Photo by Jake McNeill: Minneota's Brock Fier (35), Tristen Sussner (5) and Adam DeVlaeminck (32) walk off US Bank Field with the Class A state championship trophy after defeating Breckenridge for their fourth consecutive state championship on Nov. 21 in Minneapolis.

MINNEOTA — Over the course of the last decade, the Minneota football team has faced as high of expectations as perhaps any team in the state. That was especially true entering its 2025 campaign, with the Vikings entering the year on the back of four consecutive Prep Bowl appearances and three consecutive state titles. Still, Minneota rose to the occasion once again, putting together its third consecutive undefeated season to become the first 11-player team to four-peat as state champions.

“As freshmen, we didn’t really do much. I mean, a little bit of special teams, but I think as sophomores, we really started to realize that we can do something special,” lineman Kyson Arndt said. “We worked hard and hit the weight room in the offseason, we can potentially get a four-peat.”

Capping the season off with a state title was historic beyond just the recent success. The win tied Minneota with Caledonia and Eden Prairie for the most state football championships at 11, and it extended their winning streak to 46 consecutive games.

The still-active win streak marks just the seventh time in state history that a team has won more than 40 consecutive games, currently slotting them in sixth. They’ll head into next season one win shy of fifth-place Grand Meadow, and two wins shy of tying the Minneota record of 48, set from 1986 to 1989.

“We’d get asked a lot about the win streak, and my answer has always been, ‘I don’t even know what the number is,'” running back Kellen Bradley said. “Each game was, we don’t care, we’re just going to win. But it’s special to not only be a part of this four-peat, but also a win streak like that. It’s just monumental.”

Heading into the season, the Vikings had lost some key pieces. Ryan Meagher graduated after setting the program rushing record, along with tying the Prep Bowl rushing touchdown record as a junior and breaking it as a senior. They also lost quarterback Brody Larson, other key parts of the run game in Destin Fier and Lucas Rybinski, defensive leaders such as Eli Gruenes and Parker Bradley, and a number of other major contributors on both sides of the trenches.

The Vikings were confident that they’d be able to return to the state tournament heading into the season, but felt that they still had work to do in order to claim another state title, head coach Chad Johnston said after the state championship.

“As the season progressed and games went on, we kind of felt like we had the potential to do this again. Sometimes, some teams, some kids make it look easy. This isn’t. I’m extremely proud of this group,” coach Johnston said. “[The players] talked about brotherhood and family and team, and it’s probably been one of the tightest groups that we’ve had as a coaching staff.”

Still, Minneota had the next-man-up mentality. The rising seniors looked at the class before them as great leaders and asked themselves how they could fill those spots, tight end Brock Fier said, and felt that this year’s group’s belief in itself grew as the season progressed and they found their roles and rhythm.

“I think the strength of our bond definitely grew over the course of the season,” defensive back Easton Johnston said, adding that there were plenty of new faces joining the team at the beginning of the year in camp, but they got closer as the season progressed. “Whenever we broke huddles, it was always, ‘Brothers’ or ‘Family on three’ and whatnot, so I think the bond of our team helped us go all the way.”

Bradley added that he felt like the seniors tried to provide leadership to the underclassmen by encouraging them to come to lifts over the offseason and encouraging players to hold each other accountable so that they could more easily assimilate to increased roles this season.

In the run game, Bradley led the team’s backfield behind another strong cast of linemen and change-of-pace backs. He finished the year with a total of 1,526 yards and 25 touchdowns on the ground, averaging 8.5 yards per carry, while Easton Johnston added another 10 touchdowns and 284 yards on 35 attempts and Lacek logged 361 yards on 37 attempts.

Down in the trenches, Arndt and Hunter Carstensen were both named to the Independent’s All-Area first team for their ability to create gaps for the backs behind them, while Dalton Orvis was also an honorable mention. Arndt will be playing college football for Augustana (S.D.) next year.

The team’s success on the ground was in part due to the players’ freedom to change plays and adjust from the line of scrimmage, Arndt said, adding that offensive coordinator Matt Myrvik calls the plays but still trusts the players to audible at the line of scrimmage based on what they’re seeing on the field.

In the passing game, Tristen Sussner stepped up nicely into the quarterback role. After attempting a total of 10 passes as a sophomore, Sussner threw the ball 147 times for 1,620 yards and 25 touchdowns on nine interceptions in his first season as the starter. He also started to show off his mobility in the postseason, accumulating five of his eight touchdowns in the state tournament and seven of the eight after the end of the regular season, finishing the year with 188 rushing yards.

“Right away, we didn’t run the ball much as a quarterback, but during the playoffs it was do or die, so I figured, why not?” Sussner said. “It just worked, so we stuck to it.”

Over the last few seasons, the Vikings rolled right over everyone. Minneota’s average margin of victory on the first of their four consecutive state title runs was 26.5 points per game, followed by 41.9 points in 2023 and 49.5 points last season. As such, it had been a while since the Vikings were tested.

They got that first taste of adversity early on, when they hosted eventual Class 2A runners-up Eden Valley-Watkins in week 2. Minneota fell behind 12-7 at the end of the first quarter and 18-7 to start the second, before a late Bradley run cut the deficit to 3 points at halftime.

“We had a lot of mistakes, it was kind of an ugly game,” Brock Fier said. “They’re a good double-A school and we knew it was going to be a challenge. We go down a couple of scores right away, so I’m talking to guys like, ‘We’re still in this, we’ve just got to figure it out.”

Bradley gave the Vikings the lead with a touchdown early in the third quarter, and Fier caught a 65-yard touchdown to answer an Eden Valley touchdown later in the frame and enter the fourth with the lead. Eden Valley got the tying touchdown to start the fourth, but Bradley again came up with the winning touchdown and allowed Minneota to salt away the clock after getting a defensive stop.

“Our motto is bend, don’t break. We can make mistakes, but short-term memory, just forget about it and play football,” Arndt said of the game.

Bradley added that the Vikings knew Eden Valley was a strong team, so being able to come back against a program like that showed the players their potential.

“That really set the bar pretty high for us,” Minneota linebacker Adam DeVlaeminck said. “Trailing with that deficit against Eden Valley and coming back and winning, that showed us that we can go back, get a four-peat and make history.”

The Vikings won their next three games against Canby, Lakeview and MACCRAY by a combined score of 186-0. The Vikings didn’t allow more than 6 points to an opponent until the section championship, in which it defeated Dawson-Boyd 42-16, and the only deficit it faced before the state championship was a 3-0 deficit to Dawson-Boyd in the regular season. The Vikings went on to win that game 34-3.

Over the course of the season, Fier said that he felt the team improved as it got accustomed to playing large roles on both sides of the field and built up the conditioning needed to play both ways.

Defensively, a strong pass rush and an ability to stop the run have been the Vikings’ calling card for years. That remained the case this year, with Fier and Arndt logging 11 tackles for loss each and seven and six sacks, respectively. Sophomore Randy Sorensen also had a breakout season, logging a team-leading 92 tackles with five sacks to be the only non-senior on the Independent’s All-Area first team, and Minneota as a whole finished with 32 sacks and limited its opponents to 65 rushing yards per game.

One of the revelations for the team this year was its secondary’s ability to capitalize on that pass rush to make impact plays. The Vikings made eight interceptions in the first of their four consecutive state titles, and 12 and 23 the next two seasons, but exploded this year with 29 interceptions, something Easton Johnston attributed to the players and coaches picking each other up.

“There were many times where you’d have this big busted play, and coach would tell us that things like that are going to happen,” Easton Johnston said of the team’s secondary success. “They make big plays, they’re going to catch balls, they’re going to run up the field, you’ve just got to be ready for stuff like that. Even if it’s a big play that brings you down, you’ve got to stay to together.”

“We had such a dominant D-line. If you look at our d-ends, one’s going off to play DII [Division II] ball, one probably could if he wanted to, it just helps a lot,” Lacek added. “And our D-tackles. We had a lot of different kids who subbed in and out. We had Brock, who was normally a linebacker, slide in, gave us speed… we ran a lot of different combinations in our zone coverages, we ran a lot of combo, which [head coach Chad Johnston] had never run before, and he put a lot of trust in us in the secondary to make those calls and changes on the fly.”

Once in the state tournament, the Vikings continued to bulldoze their way through the competition with a 42-6 win over Lester Prairie and a 28-14 win over Mahnomen/Waubun a week later, led by 143 rushing yards from Bradley and a pair of rushing touchdowns from Sussner.

The Vikings got punched in the mouth for the first time since week 2 when they took on Breckenridge in the state championship. Minneota turned the ball over on two of its first three plays, trailing 7-0 after the first quarter, but tied the game on a Sussner QB keeper to start the second quarter and followed up with a 44-yard double-reverse flea flicker from Sussner to Landon Esping to take the lead.

“When I messed up during the Dawson-Boyd game… I kind of let up a big play and let up a touchdown. But Brock came over and he kind of yelled at me and said, ‘You’re fine. You’re fine,'” Lacek said after the game. “When Brock had that little drop and fumbled it [on our first play, I said], ‘Hey Brock, you’re fine. You’ve been telling me all year long that we’re fine.’ It’s kind of just leaning on each other.”

“It’s just about trusting in your teammates and knowing that if you do your job right, good things will happen,” Sussner added.

The Vikings went on to lead 21-7 at halftime and scored 49 unanswered points en route to a 49-14 win. Bradley and Lacek ran for 89 and 81 yards, respectively, with a pair of touchdowns for Bradley in the win, while Sussner ran for three touchdowns and passed for 112 yards with a touchdown and an interception.

“It feels great, but also kind of weird because we’ve never known what losing is,” Lacek said with a laugh after the game. “It just feels kind of normal. Which feels wrong. I’m just kind of ready to be done.”

The Vikings graduated another strong core of seniors after the season, including Arndt, Bradley, Fier, Easton Johnston, DeVlaeminck, Lacek, Carstensen, Orvis, Easton Sheik, Thomas DeSmet and Caleb Bottelberghe. Still, the senior class that didn’t know what a loss felt like did its part to lay the groundwork for the team to continue to succeed after they’re gone.

“[I’d tell the younger players] don’t take anything for granted,” Easton Johnston said. “When I was a freshman coming in, it was like, ‘I’ve got so long to play, it’s going to be forever until I’m a senior.’ I’m here now, and it all just kind of flew by. Getting to the bank [US Bank Stadium] five years in a row is impressive, but you can never take something like that for granted. You never know if it’s ever going to happen again. You never know if an injury is going to come by and get you.”

“All the offseason stuff, it sucks, but you’ve got to enjoy the suck and endure the suck so that you can enjoy the fun stuff,” Lacek added. “It makes it a lot more fun when you sweat through how many winter offseasons and summer offseasons, deal with the coaches yelling at you, and then you get to end your senior year and go out on top.”