TERRY COLUMN: Glacier building, and rebuilding, a dynasty

With a dynamic second half that saw its team return to punishing form on both sides of the ball, the Glacier football team achieved a rare feat last week.

With a 23-13 win at Helena High, the Wolfpack clinched a fifth-straight trip to the state semifinals.

Since Class AA switched to an 8-team playoff in 2001, only one other program has been able to accomplish that feat, when Helena Capital did the same for seven seasons from 2005-2011.

Now in its ninth season as a program, Glacier has been to the semifinals more times (5) than it has missed the playoffs or lost in the first round (4).

“It makes you proud of everybody involved that put it together,” Glacier coach Grady Bennett said.

“Since that third year, when we made the playoffs, we’ve been there ever since. That group got it started and really helped us get that vision. Since then it’s been group after group just working to reach that and take it to the next step.”

The Wolfpack achieved that next step last season, scorching the Earth on a way to a record-setting 13-0 season and the program’s first Class AA state championship.

Once many teams reach that level, there’s a drop off. Whether it’s complacency or a talent drop after graduating a senior-heavy lineup, that drop off is what keeps many programs from sustaining long runs of excellence.

Of the other three teams in the semifinals, all have missed the playoffs during Glacier’s stretch the last five years. Billings Senior and Helena Capital each missed the playoffs last year. Bozeman, Glacier’s closest competitor over the last four seasons and its next opponent, fell to 3-7 in 2011, a year after its first championship in more than 90 years.

In fact, each of the last five champions before this year had either missed the playoffs the next season or entered as the eighth seed.

“They say sometimes it’s easier to get to the top than it is to stay on top,” Bennett said.

“You look at the programs like CMR and Capital that have gotten there and stayed there and been so good year after year. Myself and the coaching staff have tried to commit to.

We’re a very competitive program, one of the upper-echelon programs. Now the challege is to stay there. Can we be there year after year? Right now we’re on a really good run. We just want to keep it going.”

Glacier seemed to be staring down a similar fate to past champions early in the season.

The Wolfpack was breaking in new starters at nearly every position to start the year, including all but two spots on offense.

When the Wolfpack lost its first two games of the season, it was a first for many on the team. Glacier hadn’t lost a home game in nearly three years, let alone two straight home games.

“I’ll never forget sitting in the locker room, listening to Helena celebrate. Then the next week against Bozeman,” Bennett said.

“A lot of the kids in that locker room had never heard that. They’d never experienced that. They’d never been a part of a home game that we’d lost and to listen to somebody else celebrate.”

However, instead of buckling, Glacier bounced back. The Wolfpack has won nine straight games, better than any team in the state, and transformed itself in the process.

Once an inexperienced, sometimes one-dimensional team, Glacier has begun to resemble the offensive and defensive juggernaut of the last four seasons, capped by a commanding performance in Helena last week.

“That was a galvanizing thing for them,” Bennett said.

“That really put all the comparisons aside, trying to do what somebody else had done. They started focusing on what they can do and becoming the best team they could be. They’ve really come together. That’s the reason we’ve had success.”

Glacier can match Capital in one other aspect if it wins this weekend. No defending champion has made it back to the state title game since the Bruins in 2009, the last in a string of five-straight championship games and the end of three-straight state title runs.

A season after there was seemingly nothing left to accomplish, this season’s Wolfpack found another step for the program. Sustained excellence.

The hard part is to keep sustaining it.