After flooding overwhelmed his Iowa hometown, Vikings linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel went to work

ROCK VALLEY, Iowa — In one sense, June 21 was Nicole Roder’s only vacation day of a summer that never came. In another, it was the first day of a summer that still hasn’t ended.

Roder, the Rock Valley High School principal, worked four weeks past the end of the school year, as she usually does, and kicked off her break that Friday. The northwest corner of Iowa had been battered with rain all week, and the National Weather Service put the area at moderate risk of heavy rainfall that night. As the water poured down on Rock Valley, Roder called superintendent Matt Van Voorst around 10:30 p.m. to see if they should move the new playground equipment that had just arrived for installation.

“He was just in tears,” Roder said. “He said, ‘Nicole, there’s no stopping it. It’s already here.’ ”

A half-foot of rain fell on the Iowa plains, with nowhere to go but up. Water levels crested at an estimated 30 feet, scaling the 25-foot berm that was reinforced after a 2014 flood that analysts said only happened every five centuries. The 2024 flood killed one person, affected 540 homes in the town of 4,100 people and left 30 buildings on Main Street inoperable.

Roder couldn’t enter the school until four days after the waters receded. When she did, she found a gym floor so warped that former football coach Cory Brandt, who is about 6-foot-2, could stand under the basketball hoop and touch the 10-foot rim. Administrators and teachers worked 12-hour days to tear out carpet, remove trim and discard sodden school supplies, aiming for a Sept. 5 first day of school, only two weeks later than normal.

Improbably, they made it, welcoming students to classrooms that were still being powered by generators. The next night, the football team won its first game of the season.

Two days later, they heard Vikings radio play-by-play announcer Paul Allen invite the people of Rock Valley to go crazy for an interception return touchdown against the New York Giants, from the native son who’d helped clear out their basements and fill their stomachs.

Geographically, Vikings linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel is closer to Rock Valley than he’s been since his football career took off. Relationally, he’s never really left. Van Ginkel’s wife, Samantha, was his high school sweetheart, and they still spend summers with their two sons in Rock Valley, near family and friends.

The night of the storm, Andrew Van Ginkel was at a Morgan Wallen concert at U.S. Bank Stadium with two cousins when Samantha Van Ginkel called to tell him water was filling their basement. He drove 230 miles to Rock Valley the next day to begin drying out the basement and salvaging family mementos. Once he was done with his house, he joined his neighbors to start on another one.

In the weeks after the flood, Andrew Van Ginkel worked morning to night on the cleanup effort in Rock Valley, all while recovering from offseason foot surgery. His agent, Drew Rosenhaus, helped Van Ginkel set up a partnership with Mercy Chefs to serve two or three meals a day at First Reformed Church. Rock Valley mayor Kevin Van Otterloo said the effort provided meals for nearly 1,000 people per day for three weeks after the flood.

Some people were “living with other family members,” Van Otterloo said. “Some were living in hotels before the campers got here. So there were just a lot of people that needed to be fed. All of our restaurants were closed. We had no electricity for a while. They really stepped up and helped us with fantastic meals.”

The work is far from over; the city is restoring its full power grid this weekend, and Van Otterloo said around 80 families remain in the campers purchased through Iowa’s FEMA-approved disaster relief program. He expects the city will buy between 100 and 150 homes with FEMA and state help starting in mid-December. The school is still full of makeshift classrooms without elementary school desks or teacher chairs; Roder picks up debris in the hallways while fretting about where Rock Valley can host a homecoming dance for its seniors.

But football season is underway, and there again, Van Ginkel has provided a spark.

Van Ginkel got his third sack of the season against the Texans last week, to the delight of 300 Rock Valley residents who’d traveled to Minneapolis as part of the “Van Club” program sponsored by a local bank. Another caravan will come to the Lions game on Oct. 20. Rock Valley has always been a Vikings town, in the team’s radio and TV territory. Brandt said he’s never seen news travel so quickly around the high school as it did March 11, when Van Ginkel left Miami to reunite with Brian Flores on a two-year deal with the Vikings.

Rock Valley cheers for him now not only as the hometown kid who made it, but as the kid who made it and returned home to help.

“It’s special,” Van Ginkel, 29, said. “Obviously, kind of a dream come true. I never thought this day would come, but it’s here now. It’s a great feeling.”

Pick any of the traits the Vikings prize about Van Ginkel. The flexibility and selflessness that made Flores say, “I can’t think of a better edge mate you could have.” The playmaking instinct that Kevin O’Connell saw on Van Ginkel’s 78-yard fumble return TD against the Rams in 2020. The intuition to jump screen passes that safety Harrison Smith struggled to recall seeing from another pass rusher. The chip on Van Ginkel’s shoulder that Flores said fuels his success.

They all have their roots in Rock Valley.

Van Ginkel was one of seven kids, with two brothers, Kyle and Nate, who played linebacker at Division III Northwestern (Iowa) College. He grew up a Vikings fan, but since the TV was rarely on at his house, he listened on AM radio. He was beside himself meeting Allen, whom Van Ginkel called “a legend,” for the first time in March.

“I don’t know if I blushed or not,” Allen said, “but when I introduced myself and he went down that road of how important the game call was to him and his family, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that from any Vikings player. So I was touched.”

The Van Ginkel children found their own fun outside, playing tackle football games atop silage piles that stood 15 feet in the air, stretching 75 yards long and 30 yards wide. “If you got to the edge,” said Brandt, the football coach, “they’d take you out. These boys wouldn’t care.”

Van Ginkel was a power forward who once dunked five times in a basketball game, and a sprinter and long jumper in track. In football, he played every position on defense and was the quarterback so coaches could ensure he’d touch the ball every play. Brandt trusted Van Ginkel could scramble behind an outmatched offensive line and fling it 50 yards downfield.

“The best thing is coming up next,” Brandt said as he narrated an old Rock Valley highlight film. “We made a [goal line] stop, and we’re trying to run the [first] half out. We’re going to say, ‘Andrew, you kind of sneak it.’”

He paused with a grin. The clip showed Van Ginkel taking the sneak 98 yards for a touchdown.

“It was fun to just watch him be him,” Brandt said.

Van Ginkel worked 12-hour construction shifts in the summertime, bringing his teammates to the Rock Valley weight room after work. “He never missed a lift,” Brandt said. But without attending the college summer camps that might have brought exposure, Van Ginkel had just one scholarship offer, from South Dakota.

He returned to Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs after one season, when South Dakota coach Joe Glenn retired. After 13 tackles for loss and 3½ sacks in 11 games, Van Ginkel got an offer from Wisconsin, where he played two seasons.

“I think those guys are the guys who have a great opportunity to thrive,” Flores said. “They haven’t been the apple of everyone’s eye. They’ve always had to work just to get noticed. The guys who develop are the guys who work.”

NFL scouts saw a rail-thin pass rusher with short arms; Flores saw tenacity, paired with slipperiness and intellect. The Dolphins took Van Ginkel in the fifth round in 2019, figuring they’d gauge his potential on special teams.

Though he played six games and started Week 17 at linebacker, Van Ginkel began his rookie year with a foot injury and struggled with painful blisters in the South Florida humidity. “I was terrible my rookie year,” he said flatly. “It was one thing after another.”

Flores stuck by him, asking him to prepare scouting reports on opposing offensive tackles. “He kept his faith and belief in me and taught me a lot,” Van Ginkel said. “He’s a big reason why I’m here today.”

Flores said he wanted to bring Van Ginkel to Minnesota in 2023, but the linebacker stayed in Miami on a one-year deal. This year, the Vikings didn’t wait.

“When you learn at a young age to do a lot of different things, your mind kind of works that way,” Flores said. “With Gink, it was never too much. We tell him something once, and we’re almost shocked if he doesn’t get it. He’s kind of a coach on the field. He’s a quiet guy, but once he gets comfortable, he comes up to me and says, ‘What do you think about this and this?’ I say, ‘If you like it, we’ll put it in.’ ”

The night of the storm, Roder planned to relax on her first vacation day, Brandt celebrated his 33rd wedding anniversary with his wife, and Van Ginkel marked the Vikings’ summer break at the Wallen concert before heading home to Rock Valley.

When told his basement was filling with sewer water, Van Ginkel thought back to the 2014 floods and wondered how an even bigger catastrophe was possible so soon. “It filled up the whole basement, dang near to the main floor,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

The Rock River cascaded over the berm on the north side of town, crushing house exteriors and leaving 149 homes with no power or gas. On the east side, Creamery Creek overflowed with four-foot swells of water. The flood moved apartment buildings from their foundations, swallowed cars, contaminated water wells with bacteria and destroyed an ambulance rig.

The Van Ginkels lost keepsakes in their basement, but not their home, which meant they fared better than many. Some had to put homes on stilts and pour new concrete to replace destroyed foundations. Others debated whether to give up and start over.

“Some people had flood insurance, but a lot of people didn’t,” Andrew Van Ginkel said. “A lot of people are still figuring out what they’re going to do.”

If life in Rock Valley taught the Van Ginkels anything, it was how to work. Andrew’s mother, Karen Van Ginkel-Cox, started making tie fleece blankets for families who’d lost everything and offered her garage to house furniture a friend from Lake Benton, Minn., had donated.

It became a city-wide donation center that’s only slowed down this week for overdue work on her garage floor.

“From sunup to sundown, people are coming to her house to replenish what they’ve lost,” Roder said. “Sheets, dressers, kids’ toys, kitchen items, anything and everything. She literally called me Saturday and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a Keurig [coffee machine] for the teachers’ lounge.”

As it turned out, Andrew Van Ginkel would spend one more summer balancing football prep with daylong labor. He cleared damaged washing machines out of basements, helped neighbors tear out wet floors and loaded debris into dumpsters.

“We’d go by his house, and stop and tease him a little bit,” Roder said. “But he grew up that way. He’s a hard worker.”

Inspection notices still line the neighborhoods near the school: red if a house is unsafe to enter, yellow if it is safe after repairs are made, white if the house is suitable for limited entry. FEMA offers likely won’t cover every home, and while the city is building a new camper complex it hopes will be done by mid-December, Van Otterloo, the mayor, said, “We’ve sold every [residential] lot we have in town.”

Some Main Street businesses are open. Middle school classes are held in trailers, and high school classrooms are months from full repairs. The weight room is a storage space after Rock Valley sold its salvageable weight equipment. The volleyball team is playing 13 miles away in Sioux Center, in an old gym the school offered to decorate in Rock Valley colors.

On Sundays during Vikings games, there’s a three-hour break from it all. Allen told the people of Rock Valley to go crazy for Van Ginkel, and they responded.

“Watching him play these last three weeks has been nothing but pure joy,” Brandt said. “If you could have had a collective volume of what happened in every house [after the touchdown], it was just an explosion.”

Some ties, it turns out, are too strong to be washed away.

“He really cares about this town,” Van Ginkel’s mother said while fighting back tears. “He didn’t stand back and say, ‘Who’s gonna help me?’ He really went to work.”

Vikings linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel’s hometown of Rock Valley, Iowa, is still recovering from major flooding that affected 540 homes in the city this summer. If you’re interested in helping with flood relief, here are a few ways to do it: