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Archive for the ‘Ranting and Raving’ Category

Cry them big, salty tears for us.

The streets of Everett are flooded with big, salty tears this morning.

This is unheard of. This just doesn’t happen. This is … delightful.

News that Archbishop Thomas Murphy’s football team was run over like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon — for the second week in a row — must be pleasant news for every football coach and fan in the state.

Last week, it was King’s that thrashed ATM 40-15. Last night it was Lakewood’s turn, and they blasted the Mildcats 49-0 to make it two years in a row that they’ve laid a whuppin’ on the former terrors of the Cascade Conference.

The shine is off ATM. Well, it’s been off of them for a very long time, since they stabbed former coach Dave Ward and a very good AD in the back before the season started, in an effort to appease some big bucks boosters.

So pardon me if I don’t get terribly choked up to watch their football program crumble at the edges.

Shutout for the first time ever in a league game. Back-to-back losses. Couldn’t happen to a nicer school.

 

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A small portion of the ’89 THS tennis squad. I’m third from the left. The tall kid in the white hat is Brad Otton, who went on to play QB for Southern Cal. During one practice I nailed him with an overhead to the crotch and he went down wailing. It was the best shot I hit in three years.

First they got pounded on the field. Now they’re getting pounded by the pollsters.

Archbishop Thomas Murphy, the school that everyone else loves to hate, got smashed 40-15 by King’s last Thursday in a gridiron rumble of the gods. With Knight quarterback Billy Green scoring at will — five touchdowns through the air and another on the ground — ATM got rolled, pure and simple.

The loss reverberated throughout the state and when the Associated Press released their latest high school football rankings this afternoon, ATM’s fall from grace became complete.

No longer the number one ranked team in Class 2A, the Mildcats aren’t even the top ranked 2A school in the Cascade Conference any more. That distinction now belongs to Lakewood, which sports a shiny 3-0 mark and holds down the fifth spot in the poll, one slot ahead of the free-falling Everett squad.

Capital, Othello, Lynden and Prosser hold down the top four spots in the poll now.

Which strikes me as sort of odd, since Capital was never a football power back when I attended nearby Tumwater and the T-Birds routinely pounded on the Cougars.

My enduring memories of the richniks who wore the cardinal and the gold both spring from my questionable three-year run as a T-Bird netter.

The first involves tennis lessons I took from the Capital coach one summer, a man who taught us to react super-fast by stretching nets across a basketball court and having us hit inside. Tennis balls come skidding off a basketball court hard, fast and at weird angles, and the first time you take an exploding fuzzy yellow ball to the crotch, you learn to move a bit quicker.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The other memory — perhaps my best moment on a high school tennis court — came during a match at Capital when I squared off with a foreign exchange player who cussed at me in his native language for two hours. I got ticked and screamed back the few Norwegian cuss words I had picked up from my grandfather — AKA the Ol’ Bastard — and we soon had players from both teams hanging off the fence, goading us on.

My saint of a coach, easy-going Hawaiian Lionel Barona, ignored us and remained as far away as possible, watching our number one player, Daryl “Psycho” Pfaff, win yet another match. Way down at the end of Capital’s endless series of courts, however, the riffraff on the squad came close to starting our second riot of the ’89 season (the other involved a very long trip to the pit of humanity — Aberdeen, WA — tennis courts high up on a hill soaked in gas, moronic preteens throwing rocks at us and an altercation involving a school bus and a Corvette in a McDonald’s parking lot).

I didn’t win a whole ton of matches in my three years in the green and gold, but I won that day. For THS! For America!!

Oh yes, but we were talking football several hundred paragraphs back…

So, yeah, King’s, which unlike ATM and Lakewood, is on Coupeville’s schedule this season (Oct. 19 on Whidbey) remains a solid numero uno in the 1A poll, claiming all of the first-place votes to easily outpace Royal and Cashmere.

If I didn’t mention it, the Knights and the free-wheeling Green are a pretty scary bunch. Maybe not as scary as a pack of late ’80s tennis players in short shorts trying to start an international incident, but scary in their own way.

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In this photo by Wendy McCormick, Wolf netters Zane Bundy (left) and Connor McCormick give future opponents a preview of the Gaze ‘o Death that awaits them over the next four years. “We’re coming for you, and you are not ready for the destruction we are bringing!”

We are at war.

On one side of town — a giant media corporation funded by filthy, filthy Canadian money (well, until they buy me out, then it’s sweet, sweet Canadian cash).

On the other side of town, coming to you from a bunker under Penn Cove, on a computer powered by three small hamsters, one of whom just passed out and jammed the server, the free voice of the people — coupevillesports.com!!

Like Patrick Swayze and Lea Thompson before us (“Wolverines!!”), we are stickin’ it to The Man, only instead of shooting them in the knee-caps, we’re just symbolically knee-capping them. At least that’s our cover story.

And how are we doing this? How can one man take down a giant corporate behemoth?

With a little help from the public, that’s how.

I’m doing this in my spare time, and while it would be nice to get out and cover all the events in person, I am not paid handsomely and showered in benefits by my Canadian Corporate Overlords. So, I need your help.

And I’ve been getting it.

Thanks to people like Shelli Trumbull, Maryann Engle, Kim Andrews and, as of an hour ago, Wendy McCormick, who are all allowing me to poach sports photos from their Facebook pages, we have shiny, happy pics of Coupeville athletes to go with my rantings and ravings.

This is how a revolution is started. One person at a time. Every one who provides coupevillesports.com with pics, or stats, or a heads-up about a story (and, unlike Big Brother down the street, we DO want JV, middle school and lil’ kid stuff, which is why we had 24 names in our most recent boys’ tennis story, while the Other Guys had just 12!) fires a shot for freedom, for anarchy in the streets.

I am here for you, the parents and students and fans of Coupeville. Use Facebook, email me at davidsvien@hotmail.com or drop stuff in my mailbox at 145 N. Sherman (it’s a big mail box, so baked goods fit nicely in there…).

Who’s afraid of the Canadian Corporate Overlords? Not me, as long as I have a town behind me.

 

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Great, now I’ve gone and got the Canadian Corporate Overlords all miffed…

I mean, what do you think they’re gonna say when they notice that an unpaid blogger (I’m actually $18 in the hole, after paying for my domain name) who DOESN’T EVEN COVER OAK HARBOR SPORTS has juicy news about Marshall Lobbestael, the one-time state title-winning quarterback at OHHS? News that their handsomely-compensated employees at Sound Publishing haven’t bothered to notice?

The sound you just heard is the pipeline of cool Canadian filthy lucre coming to a sudden, grinding halt, as the bean counters in Ottawa (or is it Halifax? Manitoba?) scream, “Just what are we paying these Whidbey Islanders for, anyway?!?!?!?”

But that’s what I’m here for, to tweak the Evil Empire and to do a community service by bringing you the cold, hard facts about Whidbey Island’s own — even when those folks have moved off The Rock.

Lobbestael, who went from flinging the pigskin for the Wildcats — in the days when current Coupeville gridiron coach Tony Maggio was on the OH staff — to tossing 300-yard games in college for Wazzu, is now following in the footsteps of Maggio.

He, and his former center on the ‘Cat title team of 2006, Edmundo Corrales, have joined the coaching staff at Sedro-Woolley High School this year. They were lured there by a chance to reunite with their head coach from their high school days, Dave Ward, who took the head job with the Cubs after being let go by an ignorant administration at Archbishop Thomas Murphy, where he had led the bad boys of the Cascade Conference to back-to-back trips to the state title game.

Now reunited, the trio who helped bring big-time attention to Whidbey Island football, are moving forward and instilling the love of the game in new players.

“High school football is all about playing and having fun. It was something I loved doing and something I wanted to be involved with on the coaching end,” Lobbestael was quoted in a piece by Trevor Pyle in The Skagit Valley Herald. “Throughout high school, I was lucky to have a great group of coaches. It made a good impression and a positive influence on my life.”

And now The Lobster is paying it forward.

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Milla is not impressed.

I freaked a guy out today.

Very few people walk on the section of barnacle-encrusted, mussel ‘n rock strewn beach that sits in front of my duplex at the corner of Sherman and Madrona. But, in that once every 60 days kind of way, there was a guy picking his way carefully across the minefields when I burst out of the bushes at the bottom of the Hill O’ Death, headed for the water for my afternoon encounter with Penn Cove.

His reaction to suddenly having a companion was akin to seeing a Sasquatch loom up out of the mist while trying to take a morning whiz out in the back country. Surprise didn’t seem to completely cover the look that shot across his face.

Once he had calmed down, and discovered, that yes, I was planning to go into the cold clutches of Penn Cove — willingly — he slowly backed away, surprise turned to a look of what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-you-and-don’t-let-it-get-on-me.

At this point, I am long past thinking about my twice daily attacks on Penn Cove as being anything out of the ordinary. It’s there. I do it. No, I don’t wear a wet suit — not even in October and November when there’s frost on the ground and icicles shooting up my crotch when I’m in the water.

Wet suits are for wusses, and I’m not a wuss. Plus, I can’t afford one.

But, I guess, if you don’t do what I do — and just about no one else seems to be willing to join the club — it may seem a little odd.

And, when I think about it, if I’ve been in the water 90 days in 2012 and, before that, I nailed 167 days in ’11, with most days being twice-a-day, then that’s more than 500 trips into the icy waters.

So, if I lost, say, three brain cells each trip (as many people seem to think), that would mean I had lost somewhere in the region of 1,500 plus brain cells.

Which might explain why I drove to Oak Harbor today and put down eight dollars to see Milla Jovovich, clad in skintight spandex, run around in slo-mo, thrashing zombies and the occasional 200-foot-tall big ‘n ugly, for an hour and a half of good-time brain cell-killing. And it might explain why I enjoyed myself, which I did.

No, of course not, there is absolutely no reason for there ever to have been a fifth movie in the “Resident Evil” series.

But then again, there’s probably no reason for me to plunge into Penn Cove twice a day, either. But I do.

Some things you just can’t explain. You just have to accept them for what they are. Then shake your head sadly and start backing away slowly.

 

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