Reusse: Legend of LeCaptain crosses state borders, into Gophers football

Perhaps you are aware of a media member who has spent a long career working to develop a reputation for being crusty, and if so, please advise said person to avoid interviews with the LeCaptain family from the cherry blossom region of Door County in Wisconsin.

Talk to mom, Kris, a teacher and in-home tutor, and father, Mark, a coach, and youngest son, Derik, a college football player, and also hear the tales of older son Nick, a pizza hustler in nearby Sturgeon Bay, and all those decades of smart aleck-ness could be floating away in the summer wind.

Derik LeCaptain was a three-sport standout at Southern Door, a school in Wisconsin’s smallest division of 11-player football. He had 5,199 career rushing yards, 100 touchdowns and more than 400 tackles. He was named the Wisconsin Male High School Athlete of the Year in 2019.

He had a scholarship offer from South Dakota and coach Bob Nielson but wound up deciding between walk-on overtures from the Gophers and the Badgers.

“We’re big Packers fans, and we were also Badgers fans,” Kris said. “But we were with Derik when he made his visit to Minnesota. At the end of practice, P.J. Fleck called the team together and started speaking to the players.

“I listened to him doing that for a few minutes and said to Mark, ‘I can say with 100 percent confidence that Derik is going to choose Minnesota.’ ”

Yes, Mom, but that was for the fall of 2019 — and Derik’s still here. Are you surprised he came back for a seventh season?

“Oh, my gosh ... no,” Kris LeCaptain said. “He lives it, being a Gopher, playing for Coach Fleck and the staff, with his teammates. Derik absolutely was going to take any extra time he could being part of this.”

OK, but how about that Badger loyalty as Wisconsinites?

“When Derik and Nick were kids, we were Badger fans,” Kris said. “But not anymore. Now, Wisconsin is our favorite game to win.”

Kris’ family name was Jahnke. LeCaptain is Belgian/French. “Mark not only learned a language [Flemish] from older relatives … he can speak it," she said.

The LeCaptains now live on the small family farm where Mark grew up near Gardner, a town of 1,100. It’s the part of Door County famous for its cherry tree orchards.

Do you have bears and deer coming by for a snack when the cherries appear?

“Haven’t seen bears, but there aren’t many mornings when we look out and there isn’t a female deer there with her fawns,” Kris said.

From this lovely scene comes Mark, a player for Wisconsin-Whitewater, a fired-up assistant coach at various high schools (currently Kewaunee), these days co-owner with Kris of the Kings and Queens AAU basketball program of Door County.

Mark was an assistant at another area school, Luxemburg, when he first met Fleck. “We had a lineman, Spencer Kanz, and P.J. and Matt Simon flew in from Western Michigan to see him,” he said. “Spencer wound up going there, but then Coach Fleck went to Minnesota.

“I was talking with Simon the day they came to recruit Spencer. He said, ‘There’s a running back over at Southern Door with great numbers; do you know much about him?’

“My answer was, ‘Quite a bit. He sleeps at my house.’ ”

And as the football world turns: Fleck and Simon wound up with the Gophers, and so did that multi-sport, big-numbers running back and defensive star, Derik LeCaptain.

Arrived as walk-on linebacker in 2019; pandemic season in 2020; switched from linebacker to running back due to RB injuries and rumbled for a TD vs. Northwestern in 2021; special teams in 2022; out with injury in 2023; mostly special teams again in 2024, and now — Season 7.

How long was the internal debate as to whether to return for another season?

“There was none,” LeCaptain said. “As soon as I knew there was a chance, I was coming back. I love everything about being part of this football program. And doing it for one more year — there was never a doubt."

There have been a few seven-year participants, with the extra seasons due to the pandemic and relaxed redshirt rules, but LeCaptain is only the third with no transfer, with all seven seasons as a Gopher:

Receivers Clay Geary (2016-22) and Chris Autman-Bell (2017-23) were the others.

When LeCaptain gets rolling, he repeats the familiar Fleck bromides about filling buckets in your life, about how you do one thing your best should be how you do everything, etc.

Yet, it seems this vet of unusual seniority is not repeating what he’s heard; more so, he’s all-in, perhaps from that first P.J. speech to the team, with Kris and Mark standing nearby, and Mom saying, “One hundred percent, Derik’s coming here.”

Just ask LeCaptain about Koi Perich, the sophomore-to-be phenom, another small-town kid (Esko, Minn.), and Derik will give you the full blast of how he sees the Gophers as a football place:

“One of the things that I love about Koi is that he’s all about football. He loves it. He loves everything from training room recovery, workouts, speed drills, hanging out with the guys, practice and, of course, playing …

“He loves being around the facility, he loves being around ball, and then, when he plays, just the fact he plays 100 miles per hour.”

Which isn’t any different from Derik LeCaptain’s approach to everything with the Gophers, except he can only offer 100%, not 100 mph.

Once LeCaptain finished his few minutes of a formal interview, there was a chance to talk to him in the small, adjoining Hall of Fame room, and I made this confession:

“Derik, as a guy around long enough to have watched Bobby Bell play for Murray Warmath, I think your guy P.J. comes off as ridiculous crawling over the top of his players to celebrate a victory over Rhode Island.”

Derik’s eyes grew wide and almost puzzled, and then he said:

“We go into every game looking to win that week, and we celebrate all wins together, and then on Sunday, we put that behind us and look at the mistakes that were made, and start working to correct those mistakes.

“I love that approach. To celebrate every win, and then go back to work.”

The LeCaptains, folks. I told you they’re dangerous for cynics.

Even Nick, knocked out of college football by concussions, dedicated to town-team baseball in the eight-team Door County League, and a one-man tourist attraction as a waiter at Sonny’s Italian Kitchen & Pizzeria in Sturgeon Bay.

“It’s unbelievable, the number of people that tell me they talked with Nick at Sonny’s,” Mark LeCaptain said. “They kill it at that place. And so does Nick.”

As a man said: How you do one thing your best, you should do everything.