Coupeville Sports

“Save us, Mrs. Butterworth! You’re our only hope!!”

Someone needs to save my fingers.

Someone needs to go back in time, to that moment in 2009 when I got an unexpected $10,000 from my grandmother’s estate, to the moment BEFORE I blew most of it on (an admittedly awesome) DVD collection which now sits in a dark storage shed owned by the spawn of Satan, and slap me.

Hard. And often.

Go back to that moment, in the final days of David’s DVD Den, when I was entwined with the lawyer who would one day own my copies of “Hell Up in Harlem,” “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death,” “Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem” (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and 2,500+ other shiny lil’ discs.

I remember the giddy stupidity of those days, as box after box arrived from Amazon. Popping the protective plastic inserts. Watching the florescent lights shining off of Jodie Foster’s face.

The complete Abbott and Costello.

The complete Woody Allen. The complete Coen brothers. The complete Scorsese. And on and on.

The Frankie and Annette beach party movies. The Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster flicks.

The complete Shirley Temple (hey now! she’s the greatest movie star of all time, so back off!!).

A nearly complete collection of ’70s black exploitation flicks. Pam Grier. Need I say more?

Every bizarre one-off film I wanted (“El Topo,” “The Candy Snatchers,” “Shortbus,” “God Told Me To”) — who cares if they ever rent? I didn’t!!

Opera. An entire set of two-disc (with booklet!) opera DVDs, shot live in Italy. Cause why the hell not?!?!

If someone had knocked me out of my daze in those unfortunate days, maybe I wouldn’t be paying the bills now as a dish dog.

Slowly crushing my fingers — the digits that type these stories — abusing them in a semi-nightly dance with half-eaten rice, razor-sharp mussel shells, butter-coated lemon wedges and some other things it’s best to just not think about as you try and jam them down a drain that is not fond of actually … draining.

I have worked in far worse places than the restaurant I work at now, which is a classy joint run by nice people.

But the reality is, nothing about being a dish dog, wherever it is, is fun.

It is, at its core, a stinky, depressing slog through the bottom end of the sewer, and it is beating the crud out of my fingers.

So I daydream about a time loop and that $10,000 coming back around and me being smarter and sitting outside full-time this spring, doing nothing but covering sports while others deal with au gratin potatoes night.

I don’t even need $10,000 for that. $3,000 and I coast for four months. And then…

Maybe we should go back further.

To that time when a 23-year old decided after two-plus years as a sports editor at a twice-weekly paper to “try something new” and ended up out on a run-down mussel boat in Penn Cove — still the worst job in the world next to being the eyeball-licker at a slaughterhouse.

Let’s punch that guy. Right in the stupid face.

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Six months today.

Six months of mocking ATM, of spats with Sultan, of major brouhahas with South Whidbey. And don’t even get me started on the carpet baggers who sold the Examiner to the robber barons from Canada.

Six months of joyous highs and rough lows. Six months of epic wins and tortuous losses. Six months of returning to covering events live and in-person again, and remembering just how hard the bleachers are, and how frickin’ cold and windy an open-air football stadium can be in November.

Six months of writing whatever I feel like, running ten billion photos and (mostly) staying one step ahead of the authorities.

Whether you think I’m a force for good (shining spotlights on middle school and JV players) or a P.T. Barnum of the internet age, ranting and raving and mixing gossip, smack talk and too many exclamation points, one thing’s for sure. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

Someone out there is reading me. 75,000 page views (and a delightful collection of hate mail from the crayon scrawlers in Sultan) doesn’t lie.

Where is this all going? That’s a good question.

It’s a bit of a high-wire act. Push the local school administrations too far, and they might cut off my access. But, the time of reporting, three days later, in clinical, stale prose, doesn’t interest me anymore.

If I’ve learned anything in these six months, it’s this — I don’t know anything.

Stories I thought would be big sometimes thudded. Stories I thought of as an afterthought sometimes shot upwards, with the page view meter clicking away.

You never know.

The question I get asked most (well, after “Did you hit your head?”) is, “What are the most read stories in the history of the site?”

At this moment, out of 625 articles, the top 10 are:

1) “URGENT: Local fisherman missing, help needed!!”
2) “Sad end to hunt for local fisherman”
3) “EXCLUSIVE: South Whidbey’s best player walks, talks!!”
4) “Faith guides Brett Arnold through hard times”
5) “Keep fighting with the grace that you always have!!”
6) “Farm Dog — forever a friend of the world!!”
7) “This is our Island!!”
8) “South Whidbey 30, Refs 26, Wolves 45!!”
9) “Fleming, Arnold go bonkers in close loss!!”
10) “Wolf receiver juggles dirty diapers, big pass plays!!”

And the least read of all-time? I’m not gonna tell you the answer to that one. Wouldn’t be fair to the person involved.

I can tell you that Coupeville High School senior Caleb “The Page Hit King” Valko has appeared in an astonishing 104 articles, followed by Bessie Walstad (93), Nick Streubel (86) and Breeanna Messner (75). I refuse to tally up everyone’s totals, but watch out for Wolf sophomores Madeline Strasburg, Kacie Kiel and McKayla Bailey — they’re coming for Valko.

And that points to the biggest change in my sports-writing over the past six months.

After years of working as a virtually non-paid freelancer for the Examiner, I am now a virtually non-paid blogger who actually cares again.

You can’t watch these kids in person, game in and game out, and not care. Am I an impartial journalist? Not anymore.

I actually punched my notebook after one play during a game this season, and got an arched eyebrow from my high school journalism teacher (and News-Times sports editor) Jim Waller.

And I’m fine with that.

Before I started coupevillesports.com, I knew Valko as a name that popped up in football, basketball and track stories. Now I know that he’s a complex dude, an onion with many layers.

He may put on a too-cool-for-school persona at times, but he’s actually a sensitive, caring guy who loves his mama, bleeds for his teammates and gets excited about free cupcakes.

Without doing this blog, I would never have known that Jared Helmstadter was just two pounds when he was born prematurely (he’s 6-foot now), that Messner is hilarious when she’s gassed after wisdom tooth surgery, that Kole Kellison actually has a dry sense of humor, why Bailey is called Turtle Shell and a million other little things that form a grand mosaic of Coupeville and its athletes.

But now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

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First of all, they have to deal with me.

But get past that (and I’m not sure the thin-skinned folks in Langley ever will…) and, especially at the high school level, you have a constant barrage of things to deal with.

You have to win games, you have to teach skills, but you also have to deal with the petri dish of emotion that is a high school.

Unlike professional sports, where you’re paid, so who really cares about your feelings, trying to hold together the often-fragile psyches of a group of teenagers while making hard decisions based on ability can be amazingly nerve-wracking.

Certainly, you coach at the sports factories like ATM, and they might can you, even if you win 47 games in four years and go to back-to-back state title games.

But at schools like Coupeville, where the expectations are a little more tamped down, there is still the eternal debate. Who plays? How much do they play? When do they play? Do you try to win games or find a moment on the floor for everyone?

Every parent thinks they know the game better than the coach. Every fan thinks they know the game better than the coach. Every writer babbles on and on and then everyone realizes, no they certainly DO NOT know the game better than the coach.

If you are a player here in Coupeville, a parent here in Coupeville, there is one important thing to remember. Coupeville doesn’t cut players.

We can’t. We don’t have enough bodies.

And yet, at a lot of schools, people get cut. They don’t make the team at all. They don’t get to wear the uniform, to be on the bench, to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Coupeville, like other small towns, gives everyone a chance to play. You show up, you put in the work, you get a chance.

In the last six months, I have seen coaches in all sports bend over backwards to make sure even their bench warmers get a moment. A chance to take the field. A chance to say they wore the red and black in a live game.

It happened in football, tennis, soccer, you name it. Basketball is no different.

I have seen them set up plays to make sure every basketball player scored before the season was done.

We are Coupeville and we celebrate all our players.

But they keep score for a reason. Teams are trying to win games, and the reality is, not all players are equal. We cheer them all on, but when it comes to crunch time, any coach who deserves to be called a coach has to make tough decisions. Decisions that will give their squad the best chance to win.

That’s why they keep score.

In a magical world, every player would get to play in every game. Of course, in a lot of athletic worlds, you would already have had your dream crushed four months back.

We put a uniform on their backs. We cheer for them. And, if we really, truly care about their development as players and people, we step back and consider why coaches make the decisions they make.

There is a Senior Night for a reason. A time to reflect on the players who have given, day in and day out, to their programs. A night to shine.

The playoffs are stark and unsentimental. A time to win, a time to put your best team on the floor, the team that will give you the best chance to achieve victory and advance on to the next day.

It may sound cruel. Sports are cruel by nature.

If you don’t know that by now, go look at the athletic programs at big schools.

It will give you a whole new appreciation of what Coupeville coaches accomplish on a daily basis.

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