A mere six months until Friday Night Lights return to the prairie. (David Stern photo)
Is 198 days before the first game too early to talk about the Coupeville High School football schedule?
Of course not.
Sure, the Wolves don’t even have a head coach right now, as Athletic Director Willie Smith conducts a search to replace the departed Jon Atkins.
The plan is to have a new gridiron boss in place by May, one whose career track will more closely emulate former coach Ron Bagby (25+ years) than the four guys who have combined to deliver eight seasons since Bags retired.
But, while we wait for that announcement, the Wolf football schedule has popped up online, and it reflects a mix of the past with the future.
To get right to it, this is what’s planned as of today, with (*) marking league games in the new North Sound Conference.
Aug. 31 @ Port Townsend — (6:00)
Sept. 7 Vashon Island — (6:00)
Sept. 14 Friday Harbor — (TBD)
Sept. 21 @ La Conner — (7:00)
Sept. 28 King’s (*) — (7:00)
Oct. 5 Sultan (*) — (7:00)
Oct. 12 @ South Whidbey (*) — (7:00)
Oct. 19 @ Cedar Park Christian (*) — (7:00)
Oct. 26 Granite Falls (*) — (7:00)
First things first, it’s a nine-game schedule, and not 10 games as it was the past two seasons when CHS played as part of the Olympic/Nisqually League hybrid.
Week #10 will play out in one of three ways for Coupeville football.
Finish in the top two in their six-team league and they are playoff-bound.
Miss the postseason but finish third or fourth and the Wolves get a season-ending crossover game with either the #3 or #4 school from the 1A division of the Northwest Conference.
That four-team league features Meridian, Nooksack Valley, Mount Baker and Lynden Christian.
The schools which finish fifth and sixth in the North Sound Conference football standings will be given an option of playing a crossover game against another non-playoff team.
If they choose to do so, it will be up to their AD’s to find an opponent.
A major plus is the schedule has CHS playing five games at home, and six on Whidbey.
The only road trips are short hops to Port Townsend and La Conner and a little bit longer one (47.2 miles) to Bothell.
Which, I’d like to point out, is still six miles shorter than a trip to Silverdale to face Klahowya has been the past four years.
The season kicks off with rematches with the RedHawks and Pirates, though this time they will be non-conference foes.
Then comes back-to-back tilts with a pair of Northwest 2B League schools who would have been new league mates if the WIAA had approved Coupeville’s bid to drop from 1A to 2B.
After that, the heart of the season is five league games as Coupeville and its compatriots open play in their new league.
It’s not marked yet, but Homecoming likely falls either Sept. 28 or Oct. 5.
After several years of opening the season against South Whidbey, the annual battle for The Bucket, which Coupeville has won two years straight, now drops much deeper into the season.
Add the intrigue of it being a league game again, and the stakes are just that much higher.
Some may ask why Coupeville immediately returns to Langley in 2018 after playing there in 2017, but that’s because a new league, and the two-year schedule that comes with it, just happens to break down that way.
The Falcons will fly to Cow Town in 2019.
While the Wolves will be a different team this fall, having lost a number of key seniors and facing a coaching change, they match-up well with their proposed foes.
Coupeville went 3-1 against teams from this schedule in 2017, beating La Conner, Vashon and South Whidbey, while falling to Port Townsend.
Eight of the nine teams the Wolves are scheduled to play in 2018 had losing records in 2017, including, yes, King’s, which finished 3-7.
The lone school coming off of a winning season is South Whidbey, and that comes with a caveat, as the Falcons, taking a year off from the 1A/2A Cascade Conference to rebuild their program, ran the table against much-smaller teams.
After absorbing losses to fellow 1A schools Coupeville and Chimacum to open, the Falcons won their final seven while facing 2B schools and a Canadian program playing football for the first time.
