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Small in numbers, big in heart

Posted in Boys Tennis, tagged , , , , , on September 3, 2019| Leave a Comment »

After a ton of off-season work, Drake Borden returns to anchor the Coupeville High School boys tennis squad at #1 singles. (Photos by JohnsPhotos.net)

Zach Ginnings is part of a solid core of returning Wolf players.

He’s never been in this position before.

Longtime Coupeville High School boys tennis guru Ken Stange has built a successful program, one which has boasted deep rosters and plenty of success.

But this season he’s facing the prospect of trying to achieve the latter without having the former.

Eight days out from their first match, the Wolves have just seven players.

While they’re all returnees, that’s not even enough netters to fill a full varsity lineup.

Coupeville needs eight men, with their league matches consisting of two singles players and three doubles teams.

With school starting Tuesday, there’s hope of at least one freshman showing up, and Stange and Co. continue to chase down every lead which might lead to a CHS boy with a pulse.

But, even if they get any late-comers, the Wolves will have to forfeit a match in each of their hard-court rumbles until the newbie(s) get 10 practices under their belt.

While he doesn’t have much depth, Stange does have a solid core of players, led by Drake Borden, who inherits the #1 singles slot from the graduated Jakobi Baumann.

“Our strength is having seven returning players with experience,” Stange said. “Another strength is Drake, who played all off-season and is primed for a solid season.”

Backing Borden are Mason Grove, James Wood, Zach Ginnings, Andrew Aparicio, Thane Peterson, and Koby Schreiber.

Of the returning players, two – Borden and Ginnings – played in the postseason last year.

Regardless of how many players he ends up with, Stange enters the season with the same mind-set he’s employed for the past decade-and-a-half.

“I expect us to compete hard and win some more individual matches,” he said. “I hope our team is able to win a few, too.”

While all of Coupeville’s other sports teams compete in the North Sound Conference, tennis joins up with South Whidbey to take on the private school powerhouses who camp out in the ultra-exclusive Emerald City League.

It’s a conference led by perennial state title contenders University Prep and Seattle Academy, and no match is an easy match.

But the Wolves made a nice statement for public schools everywhere last year, finishing in the top half of the eight teams in the ECL.

It might not have a deep roster in year two, but Coupeville has no intention of backing down quietly.

“We finished fourth in the league last year,” Stange said. “Finishing that well again would mean we had a strong season.”

Coupeville opens Sept. 11 at home against South Whidbey.

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Grove hits nothing but net

Posted in Athlete Supreme, Polls, tagged , , , , on May 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Mason Grove nailed his shot, coming away as the winner of the 7th annual Coupeville Sports Athlete Supreme poll. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

Mason Grove is your new internet king.

The Coupeville High School junior held off 24 rivals across the past 100 hours and emerged Tuesday as the winner of the 7th annual Coupeville Sports Athlete Supreme.

He joins Nick Streubel, Amanda Fabrizi, CJ Smith, Hunter Smith, Joey Lippo, and Ethan Spark in an exclusive club.

And, like them, he gets no trophy, no cash, no trip to Bali – just a warm glow in his chest, knowing voters like him, they really like him.

Sometimes that’s enough.

After the fan bases of the last two winners dropped nuclear bombs, successfully hacking wide-open, no-restriction voting, I clamped down a bit this time around.

Voters were held to one vote per device, every six hours, though it’s entirely possible there still might have been some shenanigans around the edges.

If so, good for you for figuring out ways to beat the system.

With the new restrictions, the final vote totals aren’t as high as they were in recent years, but the race also stayed competitive down the stretch, so that’s nice.

In the end, Grove and Chelsea Prescott, both three-sport stars, pulled away from everyone else.

The lead switched up a couple of times, before Grove’s fan base built a margin which held up across the final two days.

He finished with 1,065 votes, while Prescott tallied 864.

Rounding out the top five were Scout Smith (192), Maya Toomey-Stout (172), and Sarah Wright (124).

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Wolves always gunnin’ for that top spot

Posted in Basketball, tagged , , , , on February 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Scout Smith will enter her senior season as the #1 active scorer among CHS girls basketball players. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

There’s madness in the numbers.

Trying to track individual scoring totals through 147 seasons of Coupeville High School basketball – 102 for the boys, 45 for the girls – is a good way to fry your brain.

And yet, I persist, because basketball is my favorite sport, because points are the most concrete stat we have, and because I refuse to give up.

When I look at the master scoring chart I have compiled, I feel good about the girls side and semi-good about the boys.

Other than the inaugural 1974-1975 season, which the Whidbey News-Times all but ignored, I have 99.2% complete scoring totals for every other girls campaign.

I’m missing a game or three from the mid-2000’s, but, other than that, I’ve accounted for 34,452 points scored by 224 Wolf girls.

Over on the boys side, things are a bit more difficult.

I’m golden from the 1954-1955 season to today, but pre-’54 is a scattershot mess of missing score-books, inadequate newspaper articles and players and teams lost to the mists of times.

What I do have, and it’s more than anyone else out there, is a scoring chart reflecting 391 Wolf boys combining to rattle the rim for 73,296 points.

So, a start.

As the 2018-2019 seasons unfolded, I updated my master list after every game.

Now, I could have waited until the end of the season, but it was more fun to do it in the moment, watching current players move up, sometimes a single slot, sometimes leapfrogging a pack of five or six former Wolves in a single burst.

By the time we wrapped, the departing seniors had cemented their place in history, at least until someone else comes flying past them.

Lindsey Roberts made the deepest run, tossing in 448 points in four varsity seasons, finishing in a tie with Vanessa Davis at #18 on the all-time girls chart.

Then, there was Ema Smith (228 points in two seasons, #48 all-time), Dane Lucero (20 points in two seasons, #300 all-time), and Nicole Laxton (15 points in one season, #170 all-time).

Looking forward, 20 of 24 varsity players from this past season can return, 11 boys and nine girls.

So where do they sit on the all-time scoring chart? Glad you asked.

 

Girls:

Scout Smith – (142 points) – (56 as a sophomore, 86 as a junior) – (#78 all-time)

Chelsea Prescott – (139 points) – (38 as a freshman, 101 as a sophomore) – (#81)

Avalon Renninger – (59 points) – (3 as a sophomore, 56 as a junior) – (#118)

Hannah Davidson – (42 points) – (11 as a sophomore, 31 as a junior) – (#136)

Tia Wurzrainer – (18 points) – (18 as a junior) – (#165)

Izzy Wells – (11 points) – (11 as a freshman) – (#178)

Mollie Bailey – (8 points) – (8 as a sophomore) – (#184)

Ja’Kenya Hoskins – (5 points) – (5 as a freshman) – (#203)

Anya Leavell – (4 points) – (4 as a freshman) – (#205)

 

Boys:

Mason Grove – (160 points) – (51 as a sophomore, 109 as a junior) – (#153 all-time)

Hawthorne Wolfe – (158 points) – (158 as a freshman) – (#154)

Sean Toomey-Stout – (122 points) – (122 as a junior) – (#170)

Jered Brown – (100 points) – (5 as a freshman, 24 as a sophomore, 71 as a junior) – (#183)

Ulrik Wells – (78 points) – (4 as a sophomore, 74 as a junior) – (#200)

Gavin Knoblich – (70 points) – (5 as a sophomore, 65 as a junior) – (#212)

Jacobi Pilgrim – (44 points) – (1 as a sophomore, 43 as a junior) – (#253)

Koa Davison – (11 points) – (11 as a junior) – (#330)

Jean Lund-Olsen – (7 points) – (7 as a junior) – (#353)

Xavier Murdy – (4 points) – (4 as a freshman) – (#368)

Daniel Olson – (3 points) – (3 as a sophomore) – (#374)

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Hoops teams jockey for playoff positioning

Posted in standings, tagged , , , , , on January 20, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Mason Grove is third on his team in scoring during the 2018-2019 season. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

One team is in, one team is still fighting.

Coupeville High School’s varsity basketball teams are in different spots in the standings, but both have their eyes firmly set on the playoffs.

The Wolf girls swept a pair of games this past week, rising back into a tie for second-place in the six-team North Sound Conference, while also clinching a postseason berth.

Meanwhile, the young CHS boys put together their best performance of the season Friday, pushing South Whidbey hard into the fourth quarter.

While they came away with a loss, their second of the week, the Wolf boys still control the battle for the fifth, and final, playoff bid.

A game and a half up on Granite Falls, which it beat the first time around, Coupeville has four games left on the schedule as it looks to KO the Tigers from the playoff race.

This coming week, the Wolf boys play their final regular-season home games, hosting King’s Tuesday and Cedar Park Christian Friday night.

The CHS girls, who have played a game more than their male counterparts, play just once, tangling with CPC at home Friday as the opener in a doubleheader.

As we head into the next-to-last week of the regular season, a look at where we are, through Jan. 20:

 

North Sound Conference girls basketball:

School League Overall
King’s 7-0 13-4
Coupeville 5-2 7-7
CPC-Bothell 5-2 9-6
Granite Falls 2-5 4-12
Sultan 2-5 6-10
South Whidbey 0-7 2-14

 

North Sound Conference boys basketball:

School League Overall
King’s 7-0 13-4
South Whidbey 4-2 11-5
Sultan 4-2 5-10
CPC-Bothell 3-3 7-9
Coupeville 1-5 2-11
Granite Falls 0-7 2-14

 

CHS girls basketball varsity scoring:

Lindsey Roberts – 116
Ema Smith – 95
Chelsea Prescott – 84
Scout Smith – 70
Avalon Renninger – 50
Nicole Laxton – 15
Hannah Davidson – 14
Tia Wurzrainer – 14
Izzy Wells – 9
Mollie Bailey – 8
Ja’Kenya Hoskins – 4
Anya Leavell – 4

 

CHS boys basketball varsity scoring:

Hawthorne Wolfe – 125
Sean Toomey-Stout – 81
Mason Grove – 78
Ulrik Wells – 56
Gavin Knoblich – 49
Jered Brown – 47
Jacobi Pilgrim – 19
Koa Davison – 11
Jean Lund-Olsen – 5
Daniel Olson – 3
Dane Lucero – 2

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Rim refuses to play nice for Wolf boys

Posted in Boys Basketball, tagged , , , , on January 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Coupeville boys basketball coaches Brad Sherman (middle) and Chris Smith (right) couldn’t save their teams Tuesday from poor shooting performances. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

Some nights you can’t buy a bucket.

Tuesday was one of those unfortunate evenings for the Coupeville High School boys basketball squads, which took a pair of beatings in Bothell.

How it played out:

 

Varsity:

Cedar Park Christian came out hot and never really cooled off, rolling to a 70-27 win over the Wolves.

The road loss drops CHS to 1-4 in North Sound Conference action, 2-10 overall.

Coupeville, which has played five of its last six games away from home, finally returns to Whidbey this Friday when it kicks off a three-game home stand.

The Wolves sit in fifth-place in its six-team league, and control their own destiny as they chase the conference’s final playoff berth.

A game-and-a-half up on Granite Falls (0-6), CHS beat the Tigers the first time around and close the regular season Feb. 1 at Granite.

Tuesday night, the Wolves ran into a CPC squad which was coming off a huge upset win over South Whidbey, and the Eagles weren’t ready to let their hot streak cool off.

Jumping out to a 20-6 lead after one, Cedar Park stretched the margin to 36-15 at the half, then sealed the deal with a devastating 16-0 surge in the third quarter.

The Eagles rained down nine three-balls in the game, while also hitting more than their share of regular field goals along the way.

Mason Grove sparked the resistance, hitting for a team-high eight points for Coupeville, while Hawthorne Wolfe ruffled the net for five and Sean Toomey-Stout banked in four.

Jacobi Pilgrim (3), Daniel Olson (3), Gavin Knoblich (2), and Jean Lund-Olsen (2) rounded out the scoring, with Olson netting his first varsity points on a fourth quarter three-ball.

 

JV:

For one quarter, Coupeville’s young guns were blazing. Then, they ran out of bullets.

Up 15-13 at the first break, the Wolves scraped together just nine points, and one lonely field goal, over the next 24 minutes, eventually falling 61-24.

The loss drops CHS to 2-3 in league play, 6-6 overall.

Things started off nicely, with Logan Martin swishing a pair of three-balls, Xavier Murdy banging home four points, and the Wolves controlling things in the opening frame.

After that, not so nice.

Sage Downes lofted in a three-ball in the third quarter, but that was the one and only field goal CHS would hit over the final three quarters.

Even with Coupeville’s inability to coax much through the rim, the game wasn’t a true blowout until a 22-1 CPC tsunami in the fourth made the final score more far-fetched than probably needed to be.

Murdy and Martin each finished with six points, while Olson, Grady Rickner and Downes tossed in four apiece to round out the Wolf attack.

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