By Rich Winter

605 Sports

VERMILLION — As the final seconds ticked off of Thursday’s 9AA championship Parkston’s Brayden Jervik and Parkston coach Matt Grave shared an emotional moment on the field.

Jervik didn’t win any of the individual awards Thursday but he captured the hearts of Trojan fans and the coaching staff during his football career at Parkston. 

“I’m very grateful to coach a kid like and he’s gone through a lot in his life,” Grave said. “He’s a very good football player and sometimes you feel like as a coach you aren’t giving the world enough opportunities to see his light.”

Jervik recovered a fumble with 7:46 remaining to help seal the 12-7 win over Howard. He spent a good share of the night limping on and off the field. Following the awards ceremony and the team pictures Jervik spent a very quiet moment on his knees with his head buried in the DakotaDome turf. 

"Our seniors have put in so much work and this just feels amazing,” Jervik said. “I feel like a lot of people had a lot to say about us and they doubted us, which is fair because we hadn’t earned anything. I think we finally earned it tonight.” 

The road to the 2023 championship may have started on Nov. 11, 2022 when the Wall Eagles defeated the Trojans 35-14 to claim the 2022 9AA state championship. 

Jervik expounded on the amount of work the Trojan football team put in this summer. 

“All summer long we would get off our jobs at 7 o’clock and go home and eat and then meet at the weightroom at 11 p.m. and still get up for work the next morning,” he said. “We were dedicated to this. We knew what we had and we knew we just needed to put the work in and that was the biggest thing for us.”

Trailing 7-0 at halftime the Trojans had a number of players speak along with coach Grave. The Parkston coach said his team needed to calm down a bit. 

“We had to reset our kids,” Grave said. “Sometimes when you care about something so much you blow it up in your head. We were down 7-0 at halftime and it felt like we were down 27-0. I’m very proud of our seniors and how they responded tonight.” 

Jervik described what Grave and the team talked about at halftime.

“We just needed to play smash-mouth football, put it down their throats and I feel like we did that,” he said. 

Jervik is a 5-foot-9, 205-pound specimen that Parkston coaches and teammates have only ever known by the nickname “Buff”.

“I don’t really know how that got going but my uncle started calling me that when I was little and then it just kinda stuck I guess,” he said. 

Graves called the senior a team-above-self player.

“This year he’s had to step up when someone else doesn’t,” Grave said. “If someone else is stepping up he tells the coaches to give that person the ball and he’ll go block for them. He doesn’t care about stats. He just wants to win.”