MOORHEAD – Bob Feeney and Jan Knoll met at Dickinson State College in western North Dakota. Jan became the wife of this high school football coach. Bob started in small Cando, N.D., coaching the Cubs to 30 consecutive wins from 1967-69.

Dave Osborn, the pride of Cando, was a prized Vikings running back by then.

“My husband didn’t get a chance to coach Dave, but they became friends,” Jan said. “Ozzie’s parents lived right down the block from us.”

In 1970, the Feeneys went back to Dickinson, where Bob coached a powerhouse at Trinity, the Catholic school. Then, in 1974, Feeney was hired at Bismarck High — across a narrow part of the Missouri River from Mandan, Jan’s hometown, where, by the way, she had been the homecoming queen.

“How did you know that?” Jan Feeney asked on a phone call Wednesday morning.

Jan … you’re apt to find a mention of anything on The Google in 2025.

The reason for a second call of the day to Jan at her home in Bismarck was to offer this opinion: “You should be very thankful Bob traded in Trinity High for Bismarck a half-century ago. Just think of the commute to Moorhead if it was from Dickinson. It would be a hundred extra miles every time.”

Bob completed his North Dakota Hall of Fame run as a football coach at Bismarck High in 1999. They had raised a half-dozen athletes, three boys and girls, with the youngest — son Kevin — having been a four-year quarterback starter at North Dakota State from 1995 to 1998 (in the Bison’s NCAA Division II days).

Bob ran into health problems and died in 2012 at age 73. Jan lives in the same house in Bismarck and there is a large and fabulous keepsake in the living room — first mentioned this week by Trey Feeney, a grandson and the St. John’s quarterback.

“Grandma Jan knows her football,” Trey said. “And she still has the dining table with the top filled with plays sketched out by Grandpa Bob, as he sat there for decades.”

Grandma Jan laughed in confirmation of this and said: “A lot of coaches sketched out varieties of plays on a piece of paper. Bob liked using felt pens on the table.”

Jan is 85 — still adept behind the wheel, although thankfully in Bismarck, where it is 200 miles zooming across Interstate 94 to Kevin and Jamie Feeney’s home in Moorhead, and not the 300 miles from Dickinson.

She has had baseball players and soccer players, hoopers and volleyballers, to follow everywhere among 15 grandchildren.

Lately, there is arduous joy in keeping up with son Kevin’s Moorhead Spuds making an Air Offense drive to Minnesota’s Class 6A title game vs. Edina on Friday night — with junior son Jett as the quarterback.

Meanwhile, older son Trey is quarterbacking a 9-1 St. John’s team that has a bye this week into the second round of the NCAA Division III playoffs.

This is Moorhead’s first season in Class 6A. Meaning, size-wise, the opponents were all in the metropolitan area. The Spuds had games at Minnetonka, Woodbury, Eden Prairie and Edina. And after Jett suffered a break in his scapula in Game 2, the Spuds went 1-4 over the next five games.

He came back and they won a 51-44 shootout with Edina on Oct.15. All those losses, though, made Moorhead a six seed in its eight-team bracket.

“We had to win three more road games against very good metro teams to get to the Dome,” Kevin Feeney said.

Now, it’s going to be nine games out of 13 in the Twin Cities area. Not that the Spuds are complaining, what with this chance to win the first state title on the field since beating Winona for the large-school title in 1987.

“I’m from White Bear Lake,” Jamie Feeney said. “My parents still live there. They go to all the games. And they love this. The Spuds are now coming to them.”

As for Grandma Jan, who times her drive from Bismarck to reach Moorhead around noon, then rides with Jamie to a Spuds game, she said: “I’ve been in the Twin Cities more this fall than in the past decade.”

The Twin Cities area games also have been good for Trey at St. John’s in Collegeville. “If it’s a home weekend for us, they can pick me up in a team bus on the way to the Twin Cities,” he said Monday. “That’s what’s going to happen for Friday.”

And should the Spuds win another shootout with Edina, Trey can hang out for the postgame celebration, since St. John’s is off this week.

Kevin Feeney was in a breakfast place in Fargo on Tuesday. It wasn’t crowded, but as an outstanding NDSU quarterback, a 23-year-old head coach at rebuilding Fargo Shanley, a 64-8 record in six seasons at Fargo South, and now at Moorhead since 2010, he was getting a “Good luck, coach; we’ll be rooting for you” from every other person who passed a booth.

The Spuds had a loaded team in 2020, with Trey as the quarterback, and flew to a perfect 7-0 in Class 5A. “We were voted No. 1, but we didn’t get a chance to prove it on the field because of a pandemic schedule,” Trey said this week. “I’m very sure we would have won it.”

It didn’t look like Jett would get that chance, either, after the scapula injury.

“Right away, my dad told me not to look up the injury on the internet,” Jett said. ”That’s the first thing I did, of course. It said there it could take a full year to heal.

“Then, when the doctors took a full look, they said, ‘Could be five or six weeks,’ and that’s what it was.”

Jett Feeney went 35-for-41 for 387 yards and four touchdowns to beat Edina and Mason West, an exceptional quarterback and also a first-round NHL draft choice.

Anders Lee wasn’t a first-rounder, but as a great hockey prospect, he became a legend for sticking with Edina football in 2008 — at a time Feeney’s Fargo South team had a two-game series with the Hornets.

“We went down there with a winning streak and hung with them for a half,” Feeney said. “Then, that guy Lee — he was a machine against us in the second half. He was incredible."

Now, a rematch of five weeks ago, Jett Feeney, his best pal David Mack and other receivers for the Spuds vs. another football-hockey machine in West for the Hornets … on the fast surface of the big dome.

This one has incredible written all over it, complete with incredible grandmothers.