DARRINGTON — The Darrington High School football team will play a junior-varsity schedule and is currently slated for three eight-man football games in 2015 after low turnout and low school enrollment combined to halve last year’s Logger roster.
After a 32-player Darrington squad went 3-7 under Doug Lenker in 2014, just 15 players — 11 incoming freshmen — turned out for spring signup meetings.
Two of the four remaining upperclassmen — one a Darrington student and the other an incoming transfer from Marysville Pilchuck — did not play football last year, leaving senior Preston Hall and junior Cooper Young as the only returners to the team from 2014.
New principal/athletic director Rachel Quarterman and former athletic director and current assistant football coach Cory Ross said that it is “highly unlikely” that Darrington has ever been forced to play eight-man football games in its history.
“The goal is to get us back to a varsity schedule and competing in our league, which I think is the goal for any program,” said Quarterman, who took over at Darrington on July 1 after spending 15 years in the Granite Falls School District. “The real goal with hiring a new football coach is just building numbers.”
Ross, who said he was informed by the school district in March that he would not continue into 2015 as athletic director as part of a district-wide reshuffling, said that 10 potential returners that he helped coach in 2014 opted not to play in 2015 for various reasons.
“Some have specific injuries that prevent them from playing, four are doing an elite wrestling thing that they want to continue doing, a few aren’t academically eligible and a few just aren’t playing sports,” Ross said. “The rumor mill from the boys last spring said that a bunch of them were not going to play this season, and when we presented the school board with the option to go down to 8-man or stay varsity with what we have and possibly have to forfeit games because of grades or injuries, they voted to have us forfeit the varsity season.”
Quarterman said that Darrington is currently scheduled for nine games in 2015. There are contests against junior-varsity teams from La Conner, Concrete, Manson, Tekoa-Rosalia and Lakewood, Granite Falls’ C-team and the eight-man varsities of Rainier Christian and Lummi (twice).
Larry Lawlis took over for Lenker as Darrington’s coach in August, and was quickly apprised of the situation the program found itself in. Lawlis said he doesn’t have experience coaching eight-man football, but the players and the coaching staff are learning together in advance of the team’s first game, against LaConner’s junior-varsity, on Sept. 14.
“When we started on Aug. 19, the same 15 kids that showed up on my first day to meet me were the 15 kids that showed up to our first practice, and they’ve been working with our assistant coach Chad Monteith in the weight room all summer,” Lawlis said. “These are 15 very dedicated kids. We assumed that we would get more kids out, but unfortunately we didn’t. We’re hoping to generate enough talk this year to get more kids to come out next year, but everyone is very upbeat and excited. It’s still football.”
Even if those recruiting efforts are successful, it may not matter beyond this year.
Ross said Darrington’s 2015 enrollment number will likely shrink from the 115 recorded by the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association during a January 2014 count for the 2014-16 classification cycle, and the school will be right on the border of classifying as a 1B school when the WIAA releases its next enrollment count this winter.
In the current classification cycle, 90 students was the minimum number for a 2B school.
Ross said all 1B schools play eight-man football, and such programs don’t currently have the option to opt up for football the way that such a practice is allowed in basketball.
“This year’s freshmen, sophomores and juniors will be the counting class for the next four-year cycle, and we will be so close,” he said. “If four or five kids are there on the first day of enrollment we could be a very small 2B, but if two or three kids moved that we didn’t know about, we could be a 1B school.”
In the WIAA, 1B schools play eight-man varsity schedules.
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