ESKO — In 2023, Scott Arntson’s Esko football team was perhaps the most talented that’s ever taken the field in school history and there weren’t many arguments after the team buzzsawed its way through the regular season.
They were 10-0 for the third consecutive season, had three players that received All-Area honors and one — Koi Perich — who was named All-Area Player of the Year for the second successive season. Perich went on to be named first team All-Big Ten as a true freshman safety for the Minnesota Golden Gophers in 2024.
In many ways it was a dream season for Esko, but for Arntson and his family there was another side to 2023. His daughter, Ashleigh Franz, and her husband, Jacob Franz, told Arntson and his wife Amy they were having a baby in the early fall. Amy Arntson is a regular freelance contributor for Duluth Media Group.
Contributed / Ashleigh Franz
“From the moment we told them that we were expecting, he was all-in the whole time,” Franz said.
Everleigh was born Sept. 3, 2023, but it was a complicated delivery, Franz said, and required Everleigh to spend 10 days in a neonatal intensive care unit in Duluth. Visiting hours in the NICU are very strict, but the new “all in” grandfather was going to see Everleigh as much as he could.
After practice every day, drove to visit his granddaughter and spend as much time as he could with her.
“Even if it was only 10 or 15 minutes, just being able to be there and see her is all he wanted,” Franz said. “The drive from Esko to downtown and then back to Carlton was sometimes longer than the time he got to spend at the hospital, but for him it was worth every second he got to be there.”
Arntson credited his assistants with their organized practices that allowed him to slip away quickly after it was over, especially when his thoughts were elsewhere.
“I think that helped a lot,” he said. “That’s kind of where your mind is and after you leave, you can’t wait to get up there and see her again.”
This season, Everleigh was able to come to practices to see grandpa and even spent time with him in the press box working the clock for JV games. She even came to three games this season, prompting Arntson to drop his famously stoic gameday manner.
Contributed / Ashleigh Franz
“When they were walking to the fieldhouse at halftime, he would have his coach face on,” Franz said. “As soon as he saw Evvie, he would just break into a smile, come right over to us, scoop her up and hold her for 30 seconds and then hand her back. He was all coach mode and just instantly, it was grandpa mode.”
Earlier this season, Arntson’s son told him that they were expecting a grandchild and living in Wausau, Wisconsin, changed his thinking on coaching.
“Coaching football is something I love and hope to do again, but there’s other things too,” Arntson said. “I can’t even describe how much joy a grandbaby brings. My wife and I were both looking forward to it and we knew we would love it, but it’s even more than we could expect.”
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
With a second grandchild on the way, Arntson made the decision to step down after nine years at Esko and four appearances in the state tournament, the first in 2019.
Just the fourth coach in Esko history, Arntson’s first year resulted in just two wins.
“There were a lot of questions, but the next year we were in a section championship game,” he said. “Then we just kept building from there — trying to be patient and do things what we considered the right way.”
In 2019, they finally won the section and made it to state, but it wasn’t enough. They realized what it would take to win at the state level and in 2021 they made it to the Class AAA semifinal, losing to eventual state champion Dassel-Cokato.
“The last couple years we thought we were the favorites,” Arntson said. “Our bar just kept changing as far as what our expectations were.”
Over Arntson’s tenure, the Esko program has not only sent a number of kids on to play college football, it’s expanded to include flag football starting in third grade and flex football — a modified form of flag football where players wear pads and block — beginning in fifth grade. They also organized a booster club for the program.
All the practices and extra games were taking more and more of his time, making the job of head coach “more administrative,” Arntson said.
“At the end of the day, I’m a football coach — I love coaching football,” he said. “This final season, I did very little of that.”
Contributed / Ashleigh Franz
Arntson has played or coached football since 1984 and even Franz said her dad touched a lot of lives and she knows it will be different without her father on the sidelines next fall. She took stats on the sidelines when she was at Esko and remembers Arntson coaching with her brother in a baby carrier at Duluth Marshall.
“People will come up to him and call him ‘coach’ and that’s so valid,” she said. “Part of me sees him as ‘Coach Arntson,’ too, but now it’s ‘Grandpa’ and he holds that title so close to his heart.”
