By Robert Williams

Editor

A chance meeting got social studies instructor Brad Morgan’s teaching career started in Texas and he missed out on his first chance at a job in Frazee by mere days, but his path finally returned a dozen years ago and on April 11, he received the high school’s Teacher of the Year award for the second time. 

Morgan graduated from Battle Lake High School in 1988 and went to the North Dakota State College of Science (NDSCS) where he also wrestled. He completed his education at North Dakota State University where he continued his wrestling career under Bison Hall of Fame head coach Bucky Maughan. 

NDSU was still competing in Division II at that time and at the program’s heights.

“I was basically a role player; they would put me in if somebody was hurt or if they were going to change the lineup,” Morgan said. 

Mordan had his hands full at practice alone battling an All-American at 142-pounds, a national runners-up at 150 and 158.

“It was tough to squeeze in there,” he said. “You definitely got better because there was nobody easy to practice with. It was great times and still some of the best friends of my life are from that period.”

After graduating from NDSU, a wrestling coaching position was the least of Morgan’s worries, while seeking a teaching job as the market was flooded with applicants.

“It didn’t matter at all,” he said. “In social studies you had about 200 applicants for a job.”

That obviously made finding a job more or less a crapshoot.

“I actually kind of gave up, working concrete in Fargo,” he said. “I had just kind of resigned myself to not getting a teaching job.”

That’s when a little good luck came his way and wrestling helped create that good fortune.

Morgan was living in the basement of the NDSU assistant wrestling coach’s home, who was having a beer at the Bison Turf one day and happened to run into the athletic director from Oak Ridge High School in Conroe, Texas, Pat Simmers, who was in Fargo running a football camp.

“He was the head coach down there and had three boys that were wrestlers and needed a wrestling coach,” Morgan said. “A week later he called me and said you’ve got to be down here in three days.”

Conroe is a northern suburb of Houston where Morgan coached two years before returning north to be with his wife-to-be Sarah. 

Sarah is from Vining. She went to high school at Parkers Prairie and her path crossed Brad’s at a party after she had just graduated from high school and Brad was a sophomore in college with a girlfriend at the time.

“We just kind of knew each other and then my girlfriend and I had broken up and there it was,” Brad laughed.

Brad’s brother Mike took over the Oak Ridge program and continues to coach there to this day. An even stranger tangent is Simmers, the athletic director that hired him in Texas, is now a Lake Lida resident and a customer of Brad’s lawn service company.

“I mow his lawn,” Morgan laughed. “His three boys ended up playing football at NDSU.”

Upon returning from Texas, Morgan coached wrestling at Concordia College in Moorhead under Doug Perry for a year.

That led to a stint at Wadena-Deer Creek High School and then a decade at Dover-Eyota near Rochester, before taking his current position in Frazee, where he’s been the past 12 years.

Morgan had previously been a long-term substitute for Parker Williams in the district.

“I just loved it here,” he said. “When I left here I was…I really liked this place.”

Williams announced his retirement and Morgan applied to be his replacement and had also applied at Dover-Eyota.

“I was going to take this, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it so I applied at Dover-Eyota,” Morgan said.

Dover-Eyota needed a wrestling coach too and offered Morgan the job right away with a quick deadline on his answer. 

“They wanted to know right now,” he said.

He got three days to discuss it with Sarah, but the Frazee interviews were not happening in that time span which led Morgan to take the position down south. 

  “I took it, which worked out perfectly because that’s when (Jason) Reierson got hired here,” he said. 

Over the decade at Dover-Eyota, the Morgans kept an eye out for openings in the area.

“We always knew we were going to move back here eventually,” said Morgan. “I don’t even know why I looked, but I just happened to look at the job postings and I saw Frazee had a teaching opening and a cross country opening and that’s when both my girls were running cross country so we talked to the kids.”

The Morgans have two daughters Kaitlin and Ellie, both standout runners for the Hornets. Ellie went on to run at the University of North Dakota, while Kaitlin ran at North Dakota State University.

“Ellie was kind of hesitant but Kaitlin was yeah, I’d do it, close to grandpa and grandmas,” Morgan said. “That’s how we ended up back here and it’s been great.”

Morgan was on the Hornets’ wrestling staff his first year in Frazee with head coach John Barlund.

He coached Ellie in cross country and that travel schedule made giving up coaching in the winter an easy decision. He elected not to coach track and field to allow Ellie to have experiences with other coaches.

“I didn’t want to be the only coach she had and I feel we have some of the best track coaches in the state here,” he said. “That was fun just to be a parent and go watch her.”

Moving to Frazee also brought Ellie a new partner in Megan Danielson.

“The first I saw Megan I said that girl’s fast,” Morgan said.

Ellie and Megan took turns beating each other in races and became a standout one-two punch for Hornet XC.

“She was the best thing that happened to Ellie; Dover had a dominant team, but I don’t think they  had anyone like Megan that could push Ellie like Megan did,” said Morgan.

Kaitlin is currently a Rehabilitation Neuropsychology Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. Ellie is a football dietician for the University of Colorado Buffaloes, working closely with Coach Prime Deion Sanders.

Both girls are a long way from home after earning their bachelor degrees in Fargo and Grand Forks, having taken a similar path their father did. 

“Coming back here there were a lot of people that I knew from high school, Rader, Reierson and Barlund and all that; I like that it’s small,” Brad said. “When I was in Houston, the thing I didn’t like was we had 1,000 kids per grade. There would be kids that you really liked and when they left your room at the end of the semester you never even visually saw them again, let alone talk to them. Where in this building, unless it’s a brand new kid, I know every kid in the building and that’s really nice.”

Being recognized by his peers as Teacher of the Year is also more special because of the size of school Frazee-Vergas High School is.

“That’s the other small school thing; I think we all know what kind of person every teacher is in the building,” he said. “You kind of know what they’re doing in their rooms because you know everybody.”

Away from school in the winter, Brad can be found ice fishing and in the summer putting in mower miles for his three-year-old business Central Otter Tail Lawn Service, of which he is not looking for new customers.

I’ve got plenty,” he laughed.