Grant Steller and associates vie on the soccer pitch. (Morgan White photo)
Soccer, forever trying to confuse me.
If it’s not the mind-melting offside rule or the love of an 80-minute game ending in a scoreless tie, it’s the scheduling.
As in, while all of the games played by the Coupeville High School boy soccer squad this season are against fellow Northwest 2B/1B League schools, not all of them will count in the standings that way.
The Wolves have scrapped with Mount Vernon Christian, Cedar Park Christian-Lynnwood, and La Conner, winning the middle of those tilts.
And coming up next are home bouts with the top two NWL squads, Friday Harbor and defending state champion Orcas Island.
But, when that’s all said and done, while CHS will have five games in the win-loss column, none of them will have counted as league contests.
Instead, the final eight games of the regular season between Oct. 4-27, with one clash against each of the other eight schools to play boys soccer in the NWL, will be the “official” league games.
That stretch, and only that stretch, determines playoff seeding.
The quirk is a product of the fact the NWL picks up four outside schools — Lopez Island, Grace Academy, CPC, and Providence Classical Christian — for boys soccer, and boys soccer alone.
Those schools join Coupeville, MVC, Friday Harbor, Orcas Island, and La Conner, while NWL charter members Concrete and Darrington don’t field teams.
Having eight league rivals makes it nearly impossible to play each school twice.
NWL girls soccer, by contrast, has just four schools active in the sport — Coupeville, La Conner, MVC, and Friday Harbor, so six home-and-away league clashes are easy-peasy to schedule.
Orcas, Darrington, and Concrete don’t have female booters, and the league doesn’t import any outside girls squads to pad its numbers.
Technically, Lopez Island considers its soccer team co-ed, so Coupeville’s boys have faced an occasional girl during previous games.
In the end, Coupeville’s boys have a 13-game schedule, play the same team twice five times, but count only the last eight as league contests.
It also means when Friday Harbor KO’d Orcas earlier this week, handing the Viking boys their first home loss in five years, it didn’t have any impact on postseason seeding.
Their Oct. 11 rematch, however, could go a long way to deciding a league title.
In the end, Coupeville pitch guru Robert Wood looks at the whole affair with a bemused smile and a chuckle.
“Not sure why … don’t care either … that’s an administrative thing and I HATE admin work.”
And then he went back to describing the beauty of a scoreless tie.
