Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Christilaw: Balance needed in prep footbal

Steve Christilaw

Football is a numbers game.

The players all wear numbers, they are ranked and measured by numbers and scores are kept numerically.

Sometimes, the numbers don’t add up.

In the past two weeks media in Western Washington spent a great deal of time discussing the situation that Class 2A power Archbishop Murphy finds itself in. This week Cedar Park Christian became the fourth opponent to forfeit its game with the Wildcats rather than risk injury on the field. The Wildcats will now have gone without playing a football game for a month.

Archbishop Thomas Murphy, known by most as ATM, is a relatively new school in Everett, opening its doors in 1988 as Holy Cross High, and the football program was quickly built into a state power by Hall of Fame coach Terry Ennis, who won a state championship at Everett’s Cascade High before tackling the job at the private Catholic school, where he was 75-12 with the Wildcats, winning state championships in 2002 and 2003.

ATM plays in the Cascade Conference, a Class 2A/Class 1A hybrid league that includes Granite Falls, Cedar Park Christian, Cedarcrest (in Duvall), King’s, Sultan and South Whidbey. It’s a mix of small-town schools that have trouble filling out a football roster going up against a dominant football program that features a starting offensive line that weighs in at a collective 1,500 pounds and includes several major-college recruits. ATM is literally the 600-pound gorilla in the room.

To put that in a local perspective, it would be like combining the Great Northern League with the Northeast A, except that the smaller schools in the NEA would likely fare better against East Valley and West Valley than Sultan and Granite Falls do against ATM.

ATM’s 7-0 record (factoring in Friday’s forfeit) includes three wins on the field, where the Wildcats pummeled Issaquah, Bishop Blanchet and King’s by a combined score of 170-0.

In forfeiting games opponents have pointed to the risk of injury they face. It’s hard to argue with their logic or their concerns for player safety.

“We faced something like that when we played in the Greater Spokane League,” West Valley coach Craig Whitney said. “We were a little bitty Class 3A team going against huge 4A teams. For us, the biggest problem came with the junior varsity and the freshmen teams.

“For us, our best juniors and sophomore were all playing on our varsity and our best freshmen would be playing junior varsity, leaving the rest of the kids to play on the JV and freshman teams. They would be going up against teams from Lewis and Clark, for example, made up of their best juniors and sophomores and freshmen.

“After a while it was hard for us to get kids to come out to play on those teams.”

The problems in Eastern Washington get addressed by reclassification. West Valley eventually found its way to Class 2A, where it went from being a team that hardly ever won a football game to being a regular state playoff team.

It gets more complicated on the other side of the Cascades, where the public-private partnership is straining at the seams.

Large, private high schools have long been part of the prep sports scene, first with Bishop Blanchet and Lakeside in North Seattle, Seattle Prep on Capitol Hill and Kennedy High in Burien. In the last few decades the number of private schools has grown, especially in the small school classifications.

Check the bracket on a state tournament, especially the 1B, 2B and 1A classifications. Doesn’t matter what sport. You will see lots of schools represented that did not exist a dozen years or so ago. It’s easier to build a successful program when you aren’t limited to school district boundaries.

Matt Calkins, the new columnist at the Seattle Times, wrote last week that the time has come for private schools to compete against private schools and public schools against public schools. If they want to schedule discretionary, nonleague games against each other, fine.

That will be a tough pill for some to swallow, but Calkins is on the right track.

It’s not just that it’s unfair for kids in Granite Falls and Sultan to have to play football against players who are destined to shine on a college gridiron one day soon, it’s not safe.

We’ve learned too much about danger that comes with injuries, especially head injuries, that are multiplied exponentially when there is a size and strength mismatch along the lines of these forfeited games by ATM.

And it’s not fair that ATM has to sit idly by during its season. This Friday there will be no football game in the middle of its homecoming celebration.

The state’s governing body has said it will look into the situation after the season.

It needs to be ready to make the hard decisions necessary to fix the problem.

Steve Christilaw can be reached at steve. christilaw@gmail.com.