Much as in this shot from an earlier meeting, Coupeville and South Whidbey went shoulder pad-to-shoulder pad Thursday. (Beth Stout photo)
Based on one Coupeville Middle School football game, I’m going to make a prediction. You’re going to hear a lot about Ethan Loy in the coming years.
Playing in his team’s only home game of the season Thursday — a 21-0 loss to Langley — Loy, a seventh-grader, was a beast. Every time there was a tackle to be made, there was #23 flying in from the outside, crashing the middle and basically being a royal pain in the rear of anyone dumb enough to run towards him while carrying the ball.
Looking through my notes to confirm my thoughts, I find the following:
#23 — nice tackle.
#23 — blew up runner in backfield.
#23 — caught runner in backfield/major loss of yardage.
#23 — nailed kid on punt return.
So, let’s just say Ethan Loy was busy. And he had some help too, as Coupeville’s defensive line made its presence felt on the first play Langley ran, with Steven Cope and Uriel Liquidano smashing through the line to team up and decimate the runner.
The two teams opened with a virtually scoreless first quarter, only to see South Whidbey sneak in from the eight-yard line with a second left on the clock.
Coupeville, using a mix of smash-mouth runs and short passes from quarterback Hunter Downes (he hit Blake Gallahar and Cope in the early going), made progress on the offensive side of the ball, but tripped themselves up with several costly turnovers.
An interception set up South Whidbey’s first score, and then, with the Wolves driving for a potential tying score, an errant lob ended up in the arms of a Cougar defender, who rambled 90+ yards for the game-busting pick six, while repeatedly looking behind himself every other step. Probably in fear that Loy was about to go kamikaze on him.
The Wolf defense held admirably after that, until the South Whidbey coaches decided to rub a bit of salt in the wound, opting to throw a touchdown pass on a roll-out with just 29 seconds left in the game.
Still, even in defeat, the play of eighth-graders like Cope, Gallahar and Ethan Marx bodes well for the immediate future of Wolf football, while seventh-graders such as Downes, Lion DeShong and the ever-rampaging Loy have announced what’s coming.
In Loy’s case, it’s a tackling machine who should make CHS coaches very happy in a year or two.
