Just like any football coach would tell you, success starts in the weight room. And that’s where coach Todd Rice and the North Platte football team got their 2021 season started.

Summer weights and conditioning were a mainstay for the Bulldogs. Players were bulking up and hitting the weights at least once, sometimes twice a day in preparation for the upcoming season.

“Our top guys have been really committed to it,” Rice said. “Not just improving strength level and hopefully improving some of the explosiveness, but just the team bonding that comes through there, and I think our veteran guys understand that. They’ve done a great job buying into it.”

The buy-in proved to be worth it. Even though every Class A school made the playoffs last season, North Platte was awarded the No. 10 seed, got to host a game and won.

Rice, and even some of the football players, give credit to how hard the program worked in the weight room.

“That’s got to be No. 1 to be a North Platte football player,” Rice said. “We got to earn it in the weight room, put in the time. Our guys have got to be accountable, and our guys got to show up and compete.”

The results have been outstanding for the program and has turned the Bulldogs into what could be a top-10 team in the state.

A lot of that has to do with the hype surrounding some of its players. It starts with Vince Genatone, a running back/linebacker who visited many DI camps over the summer and had one-on-one workouts with coaches, including at Nebraska with Scott Frost.

“I think it was really beneficial to have … with the one-hour (evaluations), I got to be one-on-one with a lot of coaches,” Genatone said. “And I think that one-on-one coaching was really good, seeing the Division I coaches. Just being able to be coached by them, I think it was very beneficial.

“Every single coach found something I wasn’t doing right, and we worked on fixing it,” he added. “I think it’s going to show up in the games.”

There’s Matthew Musselman, a two-year starter on the offensive line who will be representing Team USA at the 2021 IWF Youth World Championships this year. There’s Nic Davis, an offensive and defensive lineman and state qualifier in shot put and discus last season.

And there’s also a high quantity of talent returning including Tate Janas, Ryan Kaminski, Kade Mohr and Kolton Tilford, just to name a few.

North Platte will also return quarterback Caleb Tonkinson, who helped lead the Bulldogs to a 6-3 record and to its first playoff appearance since 2004.

“We’ve seen it all,” Tonkinson said. “Our first year, we were 1-8, then 3-6, then last year 6-3 with a playoff win. So I think that just knowing that we’ve come all the way up and we can make it that far, there’s nothing stopping us from making it even farther than we did last year.”

Tonkinson comes back for his senior season with confidence after getting his first year as the signal caller out of the way. He said he knows what to expect this year and all the uncertainty at the position has gone away.

“The first half of the season was me just getting into the groove kind of and just trying to figure things out at a varsity level,” he said. “And now, I know what to expect, I know how fast the game is and I know what I have to do.”