A central Minnesota school returns to the state semifinals in football 36 years later

STAPLES, MINN. - The sign on the Spot Cafe door notes no one will be around Friday. They'll be down at the "Bank" watching their football team do something it hasn't done in well over three decades.

Play in the state semifinals.

The town liquor store and the Dairy Queen also sport signs congratulating the Staples-Motley Cardinals football team in this old rail town, where wheat and coal trains from the west used to split on their respective ways to the Twin Ports or the Twin Cities.

"Both of our communities are fired up because the team is doing so well," said Staples Mayor Ron Murray, retired from the hospital, as he sipped a coffee on a rainy day at the Stomping Grounds cafe across from the old opera house. "All season long, they've just packed the stadium."

When the fan bus and caravan winds southward on U.S. Hwy. 10 out of Staples (population 2,989) and Motley (680) in the woods of Todd and Morrison counties on Friday morning, there'll be some differences from the last time the football team made the trip to the play-in game to the Prep Bowl. Then, the game was at the "Dome." Then, it was also the first team to ever jointly represent Staples and Motley — two of the small Minnesota towns brought together in the 1980s by school and team consolidations. Now, the marriage is a little happier.

Bryan Winkels was on that team, which wound up losing to Lakeville, then just an upstart suburb buttressing cornfields, 35-28. Now Winkels is school board chair.

"Really, as kids, it didn't bother us as much as the adults in the room," he said, speaking to the consolidation pains. "The success of that '88 football team really brought those two communities together."

Between the late 1970s and the dawn of the 21st century, Minnesota lost about 25% of its schools as rural population shifts necessitated that smaller ones combine. Staples and Motley, once competitors, suddenly found themselves on the same sideline under bright lights. The districts consolidated formally in 1994.

Loyalties have since largely coalesced around the Cardinals. On Wednesday, a sign up for #56 "Luke" hung in the H&R Ten-Hi bar off the highway in Motley. A worker said the owner's relative is on the team. Two years ago, the team didn't win a game.

"It's an amazing story. But there's nothing magic about what's happened," said Staples-Motley Activities Director Josh Lee. "These kids have done the work. The coaches have done the work. This is a special group."

The football championships in Minnesota offer a much-sought-after ticket to playing in the palatial stadium that's also home to the Minnesota Vikings and Taylor Swift concerts, small programs coming from the mining and farming towns across rural Minnesota to compete.

In Nine-Player football, the team representing the LeRoy-Ostrander and Lyle-Pacelli districts reached the state semifinals in its first season with combined forces. In Kimball, south of St. Cloud, the team will play Friday morning, its first tournament appearance since 1991.

"Kimball is going to be a pretty quiet community Friday morning," said Superintendent Erik Widvey. After the game, players and students will return to Kimball to don costumes for the school's production of "The Music Man."

"As a small school, we have a lot of our athletes invested in [extracurriculars]," Widvey said.

Under the dimmed lights of coach Drew Potter's classroom, the three dozen football players of Staples-Motley — many of them sporting bleached hair in a show of solidarity — watched game tape on Wednesday afternoon. The coach, in his dark-framed glasses and Adidas shoes, peppered his speech with vintage Dad jokes, references to John Mellencamp and Drowning Pool lyrics, and a line from "Karate Kid."

But they listened as he spoke about assignments against Chatfield.

"Other towns have very good athletes, too," Potter said. "But we prepare. Right now, we're in the classroom."

In the corner, a collage of newspapers from the '88 season. In Potter's first year, the team didn't win a game. Last year, when they reached the playoffs, the local paper didn't put them on the front page. Now, Potter said, they're splashed all over it.

It's a recognition that the towns are behind them.

Poring over a copy of the Staples-Motley Athletic Hall of Fame annual, booster Mike Hajek notes the district's lineage runs deep, with legacies in cross-country, tennis and wrestling. The retired longtime Minnesota Twins broadcaster Dick Bremer, a graduate of Staples, hasn't even been inducted yet. But Superintendent Shane Tappe, whose son is on the team, noted this year's cumulative GPA of the volleyball team. The activities director noted the prowess of the speech team.

They also boast that the school board a couple of years ago removed activity fees, bringing down one barrier to participation in a part of the state where many family budgets can be tight.

"I had one student tell me, 'Mom said I had to choose one [activity],'" Winkels, the board president, said. "And I thought, 'Oh, my gosh.'"

Today, 83% of students at Staples-Motley participate in some extracurricular activity. School staffers said that when a child is on the team, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all show up in the bleachers on Friday nights. The only issue is making sure they don't run out of real butter for the popcorn.

Which shouldn't be a problem Friday when they'll all pile into cars and buses to drive down to the Cities, cloaked in Cardinals red, to fill seats in the cavernous U.S. Bank Stadium, bringing a bit of home with them.