Totino-Grace running back Marquel Keten was asked after the Eagles’ Class 4A semifinal win last week over Orono if he was a part of the program’s 1-7 season a few years back.

Eagles coach Jay Anderson had to jump in to offer a correction to the reporter’s query.

“It was 1-8,” Anderson said.

And it wasn’t just one season. It was two.

The Eagles endured single-win season in 2021 and 2022. Two years later, they’ll play for a Class 4A state championship against Becker at 1 p.m. Friday at U.S. Bank Stadium. The Eagles are back where they feel they should be.

“All of us, when we came here, we knew about the history and the reputation that the program has, so it just means a lot for us to kind of get back to what we think TG Eagle football is,” Totino-Grace senior quarterback Jake Person said. “Obviously, it’s been a couple of years of rebuilding to get back up to that, but we knew we had a special group of guys … so it feels really great to get back to the way we feel TG football should be playing.”

It’s worth noting those past struggles occurred when the Eagles were playing in the Gold Division of Class 6A, against the best of the state’s biggest schools. Anderson noted Totino-Grace was “fortunate enough to really have some special teams when we were competing in 6A way back when.” The Eagles won the Class 6A championship in 2016, their last state title.

But so much has to go right for any program to compete at that level, let alone smaller schools trying to punch above their weight class. By 2022, the Eagles faced growing concerns about their lack of numbers. Depth can quickly become an issue.

A game that still sticks out to Anderson was a loss to Minnetonka in 2022 in which the Eagles lost six starters to injury. They were losing the war of attrition. Suddenly, younger kids were thrust into less-than-ideal situations. Little good comes out of those scenarios.

“It was a huge impact on a lot of other kids,” Anderson said. “It’s kind of a ripple effect.”

The coach noted the program was in need of “a reset.” One of the buttons pressed was to move back down to Class 4A, which would allow the Eagles to rebuild without being under the constant strain of a numbers disadvantage.

“For us, it was the right decision at that point and time, just to start that process over again,” Anderson said.

But the reclassification in itself wasn’t a solution. Real change needed to occur. Anderson said the COVID-era scraped the Eagles’ culture clean because the younger players didn’t get to see the work the upperclassmen put in on a daily basis in the weight room.

The Eagles reanalyzed everything.

“We took a huge look at, even in our offseason training, what lifts were we doing?” Anderson said. “What were we doing to establish a great work ethic and strength gains and those types of things. We even revamped our workout program.”

But how quickly those changes take hold largely depends on the players. Luckily for Totino-Grace, a group of the current seniors stepped up.

“(They) were just a catalyst of ‘We’re going to be in there every day. We’re going to have 100 percent attendance,’” Anderson said. “I was in there with them, along with our weight-training guy. Just accountability with their teammates and getting other guys in. It really was the leadership of our seniors that has been building over the past couple of years, and then that cultural piece of, ‘No, this is the expectation every week.’ I kind of credit them, very honestly, with a lot of leadership and a lot of desire.”

A year into the “reset,” the Eagles were in the state tournament quarterfinals. They lost three games that year, all to Orono and Hutchinson. At that point, both teams were simply bigger and stronger than them. Another year later, Totino-Grace is in the title game. But the process is still ongoing.

“We’re still building,” Anderson said. “We’re still trying to instill in these guys.”

The culture isn’t based on the wins. It’s about putting in hard work and sticking to a process.

But Anderson couldn’t deny that success is a positive. The Eagles are experiencing a spike in numbers, particularly at the freshman level.

“Winning culture kind of breeds winning culture,” Anderson said. “The wins do help, but at the same time, it is teaching the little things and what does it take to actually get there. I think that’s the most important thing.

“When we were talking about this, even a couple of years ago, it wasn’t the wins and the losses. It was doing the little things right. Programmatically, throughout our whole program, we’ve been preaching doing the little things right.”

And the success has followed.

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