A youth football team on Whidbey is one win away from glory.
A perfect 8-0 regular season record and a 36-20 playoff win last weekend means a punched ticket to the championship game for the Oak Harbor Football and Cheer League’s senior division football team. Twenty-nine eighth graders, including students from North Whidbey and Coupeville Middle Schools, will battle Arlington for the title at 5 p.m. this Saturday, Nov. 8.
Bobbi Vesco, mother of running back Brycen Vesco, emphasized this game is a long time coming for the team.
Many of its players have grown up competing with one another, as the team participates in the nonprofit North Cascade Youth Football League, offering peewee, midget and junior teams as well. The league has operated in Island, San Juan, Skagit, Snohomish and Whatcom counties since 1995.
Oak Harbor has finished the regular season undefeated thrice in the last five years, according to head coach Lampton Lawrence, but suffered a crushing defeat in the semi-finals last season.
Emotions are, understandably, running high.
“It’s just really cool to see how hard they work,” Vesco said of the team. Practices began way back in August and have continued throughout the beginning of the school year, no matter the weather. “It’s paying off for them this season,” she added.
Oak Harbor needs extra support from its fan base. Rather unusually, the championship game will be played at Arlington High School even though Oak Harbor’s record earns them home field advantage. Schools volunteered their facilities for games when the schedule was set before the season started, Vesco explained.
“It was the luck of the draw,” she said.
She expects Arlington fans to show up in droves, but pointed out many Oak Harbor fans had to travel to watch games given the team only played at home twice. Ideally, a loud enough crowd attends to make Arlington truly feel as though it is the visiting team.
“We’re gonna need (support),” Vesco said. “They are going to be loud and our goal is to be louder.”
Those considering the drive have an opportunity to witness a group Lawrence believes to be an incredibly promising incoming freshman class of football players.
“If they can all stay together and keep working and pushing each other, I think that they can go far. They have a lot of potential with these guys,” he said.
Last year’s semi-final loss is only further motivation for his team. Lawrence stumbled into his role as head coach about five years ago, securing the job mere hours before the first practice that season. Since then, he has learned a lot about tailoring his message to players and deciphering what makes a team tick.
“All the kids are different but I think the competition is really just what makes them go and what makes them wanna do it,” he said. “They wanna test themselves out and they come every day ready to go and prepared and they play hard. They give it everything they got.”
Nerves are natural before a game of this magnitude, but Lawrence is confident his team’s anxiousness is rather a champing at the bit to prove itself.
“We’ve got one goal left that we all came together in the beginning of the season and set out to complete,” he said, “and we’re just one Saturday away from it.”
