Every victory this season has been particularly sweet for Marysville Pilchuck senior Michael Painter.
Because it wasn’t that long ago that wins were pretty hard to come by for Painter and the Tomahawks.
Painter is the only remaining player who was on the Marysville Pilchuck varsity team that went 1-19 in the 2012-13 season — his sophomore year. The Tomahawks improved last season and have found their stride this year, finishing the regular season 15-5 and battling with Stanwood down to the wire for a league title.
“It’s crazy, that transition that we made,” Painter said. “Coming from 1-19, what an experience to be able to play out here with my team — my family — and be going for that league championship.”
Painter remembers the struggles from his sophomore season, and how it was occasionally difficult to stay positive.
“Sometimes it was tough,” Painter said. “You always came in saying, ‘OK, we’ll win the next game.’ But being realists, it was kind of difficult to think that way at times. It was all about repetition. Do that ritual. Treat every game the same. I enjoyed that season a lot, even though we didn’t play very well.
“It was a lot of life lessons,” Painter continued. “You came out there everyday and prepared as hard as we do now. We had a lot of inexperience. You have to get down and lose a couple of games before you can learn from it. That’s what we did.”
Marysville Pilchuck head coach Bary Gould said Painter was a definite bright spot in the tough 2012-13 season.
“Mike is really a very special and unique individual,” Gould said. “I remember him being frustrated, like we all were, with losing. But I never remember him staying there. He had frustrating moments, instead of frustrating days.”
The lone victory for the Tomahawks that season came in the second-to-last game against Oak Harbor on Jan. 29. Marysville Pilchuck’s Dante Fields made a layin as time expired to give the Tomahawks the victory over the second-place Wildcats.
Painter had eight points in the game.
“I feel like you find yourself really, really, really having to coach, to motivate and think of new things,” Gould said. “I think it helps when you’re close in games, and a lot of those games were close. I just remember wanting to build on the things that we did well. It’s crazy how painful it is when it’s happening but you multiply that pain for the players by times 10. We get to be around later on when it improves and they didn’t. That was their season.”
Marysville Pilchuck’s transformation really began toward the end of last season. The Tomahawks finished the year 10-13 overall, with a big 70-49 win over Wesco 3A South No. 1 Glacier Peak in its district opener as the No. 4 seed out of the North. Marysville Pilchuck lost to Shorecrest — the eventual district champs — by four points in the semifinals and then defeated Ferndale 60-58 before falling to Mountlake Terrace in a loser-out game.
“Last year our whole motto was, ‘Why not us?’ We were looking at the Seahawks and seeing how well they were doing,” Painter said. “We just thought, ‘Why not us? Why can’t we go out there and do something for MP?’ It was really cool. We really thought we were going to go all the way. That may sound weird, but that’s really how we felt. We have so much trust in our teammates and that’s how we feel right now. We’re trying to go as far as we can.”
Painter’s senior campaign has been a bit easier for the third-year varsity player. Marysville Pilchuck heads into the district tournament not as an underdog, but as a team with legitimate hopes of getting one of the district’s three berths in the regional round.
With returners like Painter, Cole Grinde, Nate Heckendorf and Bryce Juneau, hopes were high for the Tomahawks this season.
“We’ve talked a ton about just looking at it one game at a time and not going beyond that,” Gould said. “But again, if we’re realistic we haven’t been to the state tournament since I was a high school senior. That was 1993 — a lot of years ago. It would be really awesome for these guys, for this community, if we could somehow, some way get back there.”
Marysville Pilchuck and Stanwood battled into overtime on Tuesday, with the Spartans prevailing on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to clinch the league title.
Fittingly, on the Tomahawks’ senior night, it was Painter who made several big shots and finished with a game-high 30 points.
“You cheer for him because he’s such a wonderful young man,” Gould said. “He’s putting the team on his back and he’s unstoppable inside. He’s so poised and so patient and so selfless and smart — he’s the consummate high school player. It was senior night and I gave him a hug and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without Michael Painter.’”
Stanwood head coach Zach Ward, who played with Gould at Marysville Pilchuck in the 1990s, is among those impressed with the Tomahawks’ turnaround the past couple seasons under Gould.
“I told him before the game I’m proud of what he’s done with that group,” Ward said. “They started 1-19, he invested in some kids and you can see by their effort (Tuesday night) that paid off. He’s one of the most positive people I know just in life, and I think that shows with where he’s brought that program back to be.”
Gould, in his 10th year as the head coach at Marysville Pilchuck, won a league title his first season. But that was a while back and leads to a unique dilemma for the Tomahawks head coach should MP find itself celebrating a district championship.
“Just thinking about cutting down nets,” Gould said. “Coaches that have all that success, they’re just so used to doing it. This is just an afterthought for us, like, ‘Oh my gosh, do we have a method for doing something like that if we get to do it? A net-cutting strategy? Who gets the ladder? Who’s holding the ladder?’
“We don’t want Mike to get hurt.”
Painter wants to take it one step further.
“The ideal ending is to play in the (Tacoma) Dome,” he said. “To get there and show everyone that Marysville Pilchuck has a strong basketball program. And to kind of take away from that incident on October 24th — the shooting. Everyone kind of sees our school as that and I feel like our football program worked really hard to show everyone that we’re a community. The basketball program is trying to do that as well.”
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