SNOHOMISH — Eric Solbakken didn’t like what he saw.
Watching his team practice different plays, the first-year Snohomish head football coach was prepared to wrap things up and move on to the next phase of practice.
“Last play,” Solbakken said. “Let’s go, man!”
Quarterback Dawson Cobb handed the ball off to Joe Hoff, who made a cut and sprinted upfield past the offensive line.
“On the ball,” Solbakken said. The Panthers were not done yet.
The offense ran the same play. Solbakken was not satisfied.
“What are we doing, please?” Solbakken asked one of the offensive linemen.
He had the offense run through it in slow motion, emphasizing all the key points in the play before having them run in full speed one more time.
Taking over a program that finished tied for last at the bottom of Wesco North 3A last season with a 1-5 division record (3-7 overall) and has reached the state playoffs just twice in the last 20 years (2007 and 2018), Solbakken is implementing a new standard at Snohomish.
“We’re a player development program,” Solbakken told The Herald. “So we make sure that things are right before we’re moving on to a different thing. That’s really the essence of why we do those things. …
“It’s kind of one of those things where I just have learned over the years, and from (Lake Stevens) coach (Tom) Tri, like, just don’t let things go. So we just want to get that stuff right now, and it was a unique scenario. We just talked through it, and we figured it out.”
Solbakken arrived at Snohomish after spending six years as an assistant under Tri, on a staff that won back-to-back state championships in 2022 and 2023. Before that, he spent nine years as an assistant at Shorewood from 2010-2018.
But the 35-year-old coach has another stop on his path that differs from a typical high school coach: the Seattle Seahawks.
After he was hired to do “bare bones” work in the stadium as a 14-year-old in 2004, Solbakken was later invited to travel with the team and handle the communication technology between coaches and players, particularly working with the headsets.
That position granted him access to a treasure trove of valuable information and experience, especially for a high school coach. Solbakken sat in on coaches’ meetings, could access game film, and even wore a headset in the Seahawks’ coaches’ box for six seasons, listening to how they called plays and made adjustments at the highest level.
“It’s been nice to be able to know how to communicate on headsets,” Solbakken said. “It’s been nice to be able to know how to manage games, and so I’ve taken something from everywhere I’ve gone in preparation for something like this.”
The journey was far from easy. In his first year calling plays for Shorewood in 2015, the Stormrays finished 0-10. They remained winless in division play the following season with one win overall, but progressed up to three wins in 2017 before finishing 5-5 and reaching the district round of the playoffs in 2018, his final season before joining Lake Stevens.
Winning two state championships with the Vikings, Solbakken picked up a whole new set of standards relating to effort, fundamentals and focusing only on what can be controlled. Tri praised Solbakken’s organization and communication skills, calling him a “cerebral” thinker of the game who played a big role in maximizing Lake Stevens’ run-pass option (RPO) offense. Tri is keeping the door open as a mentor and hoping to establish a friendly connection between the programs.
“They’re not in our league (Wesco 4A), so I don’t feel like we have to hide anything from him,” Tri said. “He pretty much knows our offense anyways, and has a really good idea of our defense, and so we’re going to support him the best we can and root for Snohomish as long as we’re not playing.”
Tri will not be the only head coach available as a resource to Solbakken. Shortly after he was hired in February, Solbakken went to work assembling his staff. With serious aspirations of becoming a head coach, he already had a shortlist of coaches to reach out to.
With the help of Vince Ivelia, who is Snohomish’s girls golf coach, Solbakken connected with former head coaches and Snohomish alumni Kai Smalley and Will Soren. Smalley led the Panthers from 2013-2017 before stepping away from coaching, and Soren coached Everett for nine years (2006-2014).
Smalley felt like he was getting ready to return to coaching by the time Solbakken called him. His son, Finn, doesn’t play football but is part of this year’s senior class at Snohomish, so Smalley has known many of the seniors on the team since they were in kindergarten.
Smalley liked what Solbakken had to say about his vision for the program and agreed to join as the defensive coordinator — as long as Solbakken could get Soren on board as well.
“One of the things I respect about him, I think as a young coach, is that he wants to surround himself with guys with experience,” Smalley said. “If you look at the staff, you see that. … And just making sure that (we’re) given autonomy to what we do. He didn’t tell me you have to do this on defense, you have to do that. He was just happy to let me come in and do what I’m comfortable doing.”
Soren, meanwhile, is coaching the defensive backs, and believes that while each coach is given autonomy, the entire staff is united under Solbakken.
“Everyone’s on the same page,” Soren said. “He has the kids working extremely hard, just all those things combined just creates a pretty good culture. A really good culture. And I think the kids are buying in, coaches are buying in, and we just gotta keep it rolling.”
The new culture has already made a world of difference in the eyes of the players. Senior defensive back Bridger Ulrich described practices last season as unorganized, and that there were no specific offensive or defensive assignments. This year, it’s the opposite.
“Coach Solbakken has definitely brought more structure,” Ulrich said. “I feel like everything’s more focused and we’re actually, like, getting work done.”
Cobb and junior running back/linebacker Luke Sage both echoed that sentiment.
“It’s ‘go, go, go, go.’ No slowing down, no excuses,” Cobb said. “Just creating a culture of winning and a habit of winning.”
Said Sage: “Last year we kind of (were) not really working together and working as a team and stuff, and this year we’re just creating the bond that we haven’t had in the past.”
Solbakken wouldn’t speak about comparisons to last year since he wasn’t with the program to witness it himself. His main focus is to implement his culture and see improvement in practice every day.
With experience coaching teams across the spectrum — a winless program, a state champion and several phases in between — Solbakken finally gets a chance to run the show. His way. While he’s learned valuable lessons from each of his stops along the way, he doesn’t want to be a carbon copy of his former mentors.
He plans to put his own mark on the Snohomish program.
“You just got to be yourself,” Solbakken said. “Over the years, I think I just have noticed that, when I was younger, I think I was trying to mimic people a little bit too much. And really the key for me is to be myself, and that’s okay.”
As the Panthers wrapped up practice at the end of the afternoon, Sage walked up to shake hands with Solbakken, thanking him for another day of work.
“See you tomorrow?” Sage said.
“I have to be here,” Solbakken replied, amused. Truth is, there’s nowhere else he’d want to be.
Sage smiled.
“Just checking.”
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