Coupeville Sports

Michael and Dalton Engle are captured on the Montana Western practice field in this shot by Maryann Engle.

Crossword puzzle time. What’s a five letter word that means Coupeville?

Engle.

Sure, there are a few hundred dozen Shermans dotting the landscape as well, but most of them are married to Engles, so it’s safe to say half the town still has some connection to those five letters.

I bring this up because of the photo above (which I poached from Maryann Engle), which captures two generations of CHS football — the recently graduated Dalton Engle and his old man, Michael. It’s men like them, be they young or (slightly) older, who form the backbone of Wolf Nation.

Dalton, brother-in-law Tim Walstad and friend of the family (and honorary Engle) Mitch Pelroy have traveled to the wilds of Montana as a group, taking along wives Amy (Craggs) Engle and Erin (Engle) Walstad, as they embark on a new adventure. All three former Wolves are trading the red and black of their high school days for the red and black of their college days, suiting up for the Bulldogs of Montana Western.

They are deep into two-a-days now, and, if their high school exploits are any indication, they will all be key players for MWU within mere moments.

Maryann has agreed to give us updates as they go forward, in a feature we’re going to call “Gridiron Momma.”

That way, if you are an Engle, or just an honorary one, you too can be connected to the past, present and future of our town and the classy people it produces.

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Wade Schaef

Wade Schaef may be the most interesting teenager at Coupeville High School.

I’m not joking. The kid is a dream come true for a sports writer.

Ask a few questions and deep, introspective quotes roll off of his tongue — or, at least, from his texting fingers — and I am impressed. Dang impressed.

Ask the junior wide receiver/corner about his strengths on the gridiron and he delivers like a pro.

“My strengths personally would have to be catching the ball. Which is good, since I’m a receiver,” Schaef said. “I’m pretty even-tempered too, so not much should be able to get under my skin on the field.

“I’m really agile while running, so I can adjust myself pretty well to make the QB look good,” he added. “I’m a pretty quick kid too, so I will be able to beat kids down field.

“My routes that I run are crisp and I would say just shy of perfect, making the defensive backs job hard to cover me,” he added. “I’m also a small kid, but still strong for my size.

Not that he doesn’t think he can’t fine-tune his game. The kid has his head screwed on the right way.

“I think I should work on everything that I’m asked to do, so that I am good all around, and since no one is perfect, it’s the logical thing to do,” Schaef said.

“As a player I want to unite my team, both on and off the field, make sure everyone has fun because that’s important,” he added. “Because when you have fun you are loose and ready to go, which makes everything easier.

“For a team, we all want to go undefeated and really show everyone what we can do. The Wolf program needs to be feared, unlike it has been, and we are all going to work our butts off and make that happen.”

A change in coaches can throw a team off, or fire them up, and the transition from Jay Silver (now head coach at Mount Vernon) to new top dog Tony Maggio, seems to fall into the latter category.

Schaef captured the conflicted emotions of many of the players, who had come to be close to their former coach, while also being thrilled that the job went to a popular choice already deep inside the program.

“Silver was a good coach and I was sad he had to go, but it had to be hard for him living in Mt. Vernon,” Schaef said. “The transition was real easy and relaxed since everyone but the freshmen knew Maggio as the line coach and had been with him for a bit.”

“Both Silver and Maggio operate in a way that is a lot alike,” he added. “They joke around and have fun but get on us too, if we need it. We don’t often need it, though, so that’s a good thing.”

A star on the baseball field as well, Schaef juggles sports, school, work at Kim’s Cafe, hanging out with buddies like fellow multi-sport athlete Carson Risner and dates with his girlfriend.

All while being thrifty, always a sign of a guy with brains.

“I usually hang out with a selective group of friends but that’s just because of transportation issues. I don’t want to waste the gas,” he said.

A fan of video games, weight training and history class, who hopes to attend college with plans of being a nutritionist or personal trainer, Schaef is the rare football stud who can admit to a softer side when it comes to his preference in movies.

“I love all movies, except for the horror genre. I’ve watched a few of those, but most just scare me too much,” Schaef said. “I really like movies about sports, or anything that is violent and has lots of action in it; comedies are really good too most the time.

“I’m a softy for romance movies too, they are just so touching.”

Coming from a guy (me) who has seen 13 Going on 30 too many times to admit, and really liked Confessions of a Shopaholic, all I can say is, good on you, Mr. Schaef. Good on you.

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Jake Tumblin — if you can’t catch him, you can’t beat him.

Jake Tumblin is ready to run.

Gifted with speed and the ability to slash into the open hole behind his blockers, the Coupeville High School junior may be one of the first players to benefit from new coach Tony Maggio’s decision to install the wing-t offense this season. A quarterback as a sophomore, he will operate as a wing this year, and the plan is for opposing teams to spend most of their time staring at the back of his uniform as he blows by them.

Regardless of whether he’s taking the ball under center or scampering to daylight, Tumblin is a young man of many talents. Also a standout defensive back, he was picked as the best at that position at a recent football camp run by former National Football League legend Lawyer Milloy, a pretty fine DB in his decade plus in the pros.

Tumblin will make plays. Where he lines up is the least of his concerns.

“I love the transition,” Tumblin said. “We have great athletic, young quarterbacks to fill in that position and it doesn’t matter to me where I play, as long as it puts our team in a better position to win.”

After struggling against a schedule that was top-heavy in schools that boasted student bodies several times bigger than Coupeville, the Wolves will have more of a fighting chance this year. Gone are ATM, Cedarcrest and Lakewood and in are schools much closer in size, such as Orcas Island and Lynden Christian.

“It definitely mattered to the players,” Tumblin said. “Honestly, no one wanted to play them, but hopefully over the next few years we can grow as a program and compete with them again.

“We want to be the team that nobody wants to play after they watch our film,” he added. “We want to be a totally different team than last year; we want to win. We want one win a week and we’re gonna take it one week at a time.”

The son of a coach — local baseball guru Chris Tumblin — Jake has been an All-Conference level catcher for the Wolf baseball team. Last season he was successful on every one of his 20 steal attempts,
using his jet-powered legs to dazzle and befuddle opposing batteries.

If his legs keep up that kind of frantic pace on the gridiron over the next two seasons, he may be able to reach his post-high school goal, as well.

“I’ve always wanted to play college football after high school,” Tumblin said. “That’s what I’m shooting for.”

First, though, the recruiters would have to actually catch the fleet-footed speedster. Not an easy thing to accomplish.

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Caleb Valko (63) prepares to launch himself into the fray. (Shelli Trumbull photo)

Caleb Valko is going to kick your butt.

That’s just a fact for anyone who chooses to line up opposite the Coupeville High School senior lineman this season.

You need to find a soft spot on the field and make room for when you fall, because you’re going to go down, probably hard.

As part of a rock-solid group of linemen at the core of the Wolf squad, a unit that also includes fellow beasts of the gridiron like Anthony Maggio and Nick Streubel, Valko is the furthest thing from a dirty player possible.

What he is instead is every coach’s dream — a two-way player who will go hard from kickoff through the game’s final seconds.

“With this being my senior year, I will play with no regrets,” Valko said. “From the first whistle to the last, good luck to my opponents. You don’t stand a chance.”

Number 63 will blast upwards from his starting job at both center and defensive end, opening holes for fleet-footed Coupeville runners such as Jake Tumblin and Danny Savalza and then crushing the hopes and dreams of the opposing team’s skills players.

It’s grunt work, work that needs to be done, and work that, unfortunately, sometimes gets overlooked when the headlines are typed.

“We are a small school. We don’t play normal football — we play iron man ball,” Valko said. “The only reason the backs and quarterbacks get glory is because we linemen do the dirty work.

“The stuff that nobody sees or wants to do. Without us, you can’t win games. It’s simply not possible.”

With a solid line clearing the way for the wing-t offense brought in by first-year head coach Tony Maggio, the Wolves are primed to roll up some yards.

With an easier schedule than in years past — Archbishop Thomas Murphy, Lakewood and Cedarcrest have been replaced by schools much closer in size to Coupeville — the hope is to reclaim a winning feeling.

“I think that it (the schedule change) was mainly a confidence booster to the younger kids, not having to play the elite 2A schools,” Valko said. “For me and my other upperclassmen, we could care less who we are playing.

“We are gonna scrap and fight you till the last whistle blows.

“Like anybody else I want to win,” he added. “As a team I think we all are expecting at least playoffs; we have too much talent for anything else.

“But we also need to learn our new offense. Not worry about the trick plays and perfect the fundamentals.”

And if he has to knock some people on their butts along the way, that’s just the way it goes when you’re working in the trenches.

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