For Stolski the journey started in 1962, fresh out of Macalester at age 22 and with no high school head coaching experience. He told a funny but true story about his first job in Kensington, Minnesota, a small town of only a few hundred people.
He drove a “junker car” to the interview in Kensington wearing a powder blue suit first worn in 1956 for his junior prom. He was married, had two kids, needed a job and preferred to start his football career as a head coach, not an assistant.
Nothing had ever prepared Stolski, the city kid, for what he experienced in Kensington. The first person he saw in the school building was dressed in a suit. Stolski assumed the guy was the superintendent, the man he was to interview with. No, the suit was worn by the janitor. Then this gentleman appears with patches all over his jeans and an extension cord coming out of his pants.
Meet the superintendent. The man who would hire Stolski had a heating pad attached to that extension cord and was soothing his hemorrhoids.
The superintendent asked him if he wanted to see the football field. “The grass was up to my armpit,” Stolski recalled. “He said, ‘We mow it in the fall.’ ”
The field didn’t look 100 yards long to the young coach. “We never measured it,” said the superintendent who Stolski now includes among the best leaders he’s ever known.
The Kensington football team hadn’t scored a touchdown ─ never mind won a game ─ in five years. The school played eight-man football and there were 21 kids in the senior class.
“I had never seen eight-man football,” Stolski said. “Three kids came to the first practice. There were no goal posts up.”
In his first season Kensington lost the first three games on the schedule. Then Kensington won 56-0 over Brandon, setting off a celebration that included tearing down the goal posts and free hamburgers at a diner.
Stolski went 3-5 the first year at Kensington, 7-1 the next. He moved on to Slayton for one season, to Princeton for six and Park Center for four where he started the football program and coached future Twins catcher Tim Laudner. Then Brainerd called and he liked the idea of pursuing not only his passion for football but also his recreational loves of hunting and fishing.