One basket of balls for each season of high school tennis I played back in the day at Tumwater. Who wants to relaunch the sport in Cow Town? (Starla Seal photo)
There are brand new tennis courts next to the Coupeville High School gym, but it remains questionable when they will be used by a Wolf team.
The CHS girls, who played an all road-trip season this past spring while the courts were built, will be ready to claim the area in 2025.
But Coupeville boys could go first this fall … if they can get some players.
There is currently one player signed up with the start of fall sports practices set for Monday, and the program needs more like a minimum of six to be viable.
CMS 8th graders are eligible to play for the high school team, which could help if middle schoolers seize the chance to play.
Be brave and get rewarded! You’re not going to be sitting on the bench, that’s for sure.
The CHS boys’ tennis program has been AWOL since 2019, when Coupeville and South Whidbey competed in the Emerald City League against a bunch of ultra-rich Seattle private schools.
After that, the netters got shut down by the pandemic, then hurt by the school’s reclassification from 1A to 2B.
Boys’ soccer, which is played in the spring in 1A, competes in the fall in 2B, creating a logjam with football, tennis, and cross country also competing for male athletes.
Coupeville was the only school in its current home — the seven-team Northwest 2B/1B League — to try and field four male sports programs in the same season.
Someone was going to lose the numbers battle, and so far, it’s been tennis.
While the program has been shuttered through the past four seasons, new CHS tennis coaches Tim Stelling and Starla Seal, who made their debut with the girls in the spring, still have hopes of relaunching things.
Now, it’s just a question of whether potential players show up starting Monday.
