Season of accomplishment for Scotties
The long faces are softening now. The bumps and bruises are subsiding.
And the ache of loss is slowly giving way to the joy of accomplishment.
The cold reality of playoff football is the suddenness of the ending. Even when that ending comes on the very last day.
“I think our guys are dealing with that a little bit right now,” Freeman coach Jeff Smith said after his Scotties lost to Royal, 29-7, in the State 1A championship game Saturday in the Tacoma Dome. “Right now they’re still feeling the disappointment of the loss. It will be a while before they really see how much they accomplished.”
It was indeed a season of accomplishment.
Freeman rolled through the Northeast A League season undefeated for the second consecutive year, winning 12 straight games to reach the Tacoma Dome.
A dozen spots on the all-league first team are held by Scotties. Three players, Dan Sanders, Brian Riggs and Kevin Hatch, are first-teamers on both offense and defense.
The team survived the two-game loss of Hatch, the league’s most valuable player to remain undefeated.
In the win-or-go-home world of playoff football, the Scotties earned wins over Wahluke, Zillah and Napavine to earn a berth in the championship game.
The sting comes from the loss – the second straight year Freeman lost to Royal in the playoffs. Last year, that loss came in the quarterfinals.
“I am so proud of this team,” Smith said. “The thing about football is that, when you lose, it’s sudden. There’s no coming back through the loser’s bracket for a second chance. You lose; you’re done. That makes it difficult.
“But these players are going to realize just how great this run was, and I think they’re starting to see that.”
This season was marked by a teamwide sense of personal sacrifice, Smith said. From the first day of practice, the focus was on team first, everything else second.
“That’s the incredible thing about this team,” Smith said. “We talk quite a bit about the things that winning teams do, and that’s one of them.
“You can go right down the line, and players have been willing to do whatever it takes to help this team.”
That was especially true of the team’s talented senior class.
The team featured three all-league first team offensive linemen: tackle Dan Sanders, a two-time, two-way first team selection, center Kenny Fredericksen and guard Eric Swanson. David Takisaki joined Sanders on the first-team defensive line.
Brian Riggs, a first-team selection at tight end, gave the Scotties two first-team outside linebackers.
“Teams eventually had to make a choice,” Smith said. “They could either run at Brian Riggs on one side, or against Rory Malloy, and that wasn’t much a choice, because they weren’t going to get anywhere against either one of those guys.
“Eventually, they took their chances running against Rory because they realized they were never going to make anything against Brian.”
Riggs stepped up big with Hatch on the sidelines with a broken collarbone.
“Brian was one of our vocal leaders,” Smith said. “He was a very good tight end before Kevin went down, but once we lost him, he took it upon himself to take his game up to the point where he was making plays that I did not think he could make.
“The team needed him to step up, and he wasn’t about to let them down.”
Also on the NEA first-team is running back Michael Wittwer, who also stepped up in Hatch’s absence, and wide receiver Andrew Wilkerson.
But it’s not just the all-leaguers who made the Scotties successful.
“There were so many players who did whatever it took to help the team,” Smith said. “We had guys filling in all over the place, doing whatever they could do. It was amazing.”
Smith said he rarely goes in for telling stories of past glories and former players, but he can imagine a time when some of this year’s players come back to share their experiences with future teams.
“I don’t like to tell those kinds of stories – I like to approach each team as its own entity,” Smith said. “But I do like it when former players come back and talk to the team. I let them tell their own stories.”
And what stories they will tell.