How Minneota advanced to the 1A Prep Bowl<\/p>\n
Going up against three-time defending state champion Minneota and its 44-game win streak, Mahnomen\/Waubun gave the Vikings their best fight of the season in what turned out to be win No. 45, this time 28-14.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t see a lot of programs that have a 6-4, 220-pound quarterback who plays defensive end on top of it,\u201d said Minneota head coach Chad Johnston, referencing the Thunderbirds\u2019 Blake McMullen, who executed key plays on both sides of the ball for Mahnomen\/Waubun. \u201cThey did a nice job of not really letting us get to the outside, and we had to earn everything on the inside.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the fourth quarter, the Thunderbirds found some momentum as senior Brody Lhokta barreled into the endzone for the 2018 state champs\u2019 second score of the day with nine minutes to play. But Minneota showed off why its a three-time defending Prep Bowl champion, able to come up big when it counted most.<\/p>\n
The Minneota Vikings celebrate defeating the Springfield Tigers 70-20 in the 2024 Class 1A state football championship. (Ren\u00e9e Jones Schneider\/The Minnesota Star Tribune)<\/p>\n
Senior Easton Johnson came away with the game-sealing interception to shutter the Thunderbirds\u2019 chances at an improbable, but not impossible, comeback.<\/p>\n
Johnson, whose 7-yard touchdown run opened the scoring in the first quarter, hopes he can dust off Saturday\u2019s semifinal as fast as he and teammate\/Vikings\u2019 leading rusher Kellen Bradley run on the field. Tonight, he\u2019s performing as Jacob Bradley, along with a few other roles, in the Minneota drama department\u2019s performance of \u201cEbenezer Scrooge\u2019s Big Minneota Christmas Show.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe advantage of playing the early game, I don\u2019t have to rush back and get back, so I got some time to kill,\u201d Johnson said. On returning to the Vikings fifth consecutive Prep Bowl (they were runner-up in 2021, too): \u201cWe\u2019ve got such high standards as a community. Being able to go back there for the fifth time in a row feels pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How Minneota advanced to the 1A Prep Bowl Going up against three-time defending state champion Minneota and its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-287552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}