In high school football, spoiling an opponents’ homecoming is icing on the victory cake

With less than a minute left in the game Friday at Eden Prairie, the chants from the Wayzata student section started.

“Hap-py ho-co! Hap-py ho-co!”

They were ironic, of course. On the road, Wayzata football got to play spoiler to Eden Prairie’s (2-3) homecoming game with its 27-21 win.

In theory, any high school can schedule a winnable opponent so the home side can cheer for six, seven, eight touchdowns and hardly break a sweat on defense.

That is rarely the case in Minnesota’s competitive 6A class, where the state’s largest schools continuously meet on the gridiron.

“Coach Brown preaches it,” Wayzata senior wide receiver Tony Ley said. “6A is wide open. Everyone’s beating everybody. There’s really no game that isn’t winnable,” “You’ve got a ton of talent everywhere.”

Dressed in black, the Eden Prairie student section stretched 40 yards across the home sideline. The section leaders had the tall task of directing the crowd’s humming energy into one direction. If they were conductors, and the student section was their orchestra, then whiteboards and dry-erase markers were their batons.

Almost literally — “singing auditions” was the crowd command before the national anthem.

“We write down if anything happens on the field, or if the other student section talks trash about us, and we’ll just write a response back,” Eden Prairie homecoming royalty, senior Kulani Jurru, said. “‘Wait, are we going to go with it? Oh, we are going to go with it.’”

They looked to one another, agreed on a chant — “Fire it up, Eagles,” for instance — scribbled it onto their boards and held them up for the rest of the students to see and copy.

Five, six, seven whiteboards would pop up across the front of the section with each Eagles touchdown. “We love James”, they chanted, when senior linebacker James Anderson snagged a 67-yard pick six. “What’s a Trojan?” they hollered later.

At halftime, Wayzata found itself trailing.

“It doesn’t help when you got a big old homecoming crowd, but it got me pumped up,” Ley said.

Wayzata (2-3) isn’t a stranger to the feeling of drawing a packed homecoming crowd only to leave with the sour taste of a home loss. Edina handed the Trojans a similar defeat last week amidst their own homecoming festivities.

“We were down, and I come out and watched their powder throw (during “Sweet Caroline”),” Ley said. “It’s a big tradition, the blue and gold powder throw. It’s one of the best moments.”

”Last week was just not us,” Wayzata senior safety Cooper Cleavelend said. “Was just not our game of football, but we really, really had a harder week of practice this week and just zoned in. We blocked everything out.”

A tough homecoming matchup means not every student body will crown their royalty at halftime and head into Saturday’s dance with a win. While Wayzata didn’t get their homecoming win last week, fans that traveled Friday got a bit of that satisfaction this go around.

When the clock ran out, Trojans players shook hands with Eden Prairie before sprinting to the Wayzata students to celebrate.

“It’s so much more fun to watch these kinds of games,” said Wayzata senior Jaiden Klein, part of the Trojans’ student section. “You have these moments where you’re down, but you have those moments where you’re super high up, and these wins feel a lot more fun.”

It was “the craziest student section I’ve seen since last year,” Cleavelend said, referring to the Edina homecoming game.

“I got to give a shout out to our student section,” Ley said.