It was not the happiest of benches… (Shelli Trumbull photos)
Drew Chan fights for rebounding position.
The Wolves who made it on the court, like Chan, played with great heart.
Josh Wilsey (14), one of the few Wolves to NOT be falling down sick, watches a free-throw go up.
It was not a happy gym.
Ripped apart by the sudden onslaught of food poisoning or a virus, the Coupeville High School boys’ basketball team could barely field five semi-functioning bodies Saturday afternoon.
Nick Streubel, Joel Walstad and Morgan Payne didn’t even make it to the gym, while Drew Chan spent most of the JV game sprawled across the scorekeeper’s table, looking like death barely warmed over — yet somehow poured himself into a uniform by game time and played his butt off. Caleb Valko was an odd shade of green and Carson Risner? You don’t want to know what Carson Risner was doing…
So when I say both the Wolf JV (61-37) and varsity (57-17) were handily beaten on the scoreboard by visiting Blaine, you can take it with a grain of salt. Or the pile of saltine crackers that several players tried to choke down.
By the time Aaron Curtin had fouled out, Coupeville’s varsity was down to five players. The JV team only had five to start off with, as Oscar Liquidano, Wiley Hesselgrave, Anthony Bergeron, Isaac Vargas and Jared Helmstadter played all 32 minutes, while Blaine ran approximately 212 players through their roster and continued to employ a full-court press long after reason dictated.
The varsity game was perfect — for one play — as Coupeville cracked Blaine’s press, with Gavin O’Keefe feeding Risner with a picture-perfect pass that the sophomore big man converted into a quick layup.
Unfortunately, the game took a sudden veer from there, as Blaine shot out to a 17-5 lead after one quarter and never looked back. Coupeville fought valiantly (O’Keefe and Curtin seemed to spend an ungodly amount of time on the floor, recipients of hard shots from Borderite players), with Chan and Curtin draining beautiful three-point bombs.
The play of the game for the Wolves probably came from Risner, who threaded a pass between multiple defenders to Josh Wilsey, who made a dandy reverse layup with a man hanging on him.
Relatively close in the first half, the game fell apart after halftime, as the obviously tired and ill Wolves began to fall several steps behind Blaine, which shuttled in fresh waves of players every two minutes. At one point the Borderites scored 22 straight, before Aaron Trumbull netted the game’s final points on a jumper from the side.
Chan paced the Wolves with five points, while Risner banged away for four and Curtin netted three. Wilsey and Trumbull each chipped in with two, while O’Keefe sank a free-throw.
Coupeville fans will see a much different team in the next game or two, though, said coach Anthony Smith. With Streubel and Valko out, no Wolf went bigger than six-foot-one, while Blaine rolled out five guys at 6-2 or taller. Also, with the JV guys playing a full game, there was no chance to use a spark-plug like Hesselgrave off the varsity bench for quick bursts of energy.
“We’re a better team than this,” Smith said. “It was unfortunate, but I give a lot of credit to the guys who were able to get out there and play today.”
The JV game was an intense battle for much of the first quarter, with the Wolves using a 7-0 tear to knot things at 11. Bergeron flew around blocking shots, Hesselgrave mixed it up, driving hard to the hoop, then pulling back for a three-pointer (he didn’t look sick until after the game, when he too turned an unusual shade), and the last five men standing put up a fight.
By the second half, though, they tired and things got a bit sloppier, with one Wolf player accidentally scoring on his own goal and a ref getting irritated enough to yell back at a Coupeville fan who questioned his eyesight.
Hesselgrave pumped in a team-high 15 points, Bergeron rolled in eight and Vargas tossed in six. Helmstadter, who won the half-court shot contest at halftime of the varsity game, went for five and Liquidano added two.
Coupeville has two games on the road (Tuesday, Dec. 4 at University Prep and Thursday, Dec. 6 at La Conner), then starts a run of four straight home games with a match-up against Cascade Conference powerhouse Cedarcrest Friday, Dec. 7.
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