Winter sports numbers are similar to the past few seasons at South Whidbey High School, except for wrestling.
Out of about 475 students at South Whidbey High School this year, 14 percent will participate in boys and girls basketball, cheerleading, and wrestling. That percentage is similar to the past few years, but wrestling’s numbers are low at only 11 athletes.
The Falcons will have 31 athletes in boys basketball, 24 in girls basketball, and six in cheer. Wrestling, however, took a major hit and was down to just 11 students registered on the first day of winter sports season in Washington on Monday.
“It’s gonna impact everything,” said Falcon head wrestling coach Jim Thompson during practice Monday.
He noted that losing 10 seniors leaves a major vacuum for a program. Not a single freshman signed up for grappling, but Athletic Director Kelly Kirk said there were only three incoming wrestlers from the eighth-grade middle school team last year, which did not leave a lot of room for attrition or changes of heart.
“We haven’t had to promote it before in my experience,” said Kirk, who was previously the athletic director at the much larger Juanita High School in Federal Way. “Wrestling is obviously something we’ll have to work on.”
For the basketball teams, the participation number is effectively capped by the game itself. With only five players able to play at a time, carrying about 10 players per team is the standard. The boys team under first-year head coach Mike Washington Sr., the former Oak Harbor Wildcats coach, will again have three squads: varsity, junior varsity and C-team.
Girls basketball under head coach Andy Davis and assistant Jeff Hanson, who moved over from the boys program, will run with a varsity and a junior varsity. With close to 30 girls signed up, there’s a possibility that the Falcons may have a C-team for the first time since Davis took over in 2010. Kirk said the threshold is 10 practices for 30 girls, at which point the school could hire a third coach. The real struggle, said Kirk, is finding games for a C-team.
Wrestling will need to sign up a few more athletes to field a near-full team. In head coach Jim Thompson’s decade-plus of coaching the Falcons, he’s always struggled to fill the lower weights. But this year’s challenge to flesh out a full roster is unique.
“The problem is we don’t have a junior program to feed the middle school to feed the high school,” he said.
Most years, Falcon wrestling season ends with about a dozen athletes. Injuries, poor grades and changing interests all lower the team’s ranks over the course of the longest high school sports season that stretches from mid-November to mid-February.
A silver lining, if there can be one for the Falcons’ coach, is that with fewer wrestlers he and assistant Paul Newman will have more time to devote to each athlete. Instead of working on basics, Thompson said, they’ll be able to hone skills and develop them better.
Thompson returned after officially resigning in spring. After several years and an especially heartbreaking season — Thompson criticized the officiating in the elimination match for then-senior Andy Madsen at the state tournament — he was ready to leave. But a stroll through the halls of South Whidbey High School and an encounter with Principal John Patton, who formerly served as the athletic director, changed his mind.
“John Patton stopped me in the hall. He stopped, stared at me and said, ‘You will be the high school wrestling coach next season.’ My knees started shaking … I don’t want to play poker with that guy,” Thompson said.
As a means to help rebuild the wrestling program, starting with Langley Middle School, Thompson said he’d like to do wrestling days in the physical education classes or put on demonstrations with his team.
