Two decades have passed and Kelly Ford Wilber finds herself more appreciative now than at the time she and her Grand Forks Central High School teammates won a state title.
Grand Forks will always remember 1997 as the year of the flood. That spring was also the only time Grand Forks Central High School won a state girls soccer championship.
"I'm more proud now of what we did than I was 20 years ago,'' Wilber, a junior on that team, says. "We had so many factors working against us. But we stuck together. It's pretty crazy how it played out.''
Central's 2-1 win against Bismarck St. Mary's in the state championship culminated a spring of emotional ups and downs.
Central had high expectations, with a veteran group back from a team that finished fifth at state in 1996. Then came the flood, the city's evacuation and the prospect of having no season. Attention turned to worries about family, friends and homes, not sports.
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"You win a state championship and it's the best feeling,'' said Jessica Bina, a senior on that team. "But I think it meant even more to us, just because of everything we had to go through.''
Bina was relocated to Jamestown, staying with relatives, when talk of forming the team began. Wilber was relocated to Devils Lake. Other players were located elsewhere.
"Parents started calling each other,'' Bina said. "Their first concern was what was going on in Grand Forks. But they started checking around about (having a team). We didn't find everybody who evacuated. But once they found we had enough players, our coaches set up practices at the air base.''
Approximately half the players lived away from the river at Grand Forks Air Force Base. But the flood impacted even those whose homes weren't hit by the water. For instance, senior Stacy Hallgren's home in rural Emerado had 22 flood refugees packed into it for a long stay.
"I think soccer was an outlet for us to forget about what was going on around us,'' Hallgren said. "It was something fun, a relief from everything.''
The team played eight regular-season games, all Saturday road doubleheaders. No school uniforms were available, so Central wore blue-and-white uniforms provided by the air base.
"All the support we got-from our parents, our coaches, the air base-I don't think it could have played out the way it did without that,'' Wilber said.
Central took a 5-1-2 record to the state tournament in Bismarck. The team played the state tournament in Central boys soccer uniforms that coach Edgar Ortegon had found.
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Bina had shutouts in the quarterfinals and semifinals, her seventh and eighth of the season. "I wasn't even a goalie,'' Bina said. "I got thrown into it because we couldn't find our goalie. It wasn't what I wanted to do. The funny thing is I wound up playing goalie in college for a year.''
Central beat Fargo South 1-0 in the semifinals on a Hallgren goal. The senior had both goals against St. Mary's, scoring the tie-breaker on the first header of her career with 56 seconds remaining.
"Jessica Rausch sent a long, high pass,'' Hallgren said. "It was me against their goaltender. She came out and I headed it just before she clotheslined me. I was (knocked to) the ground. I didn't know the shot went in until all my teammates were jumping on me.
"It seemed like everything was stacked against us. I think we were in disbelief that we pulled it off.''
Not only was that Central's only girls state soccer championship, but it was the last time any Central girls team won a state team title. There have been individual champions in other sports, but only the flood survivors have a team title.
"When we got the team going, we weren't going to let the flood bring us down,'' Bina said. "We liked to say we crested at the state tournament.''
