When the final horn sounded last weekend and the Mahtomedi High girls soccer team’s second consecutive Class 2A state championship was secured, Zephyrs’ goalkeeper Harlow Berger dropped to her knees and touched her forehead to the U.S. Bank Stadium turf.

There was gratitude and celebration in the action, but it was mostly to seek relief. The 6-foot-3 backstop’s right shoulder had popped out of the joint and then back in when she crashed to the ground to block a Blake cross with seven minutes remaining.

Mahtomedi midfielder Charlotte Monette, center top, jumps into the arms of goalkeeper Harlow Berger as they celebrate with their teammates after defeating Mankato East 2-1 during the Class 2A Semifinal of the Girls State Soccer Tournament at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. (Craig Lassig / Special to the Pioneer Press)

“I was super happy, but mostly I was in a lot of pain and I needed to go to the floor,” said Berger, whose sparkling, 12-save performance powered Mahtomedi to its 12th state crown. “It was constant pain, but I knew it was worth it.”

Berger, who is committed to play at the University of St. Thomas next season, has been undergoing tests, including an X-ray and an MRI to determine the extent of the injury and how best to treat it. It’s safe to say, however, that the 17-year old has the fortitude to overcome whatever the diagnosis might be.

Berger’s father, Steve, was one of 60 people killed during a 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Her mother, Joanna, a recreational marathon runner, died in 2019, five years after suffering a massive stroke that severely curtailed her movement.

“It’s a sad story, but also a story of triumph,” said Mahtomedi coach Dave Wald, a longtime math teacher at the school who taught Joanna Berger during the 1990s. “It’s amazing how much certain kids have to go through and you don’t always realize the heavy baggage they carry with them.”

Joanna Krusell married Steve Berger, a former basketball standout at Wauwatosa West High in suburban Milwaukee, who also played at St. Olaf College. The couple divorced in 2017 and Steve, a 6-foot-6 financial advisor known for his booming voice and enveloping hugs, was celebrating his 44th birthday in Las Vegas when he was killed on Oct. 1 of that year.

“He was very handsome and he had a presence about him,” said Bob Krusell, Joanna’s father. “Harlow was a daddy’s girl and if he’d go to her game, you knew who he was.”

Father and daughter loved to fish together and of his children, Bob Krusell and his wife, Pat, believe the tragedy was hardest on Harlow, who was 9 at the time. She and her siblings lived with their maternal grandparents after their father’s passing, but the oldest, Hannah, is now 23 and out on her own, and Harrison, 20, is a University of Minnesota student.

Harlow Berger now spends considerable time at the house of a friend and club soccer teammate, Nina Meyer, who attends Hill-Murray and whose parents have treated her as one of their own. She’s dealt with academic and mental-health issues but is outgoing, mature and articulate. Patricia Krusell said her granddaughter has gained a stronger sense of self and her emotions through counseling at her school and her religious faith.

Pat Krusell and Harlow worked on a college application essay in which the senior wrote about how “trauma creates change you don’t choose, but healing is about creating change you do choose.” It went on to discuss the idea of gaining relief through intentional living and not merely drifting through life.

Harlow Berger said her mother tended to put “everybody before herself, and I’ve taken that from her.” Combined with a tendency to internalize her emotions, the teenager hasn’t always been on solid emotional ground. October is always a difficult month, and her coaches have learned to gently check in on a more frequent basis and realize why her focus may wander at that time of year.

“Sometimes it hits home pretty hard,” said Berger, noting she went through multiple therapists before finding one with whom she deeply connected. “It can be simple things, like hearing someone say ‘my mom and dad’ and realizing I don’t have that.

“My therapist makes me really think about things and pushes me to dig into my thoughts. I don’t say ‘I don’t know’, anymore, I dig into why I feel the way I feel.”

Berger acknowledges she suffers from anxiety and depression and plans to major in psychology at St. Thomas in the hopes of becoming a therapist herself. She also is poised to join a Tommies women’s soccer team that won’t bring back a starting goalkeeper after failing to win a conference game this fall.

“I’ve gotten confidence from sharing my story and hope it can impact people positively,” said Berger, who wears jersey No. 43 as a way to connect herself with her father, whose sports number was 42. “A lot of people at my school see me as an athlete who gets everything she wants, but nobody knows the true story. I hope this makes other people want to tell theirs.”

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College football’s coaching carousel is spinning faster and faster as the regular season enters its final month, and the breeze coming off it can be felt in Minnesota.

There are currently 13 job openings at FBS schools. Nine are from within the Power Four conferences, including some of the most marquee brands in the country — LSU, Penn State, Florida and Auburn.

National speculation is this cycle suggests there might be more than 40 head coach vacancies when the dust settles, meaning the breeze coming off the carousel now could rise to gale-force winds come December.

Even in less turbulent years, Gophers head coach P.J. Fleck is name-dropped for openings, primarily because of how he has outperformed his predecessors at Minnesota and done so relative to his current peers while having fewer NIL resources at the U.

Already this fall, Fleck has been named on coaching hot-board lists in The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, On3 and Football Scoop.

Gophers athletics director Mark Coyle, having lived through it before, knows Fleck will keep getting mentioned. He told the Pioneer Press that in September, when there were only three major openings.

“You hear all these names,” Coyle said last weekend on KFAN’s pregame show before the Gophers’ 23-20 overtime win over Michigan State. “Who’s going to Penn State? Who’s going to LSU? I’m not saying P.J. is going to one of those places, but his name is going to pop up in places. It’s going to create a trickle-down effect.”

Fleck’s resume won’t do enough to stir fan bases in, say, Happy Valley, Pa., or Baton Rouge, La., but it might hold appeal in spots such as Fayetteville, Ark., or in Blacksburg, Va. Compared to what they’ve had, Arkansas and Virginia Tech might like Fleck’s consistency, culture and ability to spike with a dream, championship-chasing season that ends in a big bowl game.

Across the previous 75 years of Gophers football, Fleck’s winning percentage (.603) is higher than any of his 12 predecessors.

While Fleck has produced only one outstanding season, 11-2 in 2019, he has two other nine-win campaigns, and this season’s team is on the verge of its sixth winning record over his nine total seasons. Two of those losing years were in his first campaign (2017) and the pandemic-shortened season (2020).

While things have been far from smooth this year, the Gophers’ 4-2 conference record has been good enough to sit sixth in the 18-team mega conference heading into the second week of November. They were tied for seventh last year.

This fall, Minnesota’s best win is a dominant 24-6 victory over then-25th ranked Nebraska (6-3, 3-3 Big Ten), but the Gophers have been run off the field by Ohio State, which debuted at No. 1 for the College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday, and 20th-ranked Iowa. The U also took a disappointing loss at Cal (5-4, 2-3 in ACC).

Fleck’s resume also includes a 7-17 record against teams ranked in the Associated Press Top 25. While he is 4-4 against rival Wisconsin, he is 1-8 versus Iowa.

This season, the Gophers have required comebacks for ugly wins against some of the worst teams in the conference: Rutgers, Purdue and Michigan State, which are a combined 1-17 in Big Ten play.

The Gophers were pegged by oddsmakers at 6 1/2 wins in the offseason. Currently sitting at 6-3 overall, they are bowl eligible going into this week’s bye. They will be huge underdogs at No. 9 Oregon next week, but can reach eight wins with victories over Northwestern (5-3, 3-2) at Wrigley Field on Nov. 22 and at home versus Wisconsin (2-6, 0-5) on Nov. 29.

On a near annual basis, Coyle and the U have awarded Fleck with contract extensions. The latest came in July, which keeps his annual salary at $6 million through Dec. 2030, while increasing his annual retention bonuses.

That total sum ($7 million) remains outside the top half of the highest-paid coaches in the Big Ten, and Coyle regularly comments on how he feels the need to be a good financial steward on behalf of the university.

“We feel really fortunate to have P.J. here, and our goal is to keep him here at Minnesota as long as we can,” Coyle said on KFAN on Nov. 1.

(Note: The athletic department is, by and large, financially self-sufficient from the rest of the university system.)

Fleck’s new contract revised down the buyout for him to leave — from $7 million to $5.5 million this year. In the current era of exorbitant coaching buyouts, that sum is paltry, especially compared to the huge sums paid by Penn State and LSU to have James Franklin and Brian Kelly leave their programs.

Some sitting coaches named in the rumor mill for other vacancies have already received highly lucrative contract extensions this season: Curt Cignetti at Indiana, Matt Rhule at Nebraska and Rhett Lashlee at Southern Methodist.

So, another contract extension for Fleck seems like a possible route.

“We will continue to have conversations,” Coyle said on the radio. “Our goal is to make sure that he and (wife) Heather feel valued here.”

Fleck has said he “loves” it in Minnesota. He continues to preach about “cultural sustainability” and that he is built to have more success with less resources.

But if this coaching cycle is as volatile as it’s setting up to be, dominoes could fall across the nation, and Fleck could be poached by another program. The value in sitting coaches is considered higher as schools are shelling out more than $13 million in revenue sharing dollars to pay players.

“I don’t see it slowing down,” Coyle said. “I think with the first year of rev share, the pressure on these coaches, the pressures on these programs. I mean, the Governor of Louisiana (Jeff Landry) was making comments about the whole situation (at LSU), which is just bonkers to me. I always say, ‘You can’t make it up. It’s college athletics.’ ”

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court on Thursday gave new life to President Donald Trump’s bid to erase his hush money conviction, ordering a lower court to reconsider its decision to keep the case in state court instead of moving it to federal court.

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A three-judge panel in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein erred by failing to consider “important issues relevant” to Trump’s request to move the New York case to federal court, where he can seek to have it thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.

But, the appeals court judges said, they “express no view” on how Hellerstein should rule.

Hellerstein, who was nominated by Democratic President Bill Clinton, twice denied Trump’s requests to move the case. The first time was after Trump’s March 2023 indictment; the second followed Trump’s May 2024 conviction and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that presidents and former presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts.

In the later ruling, at issue in Thursday’s decision, Hellerstein said Trump’s lawyers had failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.

Hellerstein’s ruling, which echoed his previous denial, “did not consider whether certain evidence admitted during the state court trial relates to immunized official acts or, if so, whether evidentiary immunity transformed” the hush money case into one that relates to official acts, the appeals court panel said.

The three judges said Hellerstein should closely review evidence that Trump claims relate to official acts.

If Hellerstein finds the prosecution relied on evidence of official acts, the judges said, he should weigh whether Trump can argue those actions were taken as part of his White House duties, whether Trump “diligently sought” to have the case moved to federal court and whether the case can even be moved to federal court now that Trump has been convicted and sentenced in state court.

Judges Susan L. Carney, Raymond J. Lohier Jr. and Myrna Pérez made their ruling after hearing arguments in June, when they spent more than an hour grilling Trump’s lawyer and the appellate chief for Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case and wants it to remain in state court.

Carney and Lohier were nominated to the court by Democratic President Barack Obama. Pérez was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose allegations of an affair with Trump threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim, said he did nothing wrong and has asked a state appellate court to overturn the conviction.

It was the only one of the Republican’s four criminal cases to go to trial.

In trying to move the hush money case to federal court, Trump’s lawyers argued that federal officers, including former presidents, have the right to be tried in federal court for charges arising from “conduct performed while in office.” Part of the criminal case involved checks that Trump wrote while he was president.

Trump’s lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision. He also said they erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under that ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.

“The district attorney holds the keys in his hand,” Wall told the three-judge panel in June. “He doesn’t have to introduce this evidence.”

In addition to reining in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts, the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling restricted prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Wall, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, called the president “a class of one,” telling the judges that “everything about this cries out for federal court.”

Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the district attorney’s office, countered that Trump was too late in seeking to move the case to federal court. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment. Exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown.

Hellerstein concluded that Trump hadn’t shown “good cause” to request a move to federal court as such a late stage. But the three-judge panel on Thursday said it “cannot be confident” that the judge “adequately considered issues” relevant to making that decision.

Wall, addressing the delay at oral arguments, said Trump’s team did not immediately seek to move the case to federal court because the defense was trying to resolve the matter by raising the immunity argument with the trial judge, Juan Merchan.

Merchan rejected Trump’s request to throw out the conviction on immunity grounds and sentenced him Jan. 10 to an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction intact but sparing him any punishment.

Advocates hailed Zohran Mamdani’s victory as a win for rent-burdened tenants, while building owner groups decried his proposed rent freeze as a threat to the city’s stabilized housing stock.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at a campaign event in Queens on Oct. 6. (RonAdar/Shutterstock.com)

A year ago, then newly-announced mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani ran the New York City marathon with a promise on his t-shirt: “Eric Adams raised my rent,” it read. “Zohran will freeze it.”

On Election Day Tuesday, his message proved a compelling one to voters. More than 2 million people showed up at the polls—a level of turnout not seen since 1969—and more than 1 million cast their ballots for Mamdani, a 34-year-old assemblymember who’ll take office at City Hall come January.

His win caps a contentious election season where much of the debate focused on the city’s cost of living crisis—and in particular, its impact on renters, who make up 69 percent of households in the five boroughs. Roughly 2 million live in rent-stabilized apartments and would be affected by Mamdani’s rent freeze, if he’s successful in pulling it off.

“Tenants are the majority in New York. In June, we sent a clear message to the real estate industry: you can’t buy this city. Tonight, tenants beat back millions to prove it again,” Cea Weaver, director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, said in a statement Tuesday night following Mamdani’s win. “We are ready to freeze the rent with the mayor-elect.”

Stabilized tenants, whose rent changes are set each year by the mayoral-appointed Rent Guidelines Board, saw four hikes in a row under outgoing Mayor Eric Adams.

These households have a median income of 60,000 a year, and despite the regulated status of their homes, 46 percent are rent-burdened, meaning they spend at least a third of their earnings on housing. More than half of the city’s renters more widely meet that definition.

“We are at a pivotal moment. New York City faces a severe affordability crisis that no Mayor can solve alone,” the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development (ANHD), a community development and advocacy group, said in a statement Tuesday. “Families throughout the city are unable to afford rent and other necessities.”

But property owner groups, and some affordable housing experts, argue a flat rent freeze is the wrong way to address that problem. They say owners of buildings with stabilized units, particularly those with few or no market-rate apartments that can charge higher rents, need annual increases to offset other rising costs, like insurance and taxes.

Freezing rents will give those building owners less to draw from to make repairs and maintain aging properties, critics argue. A recent report from Enterprise Community Partners and the National Equity Fund, two groups that work in affordable housing, found that more than half (57 percent) of the more than 400 affordable projects it analyzed took in less revenue than what they spent in 2024.

A rent freeze would “destroy rent-stabilized housing,” Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, which represents rent regulated building owners, said in a statement Tuesday. “Thousands of buildings are in deep fiscal distress and bankruptcies are growing. If nothing is done, the city will lose this vital housing forever,” Burgos said.

Mamdani has countered such criticism by saying his administration would look to help struggling landlords by tackling rising insurance and property tax rates.

Rent stabilized tenants on a protest march to Gracie Mansion in October, the day the most recent rents increases for stabilized apartments went into effect. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

Beyond a rent freeze, Mamdani’s housing plan calls for building 200,000 “truly affordable” apartments, and expanding city programs that finance homes for seniors and very low-income tenants. He’s pledged to double the city’s capital funding for NYCHA repairs, and says he’ll push Albany to invest more in public housing. 

“We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants,” he said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.”

On Wednesday, Mamdani announced the first members of his transition team, led by Maria Torres-Springer—a veteran of city government who most recently served as deputy mayor for housing under Mayor Adams (she resigned from that post in February).

“I love that there is ambition in his and many other plans. It’s clear that the number one issue is affordability,” Torres-Springer told City Limits in a July interview about Mamdani, and housing more generally this election cycle.

The mayor elect nodded to the ambitiousness of his plans during his election night speech. While some have deemed his ideas unrealistic—including his rent freeze proposal, which could be hard to achieve, at least at first, if Mayor Adams appoints new Rent Guidelines Board members on his way out the door.

But Mamdani maintains he can get it done.

“Democrats can dare to be great,” he told his future constituents Tuesday. “Our greatness will be anything but abstract. It will be felt by every rent-stabilized tenant who wakes up on the first of every month knowing the amount they’re going to pay hasn’t soared since the month before.”

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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