Coupeville Sports

   Amy and David King are the masterminds behind Whidbey Island’s most successful high school hoops program. (John Fisken photo)

Wins and losses don’t lie; Whidbey Island is in the middle of a basketball funk.

With one noticeable exception — the Coupeville girls — our six high school varsity hoops squads have spent the past five years doing one thing, and one thing only, on a consistent basis.

Lose.

This is not opinion, this is fact.

There are the CHS girls, who have won 61 games and counting (they’re 14-3 this season) and then you fall off a cliff and keep rolling until the bottom.

From 2012-2013 to today, these are the numbers for the past five seasons for the Coupeville, Oak Harbor and South Whidbey programs:

So, that’s four winning seasons out of a possible 30, with the Wolf girls having ripped off three straight and the only other one coming courtesy of the 2012-2013 Oak Harbor boys.

There’s a chance the South Whidbey girls will hold on to notch a fifth winning season, but the odds are stacked against the Falcons.

They’re 10-9 right now, but face juggernaut King’s in their regular season finale, which means it’s 99.2% likely they’re at .500 heading into the playoffs.

Bothered greatly by injuries, it appears unlikely South Whidbey has the depth to make a sustained playoff run, so a winning season is not getting very good odds in Vegas right now.

So, why is one team doing so well when the other five are not?

It’s true that the Coupeville girls benefited from having a transcendent player the past four seasons in Makana Stone, but other programs have been blessed with skilled hoops stars during the same time frame.

South Whidbey had Hayley Newman, Chase White and Lewis Pope, Oak Harbor suited up Dyllan Harris and Brynn Langrock and Coupeville had Wiley Hesselgrave and Mia Littlejohn.

You could argue those players were and are good, sometimes very good, but not truly great like all-timers Lindsey Newman, Pete Petrov or Brannon Stone, who led their teams to big-time success on and off Whidbey back in the day.

So, with apologies to Pope, who certainly seems to be getting there, we’ll say Stone is the one true all-timer to play on Whidbey in the past five years.

But, while say, South Whidbey fell sharply off after Hayley Newman’s departure in 2013, the Coupeville girls have responded to Stone’s graduation with a ten-game winning streak, a third-straight league title and strong hopes of a return visit to state.

So I think the Wolf girls success springs from something deeper.

All of our local coaches, at all three schools, seem to be hard workers, often innovators and deeply committed to their programs.

I’m not dogging on any of them, but I am giving a shout-out to David and Amy King, who have run the CHS girls program for five seasons now.

Their style works, and it shows both in wins and losses and in the way the Wolves are booming in numbers.

Players are staying for the full four years, new players are joining, players (on both varsity and the equally successful JV) are buying in to a team-first, every-player-has-a-role-and-accepts-it mantra.

Maybe it’s the unique situation of having a husband/wife duo running a program, maybe it’s their backgrounds as life-long hoops players and coaches, maybe they just have a magic touch.

So, other coaches, my suggestion? Study what the Wolf duo is doing. Take notes and maybe think about implementing some of their ideas into your own programs.

Cause right now, over the past five years? They’re the ones doing things right.

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