WINTHROP — In a football season full of changes, postponements and uncertainty, Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop senior Dominic Henrichs stepped up and made the most of every down played.

The prep football season was originally pushed back to spring of 2021 in Minnesota after COVID-19 concerns, but with a late switch, teams were able to get in a shortened fall season. This school year, Henrichs took every opportunity he got on the football field and ran away from the competition with 1,062 yards rushing and 13 touchdowns. He also had a 14.2 yard per carry average in seven games.

Henrichs’ standout senior campaign for the Thunderbirds ended with a 40-21 Section 2A title win against Minnesota Valley Lutheran and also a unanimous selection by The Journal’s sports staff as the 2020 All-Journal Offensive Football Player of the Year.

“I wouldn’t be able to do it without, obviously, my offensive line, my other running backs, my quarterbacks, my coaches just pushing me and doing everything with me,” Henrichs said.

With the high school spring sports season being canceled earlier this year and COVID-19 cases on the rise, Henrichs said that the uncertainty gave he and his teammates the drive to play every game as if it were their last.

“It was pretty hard to get used to at first,” Henrichs said. “First we weren’t suppose to have our season until spring. Then out of nowhere, we figure out we’re going to practice with a shorter year. I guess we just knew there was nothing we could control about it so we just had to make the most of what we had and play every game as if it was our last.”

Despite the impressive numbers he put up on offense this season, it wasn’t a physical or athletic trait that Henrichs thought he improved the most over the offseason, however. Instead, Henrichs said that he thought the biggest area of improvement for him this year came as a leader.

“My leadership [improved],” he said. “On the field and off the field, just setting an example for kids to look up to me and have people on the team be able to trust me that I could lead them. Leadership is probably the biggest thing that I improved.”

Operating under a Power-T offense for the last four years, Henrichs and the Thunderbirds have been able to create a lot of misdirection and mix-ups on defense, culminating in a return trip to state in 2019 and a Section 2A title win at home in 2020.

“My grade, we were the first year as freshmen to run that offense,” Henrichs said of the Power-T. “So we’ve had four years to perfect that, get our bigs down, run hard, just know what we’re doing. I think this year it just really all came together, and we had a great year.”

While there was no opportunity to get back to the state tournament this year, Henrichs was glad to end the year with a Section 2A championship win over the Chargers, a team he’s wanted to play for years due to his previous schooling before attending high school at GFW.

“Even though the year might not have been the best, we got to end out playing MVL, which has been a school that I’ve wanted to play in football for the last four years,” Henrichs said. “I know pretty much every kid on the team, grew up with a lot of them, went to school with them [Prairie Lutheran]. So it was a cool experience.”

Henrichs said that he hasn’t finalized his college plans yet but that he’d like to continue to play football if able.