Hope Lodell (left) is joined by Hunter Smith and Mia Littlejohn. (John Fisken photos)
We’re spanning the generations today.
As we open the doors to welcome our 73rd class into the Coupeville Sports Hall o’ Fame, the athletes and performances being honored stretch from 1925 all the way up to a mere eight days ago.
It’s a diverse group, as we welcome four Wolves into this hallowed digital shrine.
One goes in for his entire career, while the other three, who are much younger, are honored for crafting major moments which shattered records.
With that we welcome Roy Armstrong, CHS Class of 1926, and Hope Lodell, Mia Littlejohn and Hunter Smith, all on their way to being part of the CHS Class of 2018.
Armstrong is the only one of the four being honored for his entire body of work, mainly because the other three aren’t done writing their story yet.
While it’s very likely Lodell, Littlejohn and Smith will be returning to the Hall one day to be inducted as athletes, for today they’re being hailed for what they accomplished this fall.
All four, however, will be found hanging out together at the top of the blog, under the Legends tab, after this ceremony.
Our first inductee, Armstrong, is also the first person I’ve put into the Hall without a photo.
While I couldn’t tell you what ol’ Roy looked like, I can tell you he left a sizable impression on the stat sheets of the past.
The campaign which really stands out (because I happen to have lucked into possession of a rare 1925 CHS annual) is Armstrong’s junior year of 1924-1925.
During that school year, he lettered in three sports (football, basketball and track), leading all three to Island County championships.
With Armstrong front and center on all three squads, Coupeville thrashed Oak Harbor and Langley to claim Island supremacy that year.
On the gridiron, he scored a key offensive touchdown in the title-clinching win over the North Enders, while also pulling off a memorable 60-yard fumble recovery in a “sea of mud” against Fairhaven for another score.
Once he moved to the hard-court, Armstrong was Coupeville’s primary scoring weapon, as he accounted for 80 of his team’s 177 points.
That included dropping in 18 of 41 points during a three-game run at the district tourney.
In the spring, he was captain of the track squad, winning the pole vault and running on a dominant relay squad as CHS demolished its Island rivals in the year’s big meet.
Coupeville rolled up 70 points in the 1925 Island County Track Meet, while Langley (28) and Oak Harbor (21) mounted little resistance to the farm boys from Cow Town.
Armstrong’s three companions on this induction day followed in his (long ago) footsteps, putting together record-setting seasons as juniors.
Littlejohn, who had eight goals through her first two seasons on the pitch, went ballistic this fall, torching the nets for 27 as she led the Wolf booters to the first winning season in program history.
That topped the 20 notched last spring by Abraham Leyva and was almost three times the previous girls single-season record of 10 tallied by lil’ sis Kalia Littlejohn in 2015.
Our third inductee, Smith, has been a two-way star on the gridiron since the first moment he pulled on a CHS helmet, and he’s on the cusp of shattering numerous career marks on both sides of the ball.
This season, he knocked off two single-season receiving marks, rolling up 915 yards and 11 touchdown receptions.
The first erased a record which had stood since Chad Gale set it in 1987, while the second nipped a more recent mark set by Josh Bayne in 2014.
Along the way, he also tied a CHS single-game record, pulling in three of those TD catches against Bellevue Christian.
Our final inductee, Lodell, not only broke a single-season record, but she did it in a way which actually broke two records at once.
After dropping 31 service aces as a sophomore, the ever-springy one found a new zone as a junior, raining down 110 aces as Coupeville volleyball put together its best season in 12 years.
Now pause for just a second.
Not only was the 110 aces a single-season record, but, by itself, it allowed Lodell to break the Wolf CAREER ace record (109 by Hall o’ Famer Mindy Horr).
With 141 aces to her credit and a season left to go in her vaunted career, she now has a chance to put the career mark way out of reach.
But that’s the future, a time when we will most likely be revisiting 2016’s terrific trio and inducting them into the Hall a second (or third or fourth) time.
Coupeville Sports 