Makana Stone snatched Olympic League MVP honors while leading the Wolves, who won all nine league games by double digits. (John Fisken photos)
Aaron Curtin, state caliber.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
The first year of the all-new, all-exciting 1A Olympic League is all but done — softball is mid-way through its season and all the other sports are in the postseason, but all league games have been played for 2014-2015.
So, how did Coupeville High School do?
Let’s just say quality beats quantity.
Despite being the smallest of the four schools in the league (with just half the student body of Klahowya), the Wolves more than held their own in the 10 sports in which they compete as a team.
For this exercise, we are looking at football, volleyball, girls and boys soccer, girls and boys tennis, girls and boys basketball, softball and baseball.
Golf doesn’t count, as Christine Fields (who just won the Olympic League postseason tourney by 10 strokes, I might add) was a one-woman team.
She played against 1A/2A Cascade Conference competition during the regular season, when she trained and traveled with South Whidbey.
We’re also not counting track, which is largely an individual sport inside a team one.
With most meets involving multiple teams from 1A and 2A (and, sometimes 3A), team wins and losses have little meaning.
Seriously, go look at the Olympic League website and try and figure out how they compute track team records. It makes no sense.
P.S. — If we go by their convoluted computing, Coupeville is the 1A girls’ regular season track champs.
But all anyone really looks at is how individual athletes (and relay teams) do at the state meet, so we’re not adding track into this team tally.
The stats:
Student body size (WIAA numbers at start of the school year):
Klahowya (455)
Port Townsend (327)
Chimacum (237)
Coupeville (225)
Total league wins across the 10 sports:
Klahowya (52)
Coupeville (40)
Chimacum (23)
Port Townsend (20)
League titles:
Klahowya (5) Volleyball, girls soccer, boys tennis, baseball, boys soccer
Coupeville (2) Girls basketball, girls tennis
Chimacum (2) Boys basketball, softball
Port Townsend (1) Football
Best league record:
Coupeville girls basketball (9-0) **Wolf JV also went 9-0**
Klahowya baseball (9-0)
State titles (so far):
Klahowya girls soccer
More positives for Coupeville, you ask?
The Wolves may have lost the regular season boys’ tennis title, but they stormed back to dethrone Klahowya in the postseason league tourney.
Plus, unlike Chimacum and Port Townsend, they garnered at least one league win in every one of the 10 sports, just like Klahowya.
In the end, what can we take away from all this?
One, Klahowya is good, especially in soccer, but didn’t really dominate across the board as much as you might have expected with its size advantage.
It is not ATM or King’s, and the Wolves can compete with the Eagles in almost any sport, any night.
Two, the numbers back my feeling that we are back in a golden age for female athletes at CHS.
Both of the new league title banners going up on the gym wall come from feminine sweat, grit and hard work, and Wolf girls accounted for 60% (24 of 40) of Coupeville’s league wins in year one.
Now, the gentlemen had their moments.
The Wolves were the only team to beat league champ Port Townsend in football and senior netter Aaron Curtin is going to state as a singles player.
In the end, take this — year one was a very good start. Year two, if the Wolves, girls and boys, believe and work, should be even better.
You know what the league is now. Go take control of it, in every sport.
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