Brody Weisenburger (right)/Photo courtesy of New Rockford Transcript
With the dust settled after New Rockford-Sheyenne/Maddock’s 2024 nine-man state championship, it really can’t be emphasized enough how dominant this team was.
Receiver Easton Benz said it himself after Friday’s championship win: This will go down as one of the best teams in nine-man football history. And he was right.
A team wins the championship every year. But very few have done so in as commanding a fashion as this year’s Rockets did. In their perfect 12-0 season, they scored 727 points and allowed 130. The only nine-man champion, going back to 1975, to score more points in a season was the 2014 Cavalier Tornadoes, who put up 754. Cavalier, which won back-to-back titles in 2013 and ‘14, limited opponents to an absurd 44 and 52 points in each of those years, respectively.
But that’s about it. Most championship teams don’t even reach 600 points in a full season, let alone 700. The ‘14 Tornadoes are the only team besides this year’s Rockets to reach the 700-point plateau.
Look at the way NR-S/M reached these marks, too. The Rockets never won a game by fewer than 30 points, which means they had a running clock at some point in every contest. That includes the semifinal and championship games against fellow powerhouses. In the regular season, they never allowed more than 14 points in a game, combining to allow just 50 altogether. And, in all reality, a lot of those points came in “garbage time,” with a running clock and many of the starters resting. That’s not an excuse, but rather just another point to emphasize how thoroughly talented this team was.
Even with the postseason included, NR-S/M never allowed more than 28 points in a game. It also never scored fewer than 44.
This year’s nine-man runner-up, LaMoure-Litchville/Marion, came into the championship with 665 points scored — the exact same, at the time, as the Rockets’ total. But even the Loboes allowed 42 points in their penultimate game of the regular season, a territory that was simply unheard of for this year’s Rockets team.
Even going into that final game, NR-S/M still had its doubters. L-L/M was technically the higher seed, and chatter around the media section was leaning towards the Loboes. There was a lot of buzz around the explosive ground game of Gunner Thielges.
But in my head at the time, despite not being very familiar with the Loboes’ roster, I had my doubts that the Rockets were really going to lose to L-L/M. That’s because all the focus was on one player — albeit, one really great player.
That’s the thing about this year’s Rockets: They didn’t just have one player carrying them. Yes, NR-S/M also had a beast of a running back in Carter Engebretson, but he was never somebody they relied solely on. Easton Benz, Kage Walford and Bennett Meier could all come up with a big play at any time. If one of them had an off-game, it usually didn’t matter because somebody else would have a huge performance. Case in point: Walford had a huge game in the semifinal, then went mostly quiet in the final. But Benz came up extra big in the championship game.
Easton Simon, the junior quarterback, was almost unfathomably great all year. Lots of high school teams in North Dakota tend to go very heavy on the running game, since not all quarterbacks at this level are reliable enough in passing unless there’s an obvious opening. But when Engebretson wasn’t forcing his way through a pile, Simon showed a remarkable ability to unleash 30, 40, 50-yard type passes down the field — with perfect precision. Even with a defender on the coverage.
That’s not even to mention the offensive line, led by Brody Weisenburger, that constantly created openings for Engebretson — or the defensive line, with Engebretson showing two-way prowess on that side of the ball as well. Nor is it to bring up the Rockets’ sharp instincts that led to numerous pick-sixes.
It was this well-roundedness and versatility in all aspects of the game that won the Rockets a championship.
While the Loboes’ defense was mostly great all year, this array of Rocket weapons was ultimately too much for them to handle. NR-S/M’s defense wasn’t able to completely stop Thielges; he still put up more than 200 yards in the championship. But it was obvious that the Loboes were relying on him as a playmaker, and while he obviously wasn’t their only good player, they just weren’t as deep as the Rockets overall. NR-S/M limited without entirely stopping Thielges, while Simon, Engebretson, Benz and Meier put on a show for the Rockets.
You could see the emotion all over Engebretson’s face. These players knew they’d accomplished something special. The Rockets, who have taken their success humbly, finally got the celebration they’ve been working for all season. Head coach Elliott Belquist noted the commitment these kids put in, working hard all year as opposed to just showing up.
And it finally paid off.
In one of the best seasons for any team in the history of nine-man football in North Dakota.
