. Thanks Karen.

At 6:32, as the teams warmed up on the field, I opened my backpack – which usually includes notebooks, pens and various other journalistic tools – and took out a bag from Arby’s. Standing at a table behind one of the benches, the turkey, bacon and ranch went down with a few swigs of Diet Mountain Dew. In the midst of this, a coach from St. Anthony Village walked up barefoot, grabbed the bottle of Dew and appeared for all the world to be ready to unscrew the cap and throw some down the gullet. A little flustered, I muttered something like, “Uh. Uh. Hold up a sec,” and Josh Merrick realized that the Diet Mountain Dew he brought was still in the bag he had stashed under the table. We had a laugh.

I have known football coaches who wear cleats on the sidelines but this was a first: An un-shoed coach, walking around under the threat of being stepped on by cleated kids. Just when you think you’ve seen everything …

After the coin toss, I introduced myself to referee Rolf Fiebiger and crew members Ben Lampron, Brian Koste, Pete Suggs and Max Korte. I took some Thank A Ref photos of the officials (posted on Threads, search for me at johnmilleamn). Rolf asked if I could text a photo to him, which I was more than happy to do immediately.

The next morning Rolf texted me with a note of thanks and for some highly unnecessary reason apologized for the delay in responding. He wrote, “I’ve been at scrimmages this morning.”

That note from Rolf says a lot about the dedication of officials and judges who are so important to high school athletics and activities in Minnesota. Imagine trying to hold these competitions without officials, or without coaches for that matter. In talking to Harris and Kidd, it was crystal clear to me how strongly they feel about the young people they impact. High school coaches are in the spotlight these days, especially with former coach (and Minnesota governor) Tim Walz stepping into the incredibly bright light of a national political campaign.

Shortly after Saturday’s text exchange with Rolf, I saw something on social media that was very special when talking committed, dedicated adults who help steer our children.

It was posted by Nik Speliopoulos of KTTC TV in Rochester. Nic conducted an interview with Kyle Riggott, who is beginning his third year as head football coach at Rochester John Marshall, where he is a special education teacher.

After some chatter about the team, about X’s and about O’s, with practice going on behind the coach, Nic asked this question, “You have a great privilege to shape so many malleable lives behind you. What does that mean to you, to not only coach football but be an impressionable force in these kids' lives?”

There’s no question that Kyle was not expecting such a question. His immediate response was pure emotion. He took a few seconds to gather himself and it was clear that tears were ready to flow.

“You got me, Nic,” he said before continuing with an answer that said everything.

“Coaching football is a calling for me. I feel good that I get to use my gifts every minute I'm out here, every minute I'm in there with the kids, with things like leadership council, we do community service, we do dinners, we just get together. We did a senior camp out in Whitewater, we took them in the wilderness, we got them alone, went up to Bemidji as a team. We did all these things. We get to do football, but to just like do life with these guys, it's special, 100 percent. And I underestimated the power of it when I took the job. You nailed it on the head, that it's a privilege to work with these guys every day, and to do it as a calling. It's awesome. It really is.”

You can see Nic’s post by clicking here:  https://x.com/nik_speli/status/1827203032154505248

And speaking of selfless people, last week I wrote about an amazing situation when a football coach donated a kidney to a colleague. If you missed it, click here: https://www.mshsl.org/about/news/johns-journal/johns-journal-coach-coach-life-saving-gift

Friday night in the St. Anthony Village locker room, shortly before the Huskies would take the field for introductions and kickoff, Kidd said to the team, “We’re not going through the motions, OK? We're here to represent St. Anthony in a high manner, right?”

With each question, the players responded with a loud, unified, “Yes sir!” or “No sir!”

“It's a great opportunity,” the coach said. “It's a great day for football. There's no backing down, the hay is in the barn. It's time to show, so show up, show out and have fun, right?”

Yes sir!

After one quarter it was a 7-7 game, with Huskies quarterback Dylan Held scoring on a 46-yard burst and Breck’s Benjie Sullivan throwing to Mu Muhammad for a 35-yard touchdown. At this point the big scoreboard identified the teams as “Vikings” and “Skol.” During the second quarter the actual team nicknames were posted … although there wasn’t enough room for the “s” on the end of Mustangs. No big deal.

The second quarter was all Huskies, or as the front of their jerseys proclaim, “VILLAGE.” Held scored on the ground by himself and through the air to Brett Siroin, Lincoln Urdahl ran for a short TD and Will Rehfuss returned an interception 39 yards for another six points to make it 33-7 at halftime.

In the Village locker room, Kidd was pleased but didn’t want anyone to let up.

“It’s good to get off to that fast start. … but we're tackling like terrible right now. Guys are kind of falling down. When we actually do our responsibility, (we get an) interception and return to the house. … The thing is, you’ve got to keep the energy up. No matter if you're up 100 or down 100 you’ve got to have fun. Love this thing, fly around, play ball.

“We're finishing everything, OK?” Yes sir! “We're not letting up. Our tempo is nice. Got it?” Yes sir!

The Huskies went to the bench in the second half, a luxury that Breck was not able to take advantage of. The only scoring was a 14-yard interception return for a score by Siroin.

Everyone in attendance enjoyed the atmosphere at TCO Stadium. Especially awesome was the music that was heard all night, including “Jump Around” at the end of the first quarter (even though the location was certainly not a House of Pain, much less an old stadium located somewhere in a state to the east).

Village brought a talented group of cheerleaders who did some of the classics, including “A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E! Be Aggressive! Be Be Aggressive!” It was glorious.

After the final whistle, the moods in the team huddles were different … as they are after every athletic event.

“It's easy when your scout team is a bunch of ninth-graders,” Harris said after speaking to the Mustangs. “You think you're having success moving the ball, looking really good. But when you're facing a physical team like that, you wake up quick. The bottom line is we just have 18 kids and it's going to be tough.”

On the other end of the field, Kidd was a happy coach.

Asked about Zero Week, he said, “I love it. We have to have more of it. It's a celebration of football. If it's TCO or anywhere else, this should be a celebration of football.”

Urdahl was one of three family members involved in the game for Village, or four if you count a guy who watched from the sideline. Troy Urdahl is St. Anthony Village’s activities director and baseball coach, and his sons Lincoln (senior) Calvin (sophomore) and Mason (ninth grade) all saw playing time Friday.

Lincoln is not only a three-sport athlete but a three-sport captain of his school’s football, hockey and baseball teams, which has father called “a pretty cool deal for him.”

“It's been really exciting to get to showcase our program, and it went just how we wanted it to go,” Lincoln said after the game. “We played great as a team. The O line did a good job, the defense played well, the offense was pushing the ball.

“I love playing sports and competing, so it's great to play with all kinds of different teams, and it's fun.”

Everything went mostly according to plan for the Huskies in the season opener. They have a veteran group of players and were well-prepared.

“There are always things that you could tweak,” Kidd said. “There's no such thing as a real perfect game, except for in baseball. But we got out here and it went great for us. Now it's about building on this.

“It's not about just championships and wins and losses, it’s about the experience.”

That’s it right there. It’s about the experience. Whether it’s officials who have a game Friday night and then work scrimmages the next morning, or coaches who spend time with teenagers that has little to do with their sport and much to do with building good people, it’s all about the experience.

Let’s have a great year.

--MSHSL senior content creator John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at [email protected] or [email protected]