This is your time, your moment, CHS. Be like Tiffany Briscoe and fight for it. (John Fisken photo)
The time is now.
The time to pick your foot up and plant it firmly on the necks of your opponents and say with one voice, “This is our league! These are our titles!”
Coupeville High School wandered in the desert for a decade, emerging from its time in the 1A/2A Cascade Conference with a lot of losses, a fair amount of pain — both physical and emotional — and a decided lack of championship banners.
Repeated abuse at the hands of private schools with scholarship athletes and 2A schools with three times the student bodies of CHS, the smallest official 1A school in the state, did some serious damage to the psyche of Wolf athletes.
The young men and women who rep the red and black today are not necessarily less talented than those who once starred for Coupeville in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
But one thing has been missing, and until that fully returns, they will not equal the accomplishments of the days when names like Sherman, Marti, Bagby, Bonacci or Grasser graced the roster.
Those athletes, during those times, believed they would win. They took the field or court primed to dominate and they often did.
A decade of being abused erased a lot of that confidence.
But, things have begun to change, especially with the move to the 1A Olympic League.
Coupeville will always be the smallest school, but Port Townsend and Chimacum are reasonably close in size and Klahowya, while being large, does not have the scariness factor that grew around Archbishop Thomas Murphy and King’s.
The Eagles are beatable (maybe not in girls’ soccer, where they won a state title) but in just about everything else.
The Wolves finished second in girls’ soccer, came within a play of reaching the playoffs in football, surprised everyone by dominating the postseason boys’ tennis tourney and were always competitive in volleyball.
And now we sit at what could, what should, be a golden moment for Coupeville.
Basketball banners are sitting there, waiting to be won, on both sides of the ball.
The Wolf girls, while they have endured a roller coaster of a season, are 6-4 overall and tied for first in the league at 1-0.
The other three squads are a combined 2-22.
And none of them have a Makana Stone, who can dominate the game on both ends of the court. They don’t have a Kacie Kiel raining down jumpers or a Julia Myers channeling her inner Dennis Rodman.
None of them are as deep as the Wolves, nine girls playing as one, each offering their own unique value. A different night, a different hero, all the way until the end.
The Wolf boys have a bit more of a hill to go up, at 3-6, 0-1, but that league loss was by a bucket.
The other three squads? Also a combined 2-22.
And they don’t have a Wiley Hesselgrave playing like a middle linebacker minus the pads, a Matt Shank swooping in for rebounds or an Aaron Trumbull, who stayed tough through the rough times and will carry his team to the good times in his final days.
Tuesday Coupeville faces off with Port Townsend, which sits winless as a school this winter. The Redhawks are 0-7 on the boys side, 0-8 on the girls.
It is a moment when the Wolves need to step up and make a powerful statement.
A moment when they need to take the court and send a message. A loud one.
Basketball belongs to the Wolves. End of story.
Kick off a second half run and reignite the glory days.
Make your gym rock again, especially on that day when you break a decade-long dry spell and raise championship banners up high.
This is not me blowing smoke up your rears.
This is fact. You, the Coupeville Wolves, are the best basketball teams in this league this year.
Will you accept your destiny? Will you put the work in over the next six weeks? Will you seize what is a golden opportunity?
I believe in you. Do you believe in yourself?
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