Photo courtesy of Jeremiason Photography Minneota head coach Chad Johnston stands on the sideline at U.S. Bank Stadium during the Class A championship.

The Minneota football team put forth another dominant season in 2023. The Vikings went undefeated en route to their ninth state championship and only two of their opponents had come within 42 points of them as they headed into this year’s Class A state title game. Coaching this year’s state championship team and earning his sixth title as a head coach was Chad Johnston, the 2023 Independent Coach of the Year.

Coming off a state championship from last season, Johnston said he felt that this group knew it had enough returning talent to make a run at it again. Between the fact that most of the line was returning, they were bringing back a deep running back room, some quality pass-catchers in Max Rost and Sawyer DeSmet, and an always deep defensive front seven.

While the talent was there from the start, Johnston said the goal before the season was just to be playing their best football come tournament time. A big part of the team’s ability to hit its stride at the right time starts the year before. When a team runs away with games the way the Vikigns did, they often have the opportunity to try some things with their lineup. Throughout the season, Minneota would have leads in which it can put in its second- and third-stringers. At home games, they sometimes have an opportunity to put in the junior varsity and freshmen players. As a result, the team was full of players with varsity experience before they were even officially varsity players.

“It’s something that we kind of pride ourselves on a little bit. We kind of joked about it, we’ve got to be like the only team at the state tournament that really the kickoff team is predominantly sophomores,” Johnston said. “We’ve got a bunch of sophomores running around on a kickoff team versus juniors and seniors and a lot of starters out there. We feel like one, it’s a good chance for us to get guys off the field and two, it’s a good way to get our younger guys out on the field to get experience. That’s just our philosophy is trying to get a lot of kids in.”

In addition to the fact that it helps develop young talent, Johnston added that it’s also a way to minimize the impact of the injuries that are unfortunately a part of the game.

One of the areas in which the Vikings depth did come in handy was its offensive line. Hudson Scholten graduated after last season and Eli Gruenes got injured mid-season this year. Still, it continued to be next-man-up for Minneota. Kyson Arndt, a 6-foot-4 sophomore, was a natural as he stepped into his new role.

“He broke his leg last year and we were expecting big things from him last year as a freshman. Obviously he got hurt in a JV game so we never got a chance to see him, but he was just a natural fill-in and it just took him a little bit of time to get used to that spot and that role,” Johnston said. “When Eli went down, we had been rotating Noah Gorecki at that tackle spot. Again, we were rotating, we wanted to be at least three-deep at every position. Three-deep at tackle, three-deep at guard, and two-deep at center. We did that all year long so when it was time to replace Eli… it was just a simple transition.”

While Johnston has been curating a winning culture in Minneota for years now, it goes deeper than that. While he said the team is fortunate to be state champions, that doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone.

“We had freshmen who didn’t go to the state tournament. We had seniors who barely played in the state tournament. So to say you’re state champions is a great privilege, but it doesn’t always mean the same thing to everybody,” Johnston said.

The way that the team looks to manage these different roles, Johnston said, is by making it a family. By the end of the season, he said the team was breaking out of huddles by saying “Family” because they had embraced that culture so much.

“We just try to take the time to emphasize the importance of teammates. The importance of what happens when you have classmates that are struggling academically or have got things going on outside of the arena that are affecting their daily work,” Johnston said. “We try to emphasize the importance of making everyone feel important. We feel fortunate that at the end of the year, our freshmen are given the opportunity to walk away or keep coming to practice, even if they’re not on the travel squad, and most of them keep coming. I think that’s just something that we have embodied as a program and our kids accept it as just the way we are.”