EVERETT — Henry Gabalis still remembers the disrespect.
After watching his older brother, Victor, play on dominant Archbishop Murphy football teams before graduating in 2020, Gabalis entered the program as a freshman in the 2022 season with high expectations.
The 2022 team finished winless at 0-8. What seemed like an unfathomable season for the program just a few years prior had become a reality. It didn’t sit right with Gabalis and the rest of his class.
“I knew Murphy as a powerhouse,” Gabalis said. “And I came here, and then I had high expectations, then we’d play and just get absolutely disrespected. That just put a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to work in the offseason.”
Joe Cronin took over as the program’s head coach the following season, turning things around to finish 6-4, but losing some big games in the process. A 45-0 loss to Anacortes on the road proved that, while the program had taken a step forward, there was still building left to do.
Archbishop Murphy took another step forward in 2024, beating Anacortes, the eventual 2A state champions, on home turf 34-28 in the regular season before ultimately reaching the state semifinals.
But the build continued, and last Friday almost felt like a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Facing Anacortes in a hostile road environment on Oct. 10 between two of the top 2A teams in the state, the Wildcats practically flipped the result of two years ago, dominating in a 43-7 win to improve to 6-0 and make a statement about where this team is heading.
“Even now, going into the Anacortes game, everyone was doubting us,” senior Jack Sievers said. “Saying, you know, we hadn’t played a good team all year. We were this overrated team that got lucky last year. … We all knew that the same outcome was going to (happen) on Friday, and that’s how we believe about every game.”
That belief will carry into this Friday’s matchup against No. 3 Lynden (5-1, 3-1), which top-ranked Archbishop Murphy beat 10-9 in last year’s state quarterfinals after losing 7-3 in the regular season.
With a win, the Wildcats would claim the NWC 2A league title. The Wildcats have bigger aspirations for the end of their season, but that takes nothing away from how significant it would be, especially for a senior class that started its career by not winning a game.
For the players, it starts with Cronin, who joked that they only praised him because he started to walk past The Herald’s interview with them at that moment.
“I think that’s like the biggest thing,” Gabalis said. “Because it switched up our whole mentality of how we do stuff. We do everything completely different than what we did my freshman year.”
Cronin recalled the “chaos” at first, installing the Wing-T offense and the learning curve that came with it. Building off their immediate success in Year 1, the Wildcats offense has since evolved into more of a “Spread T,” with senior Evan Ruiz at quarterback bringing another dimension to the unit.
In Year 3 under Cronin, the ‘chaos’ has become routine. Everyone understands the system. The team practices faster and transitions quicker than before.
However, Cronin himself pushed the praise back on his own players, as well as the coaches he worked under before taking over at Archbishop Murphy, including Terry Ennis, Lake Stevens’ Tom Tri and O’Dea’s Monte Kohler.
“We have a big senior class, and a lot of them played a lot of football as freshmen,” Cronin said. “(…) The biggest part (of) our success has been the leadership on the field and their dedication and getting guys focused, and they do it the right way. It’s just a really good group of kids.”
Part of that leadership comes from a deliberate attempt to shift the culture. Sievers recalled being doubted as a freshman by his senior teammates at the time when he took over a starting role on defense. Now a senior himself, Sievers and the rest of the class focus on bringing up the younger players rather than pushing them down.
The impact is felt all over the field. Fellow senior Tayden Olson arrived at Archbishop Murphy following his sophomore year at Marysville Pilchuck, and grew into a key figure on both the offensive and defensive lines. He ultimately became a team captain despite coming in as a transfer, propped up by his teammates after starting out as an older newcomer.
“I just fell in love with the culture,” Olson said. “I fell in love with the community, and it just really helped me be in a better place.”
With a revamped system and stronger culture, Archbishop Murphy has been able to focus on improving the details this season. Aside from growing their passing attack on offense compared to last year, the defensive backs have stepped up to shut things down in the secondary and supplement the defensive line.
The team also feels much better about its depth compared to last year, when there was a noticeable drop-off in skill between the starters and backups. With full trust in the second-strings across each unit this year, the Wildcats have been able to get results without running their starters into the ground.
“As we’ve all had another year to grow, and we brought those guys up, our first guys are able to stay healthy,” Sievers said. “Because we’re able to put in those other guys, and the standard stays the same.”
It has led to dominance across the board. The Wildcats’ 43 points against Anacortes last week was their lowest point total of the season. On the other side, they allowed their opponents to score more than eight points just once, in a 61-28 blowout against Bellingham on Sept. 26.
Their 45.8 point differential average is the best among NWC/former Cascade Conference teams dating back to at least 2009 — the furthest back such data is available on the Wesco Athletics website — and the highest since the 2015 Wildcats posted a 44.4 points differential average.
That feat will mean nothing to the 2025 Wildcats without some hardware, and the key to securing some against Lynden on Friday will be overcoming their size on the lines. Cronin estimates Lynden’s smallest lineman weighs around 260, with the rest averaging 280-300 across the board.
The Wildcats called each of last season’s low-scoring matchups “a bloodbath.” After leaving so much on the field gutting out the 10-9 playoff win and sustaining a couple injuries in the process, Archbishop Murphy felt it had nothing left against a powerful top-seeded Tumwater team, which blew them out 42-0 in the semifinals the following week.
“It was a fight to the death, it felt like. … When we played Tumwater, we were all beat up from that (Lynden) game,” Gabalis said. “But we played with our hearts.”
This year, the Wildcats expect things to go differently. If the Anacortes win showed this year’s Archbishop Murphy team has reached a new level, they hope to send another message with a victory against Lynden this Friday.
“It really just proves a statement to the league,” Olson said. “We’re here, and we’re coming for that district title. We’re gonna prove it.”
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