Coupeville Sports

A small portion of the ’89 THS tennis squad. I’m third from the left. The tall kid in the white hat is Brad Otton, who went on to play QB for Southern Cal. During one practice I nailed him with an overhead to the crotch and he went down wailing. It was the best shot I hit in three years.

First they got pounded on the field. Now they’re getting pounded by the pollsters.

Archbishop Thomas Murphy, the school that everyone else loves to hate, got smashed 40-15 by King’s last Thursday in a gridiron rumble of the gods. With Knight quarterback Billy Green scoring at will — five touchdowns through the air and another on the ground — ATM got rolled, pure and simple.

The loss reverberated throughout the state and when the Associated Press released their latest high school football rankings this afternoon, ATM’s fall from grace became complete.

No longer the number one ranked team in Class 2A, the Mildcats aren’t even the top ranked 2A school in the Cascade Conference any more. That distinction now belongs to Lakewood, which sports a shiny 3-0 mark and holds down the fifth spot in the poll, one slot ahead of the free-falling Everett squad.

Capital, Othello, Lynden and Prosser hold down the top four spots in the poll now.

Which strikes me as sort of odd, since Capital was never a football power back when I attended nearby Tumwater and the T-Birds routinely pounded on the Cougars.

My enduring memories of the richniks who wore the cardinal and the gold both spring from my questionable three-year run as a T-Bird netter.

The first involves tennis lessons I took from the Capital coach one summer, a man who taught us to react super-fast by stretching nets across a basketball court and having us hit inside. Tennis balls come skidding off a basketball court hard, fast and at weird angles, and the first time you take an exploding fuzzy yellow ball to the crotch, you learn to move a bit quicker.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The other memory — perhaps my best moment on a high school tennis court — came during a match at Capital when I squared off with a foreign exchange player who cussed at me in his native language for two hours. I got ticked and screamed back the few Norwegian cuss words I had picked up from my grandfather — AKA the Ol’ Bastard — and we soon had players from both teams hanging off the fence, goading us on.

My saint of a coach, easy-going Hawaiian Lionel Barona, ignored us and remained as far away as possible, watching our number one player, Daryl “Psycho” Pfaff, win yet another match. Way down at the end of Capital’s endless series of courts, however, the riffraff on the squad came close to starting our second riot of the ’89 season (the other involved a very long trip to the pit of humanity — Aberdeen, WA — tennis courts high up on a hill soaked in gas, moronic preteens throwing rocks at us and an altercation involving a school bus and a Corvette in a McDonald’s parking lot).

I didn’t win a whole ton of matches in my three years in the green and gold, but I won that day. For THS! For America!!

Oh yes, but we were talking football several hundred paragraphs back…

So, yeah, King’s, which unlike ATM and Lakewood, is on Coupeville’s schedule this season (Oct. 19 on Whidbey) remains a solid numero uno in the 1A poll, claiming all of the first-place votes to easily outpace Royal and Cashmere.

If I didn’t mention it, the Knights and the free-wheeling Green are a pretty scary bunch. Maybe not as scary as a pack of late ’80s tennis players in short shorts trying to start an international incident, but scary in their own way.