Sports

New-look Sioux moves forward

By Matthew Semisch

08/12/2014

As much as we might not want to admit it, some things really are irreplaceable.

High school football isn’t immune to this, and Westhope-Newburg-Glenburn (W-N-G) head coach Tom Nesvold is currently experiencing it first-hand.

The 2014 season won’t be Nesvold’s first – he’s entering his 18th – so he’s been around more than long enough to find workarounds for this problem.

Rarely, though, has he or any other coach in North Dakota had to make up for the loss of a talent like Hunter Braaten.

It’s so seldom that a coach inherits an athlete that plays as though his or her sport is a video game stuck on its easiest setting.

Braaten, a now former Sioux quarterback and strong safety, is one such specimen.

He’s redshirting for Minnesota State-Moorhead this fall before he becomes a freshman wide receiver for the Dragons in 2015. His terrorizing of W-N-G’s opponents on both sides of the ball ensured that he’d continue on after high school and play on Saturdays.

In leading the Sioux offense from under center, Braaten threw for more than 3,500 yards and ran for more than 4,300 in the last two seasons alone. Both of those campaigns ended with appearances in the state title game.

Defense helps to win games, too, and Braaten led W-N-G in tackles in his junior and senior seasons as a key piece of his team’s secondary.

Braaten was named North Dakota’s nine-man football senior of the year in 2013 and was a two-time all-state and four-time all-region selection. He was also named an all-state athlete earlier this year on the Sioux’s boys’ basketball and golf teams.

W-N-G’s football team didn’t lose only Braaten to graduation, though. Hunter Ballantyne, Ethan Miller and Hawkin Smette also exhausted their high school eligibility this spring.

Braaten isn’t the only key loss, and it’s with that wider perspective that Nesvold takes the approach that dwelling on the past doesn’t help his team move forward. Instead, he’s adjusting along with what he still has.

“We lost four seniors in all from last year’s team, and they were all pretty quality kids,” Nesvold said. “When you lose someone of Hunter Braaten’s caliber plus those other seniors, it becomes less a matter of replacing than it is adjusting with that you have coming back.”

What’s coming back this fall is a boatload of experience, and that’s down in part to W-N-G’s success over the past two seasons. In that time, the Sioux have played 26 games or nearly three years’ worth of games for teams that haven’t enjoyed playoff runs.

As for 2014, one of the biggest questions in Sioux fans’ minds regards who will take over for Braaten as W-N-G’s starting quarterback. That’s already been answered ahead of Wednesday’s first official team practice of the season, however, as junior Reese Schell has been chosen to take the reins.

“Reese backed Hunter up last year, but I’ve liked what I’ve seen from (Schell) in terms of what he’s able to do with the ball,” Nesvold said. “He’s a different type of quarterback to what with we had with Hunter and not quite as much of a runner, but that worked out last year when some of our older running backs got dinged up and Hunter’s running ability helped us out.

“Reese is a little bigger than Hunter and I like his arm, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens since Reese brings something different to the table.”

Schell also served as a linebacker for the Sioux in 2013 and could once again feature in W-N-G’s defensive backfield this year.

On offense, the Sioux may still have a formidable ground game. Junior running back Chase Conway is expected to be another of the team’s key so-called skill position pieces this season.

Many other players on the team do the brawnier work in the trenches along the line of scrimmage. Those offensive and defensive linemen, most of whom are young but not as inexperienced as they were a year ago, have Nesvold excited to see how they’ve developed.

“I thought going into last year that our lines might be a question mark as we didn’t have much experience there,” Nesvold said, “But we’ve got everyone back going into this year, and the experience they’ve built up together is going to help us.”

Injuries were big concerns for the Sioux last season, but the silver lining was that it allowed more players to pick up playing time and enhanced on-field experience.

“What’s going to be important for us is that we try and stay healthy,” Nesvold said. “We had a lot of kids dinged up almost from the start of last year, but the benefit of that was that so many kids ended up getting so much playing time.

“Injuries, even if it’s not such a huge problem that you have a lot of kids out, can bite into the depth you think you have, but we have a lot of young kids across the board that gained good experience last year, and that’s only going to help us become that much more well-rounded.”

This year’s Sioux team will look to improve upon its 10-3 record from last season. The third loss was a 54-6 setback in the Dakota Bowl nine-man state title game last November against Cavalier, thus spoiling W-N-G’s second bid in as many years for a first-ever state football championship.

W-N-G lost in the 2012 title game, falling 55-28 to Hazen.

Whether or not W-N-G can get back to that point again this season is yet to be seen. That said, as long as his team puts in the effort required, Nesvold believes there’s every chance the Sioux can once again be one of the last two nine-man teams in the state still playing.

“I always tell our kids that good things will happen if they work hard, and we’ve also got to be lucky in the playoffs, too,” Nesvold said. “That’s all come together for us the last couple years because near the end of the season is when we’ve been playing our best football, and that’s where we want to peak.

“The goal is what happens come the absolute end of the season, and that’s where we want to find ourselves again this year.”