All together now
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, September 5, 2001
By Aaron Coe
Herald Writer
This year, when coaches in the Western Conference North Division utter the cliche, “You have to take one game at a time,” they aren’t just being politically correct.
There aren’t going to be many easy games for teams in a league that has a new look this season.
The North Division is full of teams with recent playoff experience and a long history of strong football tradition.
The Wesco Conference has grown to the state’s largest league. Its 19 members are split into two divisions.
The North Division contains former 3A schools Arlington, Lake Stevens, Monroe, Mount Vernon and Stanwood along with Wesco 4A holdovers Cascade, Marysville-Pilchuck, Oak Harbor and Snohomish.
The South contains six schools that were 4A last year: Edmonds-Woodway, Kamiak, Mariner, Mountlake Terrace, Shorecrest and Shorewood. Everett, Jackson, Lynnwood and Meadowdale moved from the now defunct Wesco 3A to this year’s version of the Western Conference.
Four teams – Arlington, Lake Stevens, Mount Vernon and Snohomish – played in the postseason last year. That’s not to mention Cascade, which won all but one Wesco title in the 1990s and played in a state semifinal game in 1998.
Throw in Stanwood, which made the postseason in 1998 and Marysville-Pilchuck – one of the state’s largest schools – and you’ve got a brutal division in the north.
“This is a great league,” Cascade coach Rollie Wilson said. “Fans are going to see a great high school football game every week. It’s hard to predict what’ll happen.”
Cascade finished with a losing record (3-5 in conference, 4-5 overall) last season for the first time since the other Bush was president. The Bruins began the season 4-0 before suffering a 33-8 loss to Kamiak. That was Wilson’s last game of the year. He underwent prostate surgery not long after the Kamiak game, and his team went into an 0-4 tailspin in his absence. The cancer is gone and Wilson is back. He hopes Cascade will be, too.
“We’ll be fine,” Wilson said. “We’ve got a good group of seniors.”
Arlington coach John Boitano believes last year’s 3A teams will present a major challenge to the teams they are joining at the 4A level.
“I think our best guys are as good as their best guys,” said Boitano, whose son Joseph will start at running back this year. “There is a tendency for the bigger schools to have more depth. Their backup might be almost as good as their starter, where for us, there’s a big dropoff.”
The biggest curiosity in the division may be Mount Vernon, which played in the Northwest 3A League last year. The Bulldogs aren’t just basketball players any longer. Their only losses last year were to Ferndale, a state quarterfinalist, and Columbia River in the first round of the state playoffs.
Mount Vernon coach Paul Christianson has been able to talk most of the basketball team, which won the Class 3A state championship with a perfect 27-0 last year, into playing football.
What that means is the Bulldogs have size. Their offensive line averages 6 feet, 2 inches and 260 pounds. The team has a Division I college prospect at quarterback in Kyle Kendrick, a 6-foot-3 junior, who was the sixth man on the basketball team.
“We’ll have to take them one game at a time,” Christianson said. “We came from a great league, the Northwest 3A, and now we look forward to stepping up to 4A football.”
Lake Stevens lost the wonder twins, Matt and Nik Williams, to the University of Washington track team, but the Vikings still have great speed and size to go along with a solid ground game.
Stanwood will have its third coach in three years. New coach J.J. Hanson, who played linebacker at the University of Washington before back surgery ended his career, comes from a solid program at Kentwood, where he played high school ball and served as an assistant coach for the perennial power.
Snohomish will have to rely on a largely inexperienced and somewhat smallish group of players to get back to the postseason. The Panthers were hit hard by graduation, but most people feel coach Mark Perry will have no problem putting a tough team on the field.
“We’ve got some work to do,” said Perry, whose team went 9-0 before a first-round loss to Kentwood. “We’re making some mistakes, but they’re correctable. It’s a difficult schedule. You’ve got good coaches and good programs.”
And, you’ve got a pretty good division.
