Bison Game Day October 1 2022

PROBABLE STARTERS

DYNAMIC PLAYERS

Celebrating the nostalgic quest of NDSU’s two-sport athletes

By Jeff Kolpack The Forum Fargo

Somewhere along the way, around the time that Bill Clinton was president and the combination of a camera in a phone became a thing, the two-sport athlete at North Dakota State started to dry up like Lake Agassiz back in the day. On Friday, Marques Johnson was enshrined into the Bison Athletic Hall of Fame and along with that went a historic sort of induction.

He may possibly be among the last in a line of two-sport athletes at the school to be welcomed for more than one sport.

It’s the world of NCAA Division I athletics.

When NDSU hosts Youngstown State on Saturday in the 1 p.m. homecoming game at Gate City Bank Field at the Fargodome, Johnson will be introduced at halftime for all of his accomplishments.

Considering he did it in two sports, it may be the Cliffs Notes version.

Johnson may have been the guy at the microphone on Friday but he, Allen Burrell and Jared Essler; take a bow.

You were double the trouble for other schools.

Offseason conditioning programs, allowable hours coaches can have with their athletes in the off season and the continued emphasis on specialization are among the reasons.

“It’s becoming less

and less that you see multisport athletes,” said Hall of Fame Bison track and field coach Don Larson. “In this day and age in sports like football, what, you’re hired to be fired? Unfortunately it’s ‘just win, baby,’ but that’s our society. It’s about winning. We keep saying it’s just a game, but is it really?”

Johnson, Burrell and Essler were the quintessential prototype of two-sport athletes, starters in both football and track and field who were very good at both in the early 2000s. That’s as rare in Division I athletics these days as Bigfoot sightings.

At NDSU, there has been the occasional dabbling into another sport. Basketball player Dexter Werner threw the javelin. Michael Tveidt did the same sport combo in the high jump. But nobody did it to the level that Johnson, Essler and Burrell did. Johnson was recruited out of Milwaukee Vincent High School as more of a football player, redshirting in 2001. He had instant success his redshirt freshman year with 37 receptions in 2002, the last year Bob Babich was the head coach. When Craig Bohl was hired in 2003 and the athletic department started a five-year transition to Division I athletics, Bohl wasn’t hot on any of his players participating in football and track and field.

“It was a bit of tugof-war, things like that,” Larson said. “In Craig’s defense, he did sit down and had a meeting. They grew up doing multiple sports and just couldn’t live on 12 competitions a year. Craig graciously allowed them to do that.”

Larson had builtin comfort zones in the Division II years. Former head football coach Rocky Hager is the grandfather of his daughter Kelsey. Assistant football coaches Kevin Donnalley and Shane Hodenfield played football and ran track in college. If there was an MVP of two-sport athletes, look no farther than Arden Beachy, who in the early 1990s was the quarterback of the football team and did the decathlon in track.

Essler, whose wife Kinsey (Coles) Essler was also inducted into the Hall of Fame as a track sprinter, specifically remembers Babich coming to his home on a recruiting visit, saying when he was a football player at the University of Pittsburgh, all four members of a relay team were football players.

“That was his personal perspective and he loved that,” Essler said. “I was on board with that.”

But Babich left for the NFL after Essler’s third year at NDSU. Bohl, unlike Babich, didn’t have much of a mix of track kids with the football program at Nebraska, where he coached previously.

“We kind of butted heads, to be honest, right away,” Essler said. “There wasn’t a lot of joint trust between coach Larson and coach Bohl initially, but we worked it out and eventually came to some common ground. I credit coach Bohl for allowing us to finish what we were recruited on, the promises that were made and he honored that. Once he started to get his own guys in there, we saw that start to die off.”

Johnson said if he had to make a choice at that point in his career, he was going to choose track.

“He wasn’t used to two-sport athletes,” Johnson said of Bohl. “He was expecting me to be at spring practice because we were on a football scholarship. I think he realized that we weren’t just trying to get out of spring football and that we were actually excelling at track.”

Johnson, Essler, Burrell and Reece Vega excelled to the point that it took 18 years before their 1,600-meter relay record of 3 minutes, 7.75 seconds was broken last spring by the foursome of Adrian Harris, Jacob Levin, Jacob Rodin and Cody Roder, who took their speed all the way to the NCAA Division I Outdoor Championships.

Those four broke the record three times in a matter of a month with Vega as NDSU’s sprints and hurdles coach.

“Reece is doing a good job and those guys were

flying,” Essler said. “It was cool to see it happen.”

The two-sport experiment didn’t stop after college for Johnson, either. He played four years of professional indoor football, playing for the Omaha Beef of the United Indoor Football League in 2007. He spent 2008 with the Milwaukee Bonecrushers and the following two years with the Wisconsin Wolfpack. He was a firstteam all-league selection at wide receiver in 2010.

“Football is a little dangerous and I wasn’t making a ton of money doing this stuff,” Johnson said. “So the next thing was, you know, I can still do track. I can still move around.”

So it was onto the United States Track & Field Masters program, reaching the 100meter semifinals in the 2018 Worlds Masters Athletic Championships in Malaga, Spain, in

the men’s 35-39 age category.

A year later, in that same meet and age group, he ran the third leg in the winning 800-meter relay team in Torun, Poland. Individually, he finished eighth in the 60 meters. He is a 12-time United States Track & Field Masters All-American.

“The challenging part now is finding time to train,” Johnson said.

“Once you get to the world meets and even the USA meets, it’s pretty good competition. Some of the guys in my age group are still running under 11 seconds in the 100 and that’s very impressive for almost 40-year-old men. For me, it’s the challenge of seeing how fast I can still run at my age and just having fun.”

Readers can reach Forum reporter Jeff Kolpack at jkolpack@ forumcomm.com. Twitter @ KolpackInForum

Forum file photo

North Dakota State receiver Marques Johnson makes a catch against Montana Tech defensive back Adam Cotton, setting up a Bison touchdown in a 2004 game.