Coupeville gunner Mollie Bailey lofts a shot near the end of the 2019-2020 basketball season. (Photos by JohnsPhotos.net)
Wolves (left to right) Hannah Davidson, Tia Wurzrainer, Avalon Renninger, and Scout Smith join coach Scott Fox on Senior Night.
You never know.
A year ago today, the Coupeville High School girls basketball team was eliminated from the playoffs, KO’d by a barrage of three-balls off of the fingertips of hot-shooting Meridian players.
As the players and fans departed the CHS gym, until just Wolf coach Scott Fox was left standing in the half-darkened building, it seemed to be a time of transition.
February 11, 2020, said the calendar.
Winter sports were done, with the Coupeville boys hoops team having been similarly knocked out of the postseason a few days before.
It was the end of the road for Wolf seniors Scout Smith, Hannah Davidson, Tia Wurzrainer, and Avalon Renninger — a group which had played together since middle school.
“We fought really hard,” Fox said in the half-light. “Our seniors played their hearts out. They were our backbone and our leaders. I couldn’t be more proud of those girls.”
But, even as basketball faded from sight, the promise of spring sports helped pick up the mood.
Wurzrainer, who had celebrated her birthday that night, earning a huge roar from the crowd with a late-game bucket, was set to join Renninger for a final season of tennis.
Smith would return to the diamond, where CHS was primed to make a run at a second-straight trip to state.
There was even a chance Davidson, who had played softball in little league, might be talked into joining her for one last fling.
The Wolves needed a first-baseman, and she fit the bill — if Scooter could pull off the sweet-talk.
One season ends, another lurks on the horizon. It has been ever so.
As I left the gym, walking across the parking lot on a crisp evening, I coughed a couple of times.
Something I had done for much of the winter, as flu and cold season mixed with sitting crammed into gyms with other Wolf fans — a perfect breeding ground for my annual rite of “gym cough.”
There had been a few news articles about a new virus building in a place called Wuhan, but on Feb. 11, 2020, that was less than an afterthought.
Sports roll on, as they always have, and always will, and going outside to freeze during spring sports would ease the tickle in the back of my throat.
It was ever so … and then it wasn’t.
Very few people alive in the world the night of Feb. 11, 2020 were also alive when the Spanish Flu did its dirty work, so COVID-19 is a new experience for most of us.
The thought which was never present — that a girls basketball playoff loss to Meridian would be the final live high school sports event in Coupeville for a year — came at us fast.
The virus erupted.
Schools closed.
Spring sports vanished without being played.
There were a handful of middle school basketball games played after Feb. 11, before the CMS hoops season was also shut down, but high school sports ended that night.
And now, here we are on Feb. 11, 2021, and they haven’t returned. At least in Coupeville.
There have been some practices, as the COVID rules have shifted over the months, but no seasons, no games, no return to play.
Plans are in place for CHS and its partners in the Northwest 2B/1B League to restart Feb. 22 — just a week and a half from now — with spring sports first up.
Whether that happens depends on a number of factors, including whether Island County continues to get shafted by being lumped together with Whatcom County under Governor Jay Inslee’s new regional reopening system.
In a best-case scenario, a Coupeville High School sports team will compete against a rival at some point this month, whether it’s Wolf baseball, softball, girls tennis, or track and field which draws the first game on a schedule which hasn’t been made public yet.
Worst-case scenario, things drag on, and we lose the entire 2020-2021 school athletic year, tacked on to the loss of spring 2020 sports.
I have no clue, and neither do you.
Unless you’re a NWL Athletic Director like Coupeville’s Willie Smith, to pretend otherwise is pointless.
But at least we know both options, best-case and worst-case, are possibilities, as well as some middle compromise.
Which makes it somewhat easier to deal with. Sort of.
The night of Feb. 11, 2020, we left the gym, headed to our vehicles, wrapped in blissful ignorance.
It was just another game. The end of one season, and the start of another.
Until it wasn’t.
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