The Original Vikings Football Team in Minnesota

And no, there was no Norm Van Brocklin to be found coaching this Vikings football team.  And we're not talking about the early-60s and a son of a Pentecostal Methodist minister scrambling his way around opponents.

Let me introduce the Vikings, one of Minneapolis' first association football teams.

This post is just a small preview of a larger project in which I'm compiling and hoping to publish pieces of the early history of the beautiful game in Minnesota.  It seems there has been little devoted to this topic, and from the initial research, the game developed here much like it did in the big industrial centers of the eastern United States.  Soccer in the Twin Cities spread like wild fire among the different immigrant groups, with several groups of workers organizing teams at the larger Mill City employers, such as Soo Line and Minneapolis Steel & Machinery Co.  By the time of the photograph above, from the July 12, 1914 issue of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, association football had been played in the Twin Cities for almost 25 years.  Many of the grade schools participated in organized league play by 1912, including several of the schools in the working-class neighborhoods of Northeast Minneapolis - Webster was located at the NE corner of Summer and Monroe Streets and Prescott was on the SW corner of Taylor and 25th Ave. NE (now Lowry).  The image below is from the October 6, 1912 issue of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune.

Check back, more to come...