Coupeville Sports

Dost I dare show my face in C-Town?

“It’s called COUPEVILLE SPORTS, man, not make the South Enders feel better about living on the wrong end of the Island Sports!!”

The backlash to the backlash begins.

For 10 months, I have chafed South Whidbey High School, their athletes, school administrators (who unofficially banned me from their school, but won’t admit it publicly, which would give me another half-assed cause to rant about) and, most notably, their fans.

The Falcons are Coupeville’s closest rival, in proximity and size and they’re easy to tweak, since they get so passively-aggressively riled about it.

If silent, vaguely-disapproving glares could kill my soul, I would have died a painful death during the basketball playoff games in the Langley gym last winter.

But now, to the horror of my die-hard red-and-black-wearing fan base, I’ve gone and scandalized the world by writing not one, but two, positive, non-snarky feature stories about SWHS athletes — Maia Sparkman and Parker Collins.

There’s even a chance there will be more, as Cassie Neil and Tera Applegate have said yes to the idea.

Which leads some Wolf fans to loudly scream that I’ve sold my soul to the hippie devils.

Maybe. Just a bit.

But if I have, I did it for several reasons.

One, as more and more South Enders read the blog, if they realize I’m willing to be fair to their Falcons — at least some of the time — there’s a chance a couple of them decide, what the hey, let’s advertise on the fastest-rising sports web site on Whidbey Island.

Could happen. Should happen.

My contact info is located under “David’s Best Ever Friends” and my rates are exceedingly reasonable. Just saying.

It also gives me another chance to head-slap the Canadian-owned newspapers of this Island. Right hand hits the Whidbey News-Times, left hand smacks the Whidbey Examiner, then both heads whip back and bonk the South Whidbey Record Three Stooges-style.

Cause, despite all the filthy lucre the Canadian Corporate Overlords up in Moosejaw seem to be willing to pump into their pale versions of what once were proud papers — they flat out aren’t doing the job. And man, the Record provides the slowest, thinnest coverage of them all.

Those two features on Sparkman and Collins — from a part-timer who DOESN’T EVEN COVER SOUTH WHIDBEY — trumps what the Record has produced in the last year. Ouch.

And thirdly, you always have to keep ’em guessing. No one expects Coupeville Sports to cover cars running into buildings in Oak Harbor, but every time I do, the page views roll in … just like the cars do before hitting the wall.

Now, let’s be honest here.

Once a new high school season starts up and the Wolves go back to pounding on the Falcons (we own The Bucket in football, baseball and softball spanked you hard and in golf, your best golfers were … Coupeville kids … so facts are facts), will I offend again?

Will I remind the folks in Langley that their former mayor enjoys jail food? Probably.

And they’ll surely remind me of their deeply-held belief that Coupeville smells like poop.

But I DON’T hate South Whidbey. Some of my favorite people were born and raised there.

I can celebrate their athletes — who seem like really intelligent, well-spoken, talented young men and women — and still poke the South End and its high school for not being as awesome as Coupeville is, in my eyes.

There’s a big difference between hate and spirited rivalry.

Hate is what a person feels for carpetbaggers who profit off of other people’s writing, then sell out the heritage of proud papers to maple syrup-chuggin’ robber barons who promptly erase that paper’s history (and all the bylines).

THOSE are the people deserving of a righteous head slap.

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