Aug. 20—VALLEY CITY — Valley City has a Division 1 prospect on their roster — and he's only a junior.
"Owen (Hunt) was offered by UND (University of North Dakota) this summer and has had a number of schools from all around the country to get his height and weight and see where he is at," Valley City head coach Chad Smith. "He's 6-foot-5, 300 pounds — I've coached for 15 years and he's got the build. He played really well for us as a sophomore, but he was young and young makes silly plays sometimes. We're excited to see him step up and improve that level of play even more."
Hunt and the Hi-Liners began practices on Aug. 6. The team will see its first competition of the year on Aug. 21 when they take on Velva/Drake-Anamoose.
"We graduated a ton of size," Smith said. "Losing Trey McPartland to NDSU (North Dakota State University) and Jack Dieterle — a 6-foot-7, 240-pound kid — we're going to miss those guys, but we're excited about it.
"We've got a ton of young kids who we'll have to start sorting through in fall camp to figure out who is going to be wearing what for us," he said. "We had 12 seniors graduate, and there is 11 guys on the field at one time. Almost every starting spot is open, so we'd better have competition right away, and we'll figure out who the best 11 guys to play on both sides of the ball will be."
Smith will be entering his second year as the Hi-Liners head coach.
"Our seniors who just graduated went through three different head coaches, but these younger kids have only heard my voice or my assistant coaches' voices," Smith said. "The nice part about that is that we don't have to start over. We can just go in our drills and work out our fundamentals the way we've trained them to. We don't have to break a ton of bad habits. We can just continue to grow and learn from our mistakes."
At the end of July, Smith said the Hi-Liners were expecting 38 to 40 kids to commit to football for the year. While there are only two seniors on the roster, the incoming freshman class could be as deep as 15. Smith also said he is expecting nine kids from Barnes County North to join the team.
"(Barnes County North) had an emergency co-op with us last year, and that happened in July, so we had two kids playing with us, but they weren't able to play varsity, but now since we are an established co-op, they can all play with us," Smith said.
Brady Broten is a sophomore coming out of BCN.
"I am really excited about where he is going to be as a sophomore," Smith said. "He has grown over the summer, he's been at every single workout and everything for summer this year. I think it's been an incredible springboard for him and we'll see him playing a lot for us this year."
Layne Jorissen is another athlete from Barnes County who is looking to establish himself at the running back and linebacker positions.
"Those two kids brought a lot to our program at the JV level so hopefully they can mature into our varsity team," Smith said.
The kids from Valley are looking to make their hometown proud too.
Hudson Kriewald will be lining up as the starting signal caller for the Hi-Liners.
"Unfortunately last year, he got thrown into the action right away because our starting quarterback broke his collarbone against Velva on the second-to-last play of the game," Smith said.
"Hudson had to step up and join our program right away and he had joined late — only had two weeks of practice before he had to step in and play. He did that over the season so that was encouraging, but now he'll be in full-on command of everything, and we'll see where he can take this offense."
Kriewald will be surrounded by athletes like Andrew Sykora.
"I think Andrew is going to have a really, really good year for us," Smith said. "He's the glue that holds our defense together. He makes the defensive calls, makes the checks and is the physical strong safety who gets down in the box as a linebacker at times."
Smith, who spent some time coaching at NDSU, said Sykora shares similarities to Cole Wisniewski, the former Bison and Texas Tech safety who was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in the seventh round of the 2026 NFL draft.
"I see the same characteristics in Andrew where he is a physical football player and he is going to grow and mature in that spot," Smith said.
"With Andrew and Hunter (Undem) as our only seniors, we're going to be super young, but that's OK," he said. "It'll be a great test, and I think we'll have a great year."
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