After a hat trick in the girls hockey Class A state tournament semifinals, Warroad senior Taylor Reese declined to reveal who she would rather face in Saturday’s state title game, Breck or Blake.
She was less reserved two days earlier about the Warriors’ potential semifinal opponent. After Warroad opened the state tournament with a 5-1 win over Luverne, Reese made her preference clear.
“I want to play Dodge County. I think we owe it to them,” she said in the postgame press conference. “Make them feel how we felt last year.”
She was referring to Warroad’s overtime loss to the Wildcats in the 2025 state title game.
On Friday, the girls from Dodge County provided a reminder about being careful what you wish for. The Warriors prevailed in a 6-5 overtime win but not before a season’s worth of momentum changes and drama, as well as Reese’s immediate emergence as a villain for a significant number of Southern Minnesota hockey fans.
“WE WANT WARROAD,” was the chant the Dodge County student section offered as a serenade to Reese when she was on the ice early in the game.
“Um, I did not expect that to happen, but here we are,” Reese said, following the latest chapter in what has to be one of the more unlikely rivalries in Minnesota prep sports.
Google Maps notes that from The Gardens in Warroad, home of the Warriors, to Dodge County Ice Arena in Kasson, home of the Wildcats, it is 425 miles and will take you more than seven hours to drive. And that’s if you don’t hit traffic in the Twin Cities, or hit a deer coming across the Big Bog in a desolate stretch of rural Lake of the Woods County.
Rivalries, it is said, need two things to thrive: geography and history. You would be hard pressed to claim that Warroad and Dodge County are neighborhood rivals, unless that neighborhood stretches from down by Iowa to the shadow of the Canadian border. But in terms of history, it is recent and intense when the Warriors and Wildcats get together in downtown St. Paul.
Thursday’s game was won by Warroad after upset-minded Dodge County held 2-0 and 3-1 leads at various times, and rallied from a pair of goals down to force OT in the final two minutes. It marked the third consecutive year these far-flung frenemies have met in the state tournament. Although, by comparison to 2024 and 2025, this game was relatively low stakes.
Two years ago, Warroad won its third straight state title, beating Dodge County 5-2 in the finale. Last year, the Wildcats turned the tables, getting a textbook “greasy goal” in overtime to bring the program’s first state crown back home to this cooperative of Kasson, Mantorville and Byron.
“We’re meeting them in big games. That’s how rivalries start,” Warroad coach David Marvin said. “That’s a good thing.”
Wildcats coach Jeremy Gunderson is in his 19th season, while Marvin is concluding Season 20, and there have been a few times when one team or the other traversed roughly the entire state to play in the regular season, as well. The Warriors braved a snowstorm to get to Kasson in January 2020 for a game. Gunderson said there were great times on the ice, chasing pucks at the rink and chasing walleyes on Lake of the Woods, when the Wildcats would visit Warroad.
“We used to do their holiday tournaments, and we played for years,” Gunderson said. “(Marvin) used to have an ice fishing operation up there, so we’d take the kids to the holiday tournament and ice fish with the guys.”
With great respect between the two coaches, as far apart as they are on the map, for them to meet in the middle, a few blocks from the State Capitol, seems to make geographical sense.
“We want to beat the metro teams like he does and like anybody else does,” Gunderson said. “We take a lot of pride and want to be the best team down south. We always joke with each other that he wants to own the north. Let’s meet down here and kind of take it to the metro schools.”
In other words, we could surely see the Warriors and the Wildcats meet again, right here, next February.
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