Hall o’ Fame inductees (clockwise, starting top left) Amanda d’Almeida, Alex Evans, Randy Dickson and Willie Smith’s 2010 CHS baseball squad.
Big hits, big scores, big titles — the group being inducted into the Coupeville Sports Hall o’ Fame today all excelled during their time repping the red and black as Wolves.
Two stellar athletes who excelled in multiple sports, a coach who led a revival on the prairie and the ultimate hitting machine, they make up the 58th class to enter these hallowed digital walls.
Welcome Amanda d’Almeida, Alex Evans, Randy Dickson and the 2010 CHS baseball squad, AKA “The Hit Machine,” as they join their fellow honorees.
From now on, they’ll reside atop the blog, under the Legends tab.
Our first person to the dais was brilliant on and off the field.
A co-valedictorian when she graduated in 2013, d’Almeida was aces in the classroom and aces in the arena.
Soccer was her first calling, where she was an All-Cascade Conference player who won every team award imaginable (MVP, Best Offensive Player, Best Defensive Player) over her sterling four-year run on the pitch.
The CHS Female Athlete of the Year her senior year, d’Almeida also swung a mean racket, scoring as both a doubles ace (where she teamed with fellow Hall o’ Famer Jessica Riddle) and a singles juggernaut.
A three-time district champ, she claimed MVP honors on the court and was a captain for both of her sports.
Evans, who graduated five years earlier, was a true three-sport threat who put up impressive numbers in all three of his sports.
On the gridiron, he hauled in passes (23 during his senior campaign), used his booming leg to keep the Wolves out of danger (2,500+ career yards as a kicker/punter) and was a beast on defense.
During his final go-around for the Wolves, Evans racked up 84 tackles his senior season, with six of those coming for a loss, including two sacks.
Put a basketball in his hands and he was deadly from long-range, swishing three-balls at a mad clip.
Evans sank 31 treys his senior season, which stands as the seventh-best single season put up by a Wolf sharpshooter between 1990-2015.
His best sport might have been baseball however, where he was a two-way threat, pacing the mound as a staff ace, while also rapping out his fair share of base-knocks at the plate.
Evans led Coupeville with 22 hits his senior year, wrapping up a four-year career in which he collected 66 hits overall.
Only six other Wolf players have topped that career total in the past 25 years.
Our third inductee, Dickson, is the quiet genius, a coach who achieved big results while never looking to toot his own horn.
He was a key member of the coaching staff under longtime CHS football guru Ron Bagby, but we’re putting Dickson in the Hall primarily for his work on the softball diamond.
Taking over a program that was going nowhere, he rebuilt the Wolves into contenders, first as a slow-pitch team, before the program had its biggest success in the fast-pitch era.
Coupeville, which had lost 40 straight games at one point, broke an eight-year drought to make it to Tri-Districts in 2000, then shocked the softball world two years later.
In their first year of playing fast-pitch, the Wolves, led by the titanic trio of Sarah Mouw, Ashley Ellsworth-Bagby and Tracy Taylor, won the only league title in program history, before coming one win away from a state title.
Under the guidance of Dickson, Coupeville won four of five game at state in 2002, falling only to eventual champ Adna, and claimed third place in 1A.
It remains the best showing by any CHS sports team at state in any sport.
One of Dickson’s fellow football coaches, Willie Smith, was the architect of our final honoree, the 2010 Wolf baseball squad.
During his days at the helm of the hardball program, the Wolves fought tooth and nail against stacked competition in the 1A/2A Cascade Conference, often as the only 1A school in the mix.
While other teams made a bigger post-season impact (the 2008 squad were district champs), the 2010 Wolves were the ultimate hitting machine.
And it’s not even close.
Cranking out 212 hits in 24 games, that CHS squad put together the best offensive season any Wolf hardball team has had in the past three decades.
The top four single-season marks for individual players from 1990-2016 all came that year, as Smith’s marauders pounded the ever-loving snot out of the ball.
So let’s honor Smith and the 11 Wolves who collected a base-knock that season.
Going in to the Hall, together, as a team, along with their hit totals from 2010:
Chad Brookhouse – 32
JD Wilcox – 31
Ian Smith – 30
Erik King – 27
Kevin Eaton – 22
Chase Griffin – 22
Alex McClain – 17
Sean Thurman – 12
Erik Wheat – 12
Jason Bagby – 6
Drew Chan – 1
Read Full Post »
