Former Gopher Mike Sherels said if the Vikings retain six or seven cornerbacks on their roster his brother and former U teammate Marcus will for sure make the team.   Marcus is also trying to win the punt returner job.

Gophers radio broadcasts on KFAN will include two voices heard when WCCO was broadcasting the games.  Mike Grimm, who last year was a studio host, will do the play-by-play.  Analyst Darrell Thompson, who used to work with Dave Lee and Dave Mona, will assist Grimm.  Justin Gaard will be the sideline reporter, Kevin Falness will host the pre-game show, and Corbu Stathes will host halftime and post-game shows and provide scoreboard updates.

Ex-major league catcher Chris Coste, a Fargo native, is playing for the Moorhead Brewers and hitting .283, according to the team website.

Former Gophers hockey coach Doug Woog is the 2011 recipient of the Minnesota Minute Men’s Courage Award. The award will be presented to Woog during a luncheon at Mancini’s Char House on September 9. The Courage Award has been presented by the Minute Men since 1979 to individuals for their outstanding service to the community.  Woog has more wins than any coach in Gophers history, with a 389-187-40 record.  He now trains athletes and is a Fox Sports North hockey analyst.

Phil Esten, head coach of men’s cross country at UW-La Crosse from 1970-1998, will be inducted into the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame in San Antonio on December 14.  His son Phil is a former Gophers associate athletics director and now heads the University of Minnesota’s Alumni Association.  The older Esten was named the NCAA Division III Coach of the Year in 1996 when he led UW-La Crosse to the NCAA Division III cross country national title.  His teams also finished second at the national meet eight times during his career.

Prep basketball authority Ken Lien emailed to report that Marcus Marshall (St. Paul Johnson) has officially committed to Missouri State.

Wonder if Dennis Rodman (inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame last week) is the first player ever enshrined who once wore a wedding dress?

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How could the memories not filter through Ron Stolski’s mind today?

The Brainerd High School football coach will pass out equipment to his 2011 team in preparation for Monday’s start of conditioning drills.  Today is also Stolski’s 72^nd birthday and the start of his 50^th season coaching high school football.

The self-described “Polack” from north Minneapolis has won 330 games, more than any Minnesota prep coach ever.  Someone might guess that he would smother his players with ego, praising his own accomplishments.  But that’s not Stolski.

What Stolski will emphasize with this year’s players is something he’s been asking his teams for awhile now: “What will you settle for? How will you be remembered?”

He will tell them to accept only a “best effort, and the score will take care of it self.”  With his teams, that’s usually a winning result.

Three of the last four years the Warriors have made it to the semi-finals of 5A, the big school class usually dominated by suburban or city behemoths like Eden Prairie, Wayzata and Cretin-Derham Hall.  Brainerd, a school that sits in the lake country of central Minnesota, even beat mighty Eden Prairie with a 93-yard drive last year in the playoffs.

The Warriors finished 11-1 and Stolski’s record sat at 330-148-5.  He’s still looking for that first state title after 49 seasons, but whether he wins one or not, the victories are sure to pile up for awhile longer.

What do the record and all those wins mean to him?  “It means I’ve been coaching for a long time,” he said. “That’s all it means to me, to be very honest.  We tried hard and learned a lot along the way.  Good staff and people.”

Stolski never expected to win so many games.  “The thing I am proud of is the 330 has been accomplished at five different schools,” he said.  “You look at most other (win) leaders and it’s been at one or two schools.”

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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.

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