When Nick Olson held his first practice as Amundsen’s head football coach in 2015, 12 players showed up.
The Vikings were coming off six consecutive losing seasons and were in the Inter-City, the lowest tier of Public League football.
When Olson held a fumble drill one day, he had to explain to players with no football background what a fumble was.
The Vikings went 1-7 that fall and started the next season 0-3. But they ended the year with a six-game winning streak and haven’t had a losing season since.
Next fall, Amundsen will move up to the highest level of Public League football when it debuts in the newly reconfigured Red North.
‘‘This year we made a statement,’’ said Olson, whose team went 7-0 en route to the Red North-Central title in 2022 and was 7-3 overall. ‘‘It’s time to move up.’’
Public League officials have overhauled the conference structure for the second consecutive season. Last fall there were two top-tier Red sections, the South and North, with six teams each; five second-tier Red sections with eight teams each; and six Blue sections with six to eight teams each.
The Red sections played under the same IHSA playoff-qualifying rules as the rest of the schools in the state, and the Blue teams were ineligible for the state playoffs. Next season, there will be three tiers — Red, White and Blue — with all 16 Red teams eligible for the state playoffs. The top four teams in each of the four eight-team White sections will be IHSA-eligible and the four Blue sections again will be ineligible for the state playoffs.
Amundsen joins Lane, Clark and Curie in the Red North. Defending city champ Simeon, Morgan Park, Brooks and Perspectives will make up the Red South. The other Red sections are the Central (Kenwood, Phillips, Hyde Park and Urban Prep) and the West (Taft, Westinghouse, Young and Bulls Prep).
Getting to the top tier of Public League football is the latest indicator of Amundsen’s rising stock. The Vikings never reached the IHSA playoffs before 2018 but have qualified every year since (except for the pandemic season, when the playoffs were canceled).
In 2022, they had their most competitive postseason showing, losing 35-21 to Harlem in the first round of Class 6A.
There are other markers of the program’s progress, as well. While there are still inexperienced players learning football on the fly, there also has been an infusion of talent from the North Side Youth Football program, which is based at Welles Park.
And when Amundsen holds open houses for prospective students, Olson now winds up talking to 20 athletes interested in football instead of three or four.
North Side Public League teams long have played in the shadow of South Side powers such as Simeon, Morgan Park, Kenwood and Phillips. But Olson and Amundsen take inspiration from the recent strides taken by Taft and Lane.
‘‘We aren’t selective enrollment, and we don’t have 2,000 kids [in the building],’’ Olson said.‘‘[But] we talk about those teams: ‘If they can do it, why can’t we do it?’ ’’
The Vikings will have a number of spots to fill because of graduation, including that of elite receiver Adam Muench. But they have seven returning starters, decent numbers in the program — there were 29 freshmen in 2022 — and a motivated coach.
‘‘The ultimate goal is we want to compete against the best,’’ Olson said.
Next season, they will.
