Randy Strand has long been a Hall of Famer in the eyes of anyone who has followed Adrian High School football at anytime since the mid-1980s, but now it’s official.
Strand, a 1974 graduate of then-Tracy High School and former head high school football coach in Adrian for 33 seasons, was inducted into the Minnesota Football Coaches Hall of Fame on Saturday in Minneapolis.
“This is not necessarily my award, it’s our award,” Strand said. “This is about the community, the guys who played over the years, certainly the coaching staff and all they did, and the parents. It was not a journey I made alone, by any means.”
Strand began his teaching and coaching career at Adrian Public Schools in the fall of 1978. He taught elementary school there for 38 years, the first 33 as a sixth-grade instructor and the final five as a fifth-grade teacher.
“I remember saying to my mom that it was kind of a small community, and she pretty much said, ‘Young man, they’re offering you a job, take it!’” Strand said. “I liked the school, I liked the people, made a lot of new friends.”
After beginning his coaching career at the junior high level, Strand, who admits he had no idea where Adrian was before beginning his teacher career there, coached football and boys basketball at the junior varsity level for a couple of seasons, then was an assistant for both sports at the varsity level.
Strand’s girls’ basketball teams— he was the head girls basketball coach from 1986 through 2019 — won 488 games over 32 seasons and earned eight conference titles.
But it was on the football sidelines that this former Scrapper had the biggest and most lasting impact.
Stand became head football coach of the Dragons in 1985 and went on to amass 238 wins over three-plus decades against just 112 losses. Strand was selected Conference Coach of the Year nine times and was a six-time Section 3A Coach of the Year, and his teams won 10 conference championships and six sectional titles.
Four of those teams — the 1997, 1998, 2007 and 2009 squads — reached Minnesota State Class A Championship games.
The 1997 runner-up team’s 13-12 loss to Cook County in the title game included a 90yard Adrian touchdown that was called back because of an illegal procedure call.
Four championship games, four losses. Remind you of another Minnesota football coaching legend?
“That’s my shoulderrubbing to Bud Grant,” Strand chuckled, now able to look back and laugh becuase of how long ago his last state championship game appearance was. “I’ve been to four championship games, and unfortunately we weren’t able to come away with a ‘W’ in any of them. It crosses my mind every once in a while.”
Under Strand and his staff — including assistant coach Kevin Nowotny, who started and ended his coaching stint the same time Strand did — the Adrian football team grew a reputation of being a tough, hard-nosed squad. It was a reflection of how Strand approached things during practice and from the sidelines at games.
“We were a bunch of farm boys — that’s kind of how we live down in this area,” he said. “We did have some athletes, but just a lot of kids who really liked playing football.”
As far as his playing days — besides one year of football as a walk-on at Moorhead State — Strand, donning his black-rimmed spectacles — was a tri-captain on the 1974 Scrappers team that finished 8-1. He played alongside the likes of Charlie Hayes, Doug Bosacker and Doug Hansen.
“We had a pretty good outfit that year — we just missed the playoffs,” Strand recalls.
And while Strand made a name for himself with our neighbors to the south, it was in Tracy where his future coaching style began to form under his head coach, Gale Otto.
“I give him a lot of credit for a lot of things I’ve done over the years,” Strand said of Otto.
It was in the Tracy park and recreational system where Strand realized his love of sports. As he got older and into middle school and high school, it was men like Bill Bolin, Chuck Goerish, Leo “Gabby” Sebastian and Dale Hatch that furthered his interest.
“Just a ton of guys that I would consider mentors,” Strand said. “Learned a lot from them. They were very dedicated guys with what they did.”
