Riding the Royals' Victory Bus

Nobody had furrowed brows. Nobody was snapping at other teammates. Nobody was fidgety. Nobody was feeling like they were going to throw up.

For a team about to play for the championship in the top class in Minnesota girls basketball, the Hopkins Royals were a very relaxed group.

As the bus loaded up outside the Lindbergh Center at about 5:45 p.m. Saturday for the 15 minute trip to the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, the players, coaches, cheerleaders and a few others, seemed remarkably relaxed. You could hear the players' laughter from where they were grouped in the back.

Head coach Brian Cosgriff, nattily attired in the same suit in which he was married, chatted amicably with those nearby. This was his third trip to a state championship game, and he was displaying all the coolness of a veteran warrior.

In the seat directly behind Cosgriff, assistant coach Annie Isler, who starred on Cosgriff’s first championship team in 2004, sat next to the coach’s eight-year-old daughter, Brooke. Isler read a text message to Cosgriff  from Steph Sension, a former Royal now playing for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Sension's father, Tim, is a long-time Cosgriff assistant coach.

The message was one of encouragement and hope to the kids on the bus: regardless of the outcome, they would take the night’s experience with them the rest of their lives and their friendships would last forever.

There was no rah-rah stuff. Any last minute, pre-game speech from Cosgriff would no doubt be in private in the team’s locker room. When the bus pulled into the garage underneath Target Center, everyone disembarked pretty much like they did back in mid-December when they showed up at New Prague High School.

In a casual, yet direct, fashion they filed into the locker room just as the Hill Murray Pioneers came running past from their locker room to take the floor for the start of the Pioneers' game against Minneapolis DeLaSalle for the Class 3A championship.

The Hopkins players and coaches went into the locker room. The cheerleaders and the few others from the bus headed into the arena.

***

A little more than four hours later, the same bus with the same driver, Steve Gronwall, waited in front of the Target Center, along First Avenue North.

The attitude and mood of the same passengers who had traveled the one direction earlier, was very different as they boarded to head in the other direction.

There were hugs all over, shrieks of joy, tears and unabashed laughter.

The Royals were returning to the Lindbergh Center as the 2011 state champions.

Before the bus pulled away, a round of cheers and the pounding of hands on the metal roof of the bus boomed throughout the vehicle and, most certainly, up the block.

Cosgriff got on the PA and said little other than to remind them of who they were and what they had just accomplished.

The return trip was filled with more cheers. Cosgriff sifted through the dozens of text messages on his cell.

“This is the hardest our coaching staff has ever worked, and these kids were a joy to be around,” he said matter-of-factly.

The bus pulled into the parking lot. It was starting to rain. The girls of 2010-2011 stepped off the victory bus and, with the same deliberate fashion they had shown all year, walked directly ahead into a waiting welcome home victory celebration in the gym.

They looked as if they had fully expected to do so every since they first assembled for practice back in mid-November.

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