DEVILS LAKE — Eric Nygaard once coached against Brent Luehring.
Nygaard coached baseball in Mayville for roughly 20 years. Luehring, a Tolna native, coached Legion ball in Nelson County from 2008 to 2017. Luehring recalls facing Nygaard during a Legion baseball game in 2014.
The two united over a decade later as coaches for the Devils Lake Storm.
Now, Nygaard is taking over the role Luehring once held.
“I’ve known Brent for a long time,” Nygaard said. “He was under a coach, too, Rick Christianson, that I think certainly taught him the fundamentals and having some expectations for the players.”
Following Luehring’s resignation after nine years as Devils Lake Firebirds baseball coach, Nygaard has been hired to take over the position. The news comes after Nygaard — otherwise known as “Skip” — helped coach the Storm to a Class A Legion state title this summer.
“I’m very excited and honored to have the opportunity to take over as the head coach,” Nygaard said. “And a lot of the players that I have back, played summer baseball. So that’ll be nice to have a connection with them. The B players, I didn’t have a lot of interaction with as a coach, but I kind of got to see them play in some games.”
Nygaard coached the Devils Lake B team in the summer of 2024. In 2025, he joined Jeff Carpenter and Luehring on the A team staff.
It turned out that Nygaard and Luehring share a lot in common.
“A lot of the stuff that Eric does is stuff that I do,” Luehring said. “And then a lot of the stuff was very familiar: the style of baseball we play, and kind of the stuff we preach.”
Coaching alongside Luehring, who’d spent the better of a decade as Firebirds head coach, Nygaard learned from him firsthand. Their relationship continued even after Luehring stepped down to coach 9U ball this summer.
“Brent is a student of the game,” Nygaard said. “So if we had any scouting reports, he would know where to go look. And a lot of times, before we even got on the bus, he would text us and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna see this kid, and he throws this fast, and throws a lot of strikes.’ … And I think the connection that we’ve had the past couple summers, I think we agree on a lot of the stuff.”
Luehring even stayed in communication with things like lineups and pitching decisions.
“I think we complemented each other,” Nygaard said. “He kind of had the pitchers and I had the catchers, so a lot of times we would sit next to each other and we’d kind of pick our brain about what kind of pitches we want in certain counts and what our philosophy was with pitching.”
As a trio in 2025, Luehring, Nygaard and Carpenter meshed well and shared a vision.
“I just think we were all on the same page,” Nygaard said. “The same concepts: the short game, the bunting, the bunt defense, the defense itself. I think we all shared kind of that same philosophy.”
Once Luehring left the Legion team, Nygaard’s role on the coaching staff became more significant, as he essentially replaced Luehring’s position. The state-champion Storm team was particularly robust with the bats, hitting 18 home runs with a collective .932 OPS in more than 1,200 plate appearances. Multiple players credited Nygaard for helping with their swings throughout the summer.
Luehring resigned from coaching the school team following the conclusion of the spring season. With Nygaard already coaching Devils Lake for Legion ball, he knew he wanted to take a larger role within the program.
“It was kind of in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a part of the program, I guess, as a head coach,” Nygaard said. “I really thought about it. I had some discussions with my family. And I just think it’s a good time to do it.”
Despite spending two decades in Mayville, with a stop in Cando, Nygaard has Devils Lake ties, being an alumnus himself from 1990. At the time, he said, Devils Lake didn’t even have high school baseball.
“So to get the opportunity to coach summer baseball, and now the spring, I’m very honored to be able to do it,” Nygaard said.
Nygaard accepted the position in the middle of the summer season. He never made an official announcement, per se, but the players found out anyway that he would be their coach next spring.
“I think they kind of found out through the grapevine,” Nygaard said. “And I had a few kids that came up and said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be the head high school coach,’ and I said, ‘Yep.’”
Nygaard is now officially going to be the skipper, or “skip,” of the Firebirds, which is fitting for a guy whose nickname is already “Skip.”
Nygaard said the nickname goes all the way back to high school.
“It just happened to come from, actually, one of the players’ uncle,” he said. “He was inside; I was outside. It was winter. And I must have looked pretty foolish once I was skating across the ice underneath the snow. And he had made a comment inside the house, and one of the kids had heard that, and it just kind of happened.”
The nickname stuck. The Firebirds now welcome Skip as their skipper.
Spring ball presents a new challenge from Legion. Devils Lake won the Class A state title this summer, conquering the middle of three classes, but spring ball is still split into two classes. In the spring, Devils Lake competes among the very best baseball competition in North Dakota, which includes players committed to schools like Texas A&M and Georgia Tech.
The Firebirds have never won a spring state championship. They haven’t been to a state tournament since 2010. But they have been competitive over the last three years, going 40-33 overall and 30-24 in Eastern Dakota Conference play in that span. They’ve made it to the state qualifier round twice in the last three seasons.
Having spent all those years in Mayville, Nygaard is used to coaching against Class B competition. The EDC is a new beast for him.
“It will be a challenge,” Nygaard said. “The big thing for me is I’ve never been a scoreboard person. … I know winning is important, but we’re gonna teach more of, ‘Let’s do the things right.’ And then the scoreboard will usually take care of itself.”
Some of the players who won a state Legion title this summer have also recently graduated from the Firebirds program. Next spring, Nygaard will have to figure out how to offset the loss of guys like Mason Palmer, Max Palmer and Taydon Triepke.
“We graduated quite a few talented seniors, and it’s gonna take a team effort in all aspects of the game,” Nygaard said. “But yeah, competing in the EDC is gonna be a challenge. We’ve just got to keep improving each day to be able to compete. And I always say we want to play our best baseball at the end of the year, so we’ve got to teach all of those components of the game to get to be competitive in the EDC tournament.”