Coupeville Sports

South Whidbey fans reading this blog in the early days…

It started with four exclamation points in the first headline and no photo with the story.

And a heck of a lot more frequent open-handed slaps to the South Whidbey fan base back in the early days, when I was feisty and feelin’ my oats.

I’m so much more responsible these days. Or just more tired.

Anyway, exactly 14 years ago, on August 15, 2012, I published my first words on Coupeville Sports with https://coupevillesports.com/2012/08/15/hark-fall-sports-approaches/.

Wolf football coach Tony Maggio was the first person to ever see their name on the blog, with Amanda d’Almeida the first athlete to appear — though it wasn’t until this very morning, 14 years after the fact, that I finally noticed her last name had been misspelled in that debut story all this time.

It’s corrected now, though I did resist the temptation to retroactively add a photo to the story just to mess with people’s memories, Mandela Effect-style.

This is article #12,784 and much remains the same from the moment article #1 hit the internet.

The look of the blog is still very 2012, because it was simple, straight forward and easy to read back then, and remains that way.

No pop-up ads to constantly close, no weird colors or layouts to abuse your eyeballs, as little confusion as possible.

Plus, I’m obstinate in the extreme and have taken great delight in chafing WordPress by ignoring most of their “innovations” over the years, holding on to a background theme which was long ago retired.

When I write and publish, I steadfastly click on the “classic edit” mode, which they had to grandfather in to deal with those of us who refuse to use their “new, improved” editing tools, which are annoying, unhelpful, and a pain in the tush.

As we near the start of another high school sports year — football begins this coming Wednesday, August 19, with everything else kicking off five days later — Coupeville Sports has survived a pandemic, my two-and-a-half-month side trip to my sister’s homestead in West Virginia, and my daily mood swings.

Some days I envision hitting publish on story #20,000. On others, I don’t.

Across the past 14 years, there have been extreme highs, with Wolf supernovas Danny Conlisk and Alex Murdy winning state track and field titles, teams pulling off miracle wins, and the chance to help create things bigger than myself.

If there is a legacy to Coupeville Sports, it is in the Wall of Fame in the CHS gym and the memories from the 101st and 50th anniversary shindigs for Wolf boys’ and girls’ basketball.

And in the enduring words of the low rent grifter who told me I was a “sick human being, a punk, and an asshole” after I wrote a series of articles about a shot-in-Vegas YouTube show which dripped sleaze on our island for a bit.

PS — Still haven’t built that housing development, have you?

There have also been gut-wrenching losses on the field and floor, and much more personal ones in real life.

And there have been a constant flood of numbers.

So, so many track and field times to transcribe over the years, knowing that when (not if) I get that 24th place finisher’s time off by a single half-second, I will undoubtedly hear about it.

So, where do we go from here?

I don’t really know.

Like I said, my moods are fickle, but my typing fingers are (fairly) fast.

The Wolves who will be seniors this fall were three or four when I launched the blog, and it’s been operating virtually every day of their sporting lives.

Put in four more years and we’ll have a graduating class that never lived in a world where Coupeville Sports didn’t exist.

Or don’t and return some anonymity to young lives already beset on every side by modern day social media. Which might not be a bad thing.

We’ll see.

For now, we’ll note today’s milestone while daydreaming about Dairy Queen becoming my first national sponsor and home-delivering a tasty treat to mark the occasion.

And tomorrow?

In the words of the late, great Scarlett O’Hara, “Tomorrow is another day.”