DEER LODGE — As the Deer Lodge Wardens prepared to take the practice field on Wednesday, there was a noticeable pep in the players’ step.

There was a palpable buzz around the team. The type of buzz that had previously been missing from the football program for five long years.

The Wardens’ 56-22 victory over Lodge Grass last Friday was the first win for the program since the 2019 season.

“It was a lot of excitement. A lot of…didn’t know what to do, because it’s been so long,” Deer Lodge head coach Mac Bignell told 406 MT Sports on Wednesday.

The Wardens have come a long way. When the current seniors were freshman in 2021, Deer Lodge was playing a JV schedule, which it had started in 2020. According to Bignell, who starred at Drummond and then Montana State, there were about 12 players on the team that season.

Deer Lodge transitioned from Class B to 8-man football in 2022 in an attempt to turn the tides and combat the low participation. It became even more tumultuous when former coach Andrew Verlanic was replaced and then reinstated five days later.

Bignell, an assistant who had been tapped as the interim for those five days, took over as head coach in 2023 and while the losing seasons persisted in the first two years at the 8-man level, slowly things started to change.

Now, the Wardens have 32 players. Of the five seniors on the team, two of them — quarterback Orrin Hansen and wide receiver/linebacker Cayman Herrick — have been with the program since the JV days in 2021.

“It’s definitely a little bit different. Our freshman and sophomore year we only had five guys, maybe, on the sideline. As we’re on the field and we look at our sideline, there are more than double the kids. It definitely helps everyone,” Herrick said.

Not only has participation skyrocketed, but so has the general excitement around the program.

For a team that had dealt with so much defeat, the players knew there needed to be a shift. And even before earning their first victory, they could sense that the culture was changing.

“Attitude is a big part of it. I remember freshman, sophomore, junior year, (attitude) was horrible. There was definitely some fun times, people were pretty confident but once we got through those first couple of games, morale just went downhill,” Hansen said.

“This year, we’ve got some new plays, new kids, new positions and it’s kind of given everybody that boost. Everybody’s enjoying it a lot more, there’s been a lot more fun.”

Of course, drastic changes don’t happen overnight.

The work started for Deer Lodge in the offseason, with the players taking the initiative to get together for team lifts and other activities.

“A lot,” Bignell said of the work that went into the program’s first win in five years.

“It’s mainly the kids doing it. They’re the ones that are getting in the weightroom in the summertime. They’re the ones that are getting other kids excited about it to get out (for the team).”

Now that the Wardens’ five-year losing streak has come to a halt, they hope to keep the momentum rolling. They want the win over Lodge Grass to be a turning point rather than an anomaly.

“I think you get that taste of (winning),” Bignell said. “You get that dopamine hit, and you just want more and more of it. I think it’s just all that hard work paying off and finally getting a victory.”

And the players who battled through the tough, winless years hope to have paved the way for the younger generations in Deer Lodge, proving that it doesn’t have to be the same old Wardens.

“Once you start winning, more people show up,” Hansen said. “It kind of gets all the young kids looking at it like ‘hey, I want to be a part of this.’”

After some dark years for the Deer Lodge football program, the 2024 team decided enough was enough. And while the results didn’t show it until last Friday night, the work to break the drought started long before.

“I told them after the game that they were always winners in my book, but now the scoreboard is finally showing it,” Bignell said.