Through the Storm, a new film by Charles Frank and Fritz Bisoie, tells the story of the Red Lake Warriors, a Minnesota high school football team on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. One of the first things you learn about the Warriors is that sometimes, they only have 12 kids. Football, famously, requires 11 players to field a full team.
This means the Warriors often play entire games with little to no substitutions, and practices can be even more sparsely attended. During the 2024 season, they were on the wrong end of games that ended 70-0 and 65-6. But within their community—which excels at basketball, leaving football as a distant afterthought—the results in the win and loss columns pale in comparison to the impact that football leaves on these young men.
On the field, where the Warriors have hosted teams from as far as three hours away just to get a game in, they are coached by Nolan Desjarlait, a beloved figure on the reservation whose life was upended by personal tragedy. Coaching high school football offers him a respite, guiding players who were in the same age group as his late son. And though the Warriors haven’t won a game since 1999 (a period much longer than any of the players’ lifetimes), they can’t imagine spending their extracurricular hours doing anything else, or with any other squad. “I lost a lot. I could have gave up on the whole program,” Desjarlait says. “The kids wanted me back. Being around these kids makes me feel special.” Micah Brun, a towering figure on the gridiron whose parents describe him as the only kid on the reservation with NFL dreams, puts it another way.
“I’d rather lose with these guys a thousand times than win with a bunch of people I’m not really close with.”
