Matt Hilborn ripped off a 12-yard scoring run Friday, his second touchdown of the season. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)
This was a rough one to sit through for many, many reasons.
A spectacularly inefficient refereeing crew derailed any sense of momentum Friday night, raining down a never-ending stream of penalty flags and stretching out the Coupeville vs. Charles Wright Academy football game well beyond its recommended running time.
To their credit, the refs weren’t one-sided.
To their discredit, they were just flat out stinky on both ends of the field, though they ultimately stung the Wolves worse.
And frankly, Coupeville’s gridiron players didn’t respond tremendously well, allowing frustration to seep in as they watched a one-score game rapidly slip away and turn into a 52-20 defeat.
The loss, coming in the Olympic/Nisqually League opener for both teams, drops the Wolves to 2-2 overall, 0-1 in league play.
There was a moment, late in the first half, when it looked like Coupeville was in control of the game.
Rallying from a 13-0 deficit, the Wolves broke through on an electrifying 68-yard touchdown pass from Hunter Downes to Cameron Toomey-Stout.
It came on a fourth-and-eight from their own 32-yard line, with Downes double-clutching, then rifling a shot into the great unknown on which his speedy receiver outran a CWA defender to snag the ball in full stride.
A play later, Wolf senior Hunter Smith picked off the Tarrier QB for the second time — his first interception allowed Smith to break a tie with Josh Bayne and claim the CHS career record for picks — and Coupeville was starting to roll.
Downes marched the Wolves 68 yards down the field, mixing passes to Smith and Toomey-Stout with a run by Matt Hilborn and a crucial face mask penalty by Charles Wright.
Coupeville was sitting first and goal at the eight-yard line, ready to retake the lead and carry all the momentum into halftime.
But it wasn’t to be, as a short run by Sean Toomey-Stout was stuffed at the five, then three straight passes fell incomplete.
At which point, everything which could go wrong for Coupeville did.
It started with Sean Toomey-Stout, Coupeville’s leading tackler on defense this season, getting dinged up and spending the rest of the game on the sideline undergoing concussion protocol.
Then the refs got nasty, issuing three consecutive penalties on the Wolves, allowing CWA enough life to stage a miracle last-second drive and tack on a score on the first half’s final play.
While the refs shocked everyone by not throwing a single flag in the third quarter — don’t worry, they would make up for it in spades in the fourth — Charles Wright’s running game, personified by Asher Shakoor-Asadi, did more than enough damage on its own.
The silky-smooth Tarrier junior busted off two more touchdown runs, giving him four on the night, and a 27-0 third quarter surge crushed every last Wolf hope.
Coupeville didn’t go down without a fight, getting touchdown runs in the fourth from Downes and Hilborn, but that was small consolation.
The flags flew in flurries in the fourth, Smith was blatantly robbed of a touchdown reception by a ref whose seeing-eye dog promptly slunk out of the stadium in shame, and then the Wolves took a late sucker punch.
Junior Chris Battaglia, who is #2 on the team both in rushing yardage and tackles, was ejected when a tackle which went high was questionably ruled a punch.
That’s a double whammy, since an ejection in high school play results in the player being suspended for a game.
Barring a successful appeal — and WIAA rules make it virtually impossible to win, going as far as not allowing teams to present video proof of the ref being wrong — Battaglia will miss next Friday’s game at Vashon Island.
By the end the game was well out of hand, both on the scoreboard and with the zebra’s inability to understand their own rule book.
Much time was spent with the reffing crew huddled together arguing/debating/trying to correct blatant mistakes and it was beyond tiring.
“There’s another flag on the field” vied with “oh lord, they’re not talking again, are they” as two minutes on the game clock frequently translated into 10 minutes on people’s watches.
In the mash-up of emotion at the end — coaches on both sidelines were visibly upset at times, though genuine anger ruled on Coupeville’s sidelines by the final gun — a few strong plays by role players might have been missed.
Lineman Kyle Rockwell, making his debut, earned praise from an otherwise beyond-frustrated CHS coach Jonathan Atkins, and Jean Lund-Olsen showed no quit.
A botched Wolf running play on the next-to-last play of the night turned into a fumble which Charles Wright almost brought back for a game-capping 80-yard defensive touchdown.
Lund-Olsen though, sprinting full tilt from one end of the field to the other, caught the shocked Tarrier and slung him to the turf at about the two-yard line.
On a long, frustrating, angry night, it was an unexpected positive note for the Wolves, a sign that, even with the world conspiring against them, they’ll keep on fighting.
