Ava Shiflett scored two goals and Kay Botkin added a third, enabling the East Jefferson Rivals to defeat the Cascade Christian Cougars by a score of 3-2 on September 20 in Puyallup.

"We were shooting on all cylinders. We felt untouchable” said senior co-captain and center forward Iris Mattern.

To earn their first win of the season, the Rivals had to overcome losing their starting goalie to illness. Sophomore Rylee Jo Spanauer-Oas stepped up to fill in as goaltender and made several key saves

EJ opened the season by tying Annie Wright, then lost to Vashon and Bellevue Christian before bouncing back to beat Cascade Christian.

On September 22, the Rivals lost to Klahowya–the defending 1A state champions–at Memorial Stadium. On September 29th, EJ lost a non-conference road game to Crosspoint Academy in Bremerton.

At 1-4-1, the Rivals remain undaunted. After the loss to Klahowya, junior forward Kay Botkin said, “We feel that our team dynamic has improved since the beginning of the season and the last two games really showed our growth. We are excited about the rest of the season and are looking forward to playing in the district playoffs.”

Redhawks ‘making strides toward future

Kirk Boxleitner

kboxleitner@ptleader.com

Port Townsend High School Football Head Coach Tony Haddenham is looking forward to the  Redhawks’ away game at Vashon Island at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 7, even as he acknowledged that his team found its home game against Tacoma’s Life Christian Academy on Friday, Sept. 29, to be a challenging match-up.

With Life Christian prevailing by a score of 66-12, Haddenham wryly conceded the opposing team was “scoring at will,” but he pointed out that the visiting team had already weathered a period that the Redhawks are currently working through.

“It’s a rebuilding year for us this year,” Haddenham said. “Life Christian was rebuilding last year, but all their freshmen then are sophomores now. We had 12 players graduate last year, and 12 more graduate the year before that. The nucleus of our team shrank really substantially in relatively short order.”

Haddenham elaborated that the current “extremely young” Redhawks lineup numbers “four to five seniors, three juniors, and the rest are freshmen and sophomores,” and even among the upperclassmen, a number have either returned to the sport from some time away and some are new to the sport.

“Our team is constantly learning,” Haddenham said. “We’re continually throwing different kids into different spots on the field. We’re spreading out and moving around our talent, to see which configurations will work best for the performance of the team as a whole. Right now, I’ll admit, we’re still puzzling it all out.”

Even as the current lineup of Redhawks have worked with an initially limited knowledge base, Haddenham enthusiastically credited them with “learning well together, even as they’re all still figuring out what each of them does well.”

Although the team has remained mostly focused on hammering home the fundamentals of play, Haddenham has noticed his players making measurable weekly progress toward their improvement goals, even if those lessons sometimes need to be reiterated.

“You can’t go wrong with going back to basics,” Haddenham said. “We occasionally take the time to relearn what we might have forgotten. With our game against Life Christian, we went from not being aggressive enough to being overly so. In both cases, it hurt our performance.”

As the Redhawks aim for a balanced approach, without “reinventing the wheel,” Haddenham emphasized that the team has “taken steps in the right direction,” and praised them for doing “a lot of work during the summer, and in the weight room,” that he identified as having paid off more recently.

“These might seem like smaller steps, but they’re towards a longer vision,” Haddenham said. “The Redhawks are making strides toward the future.”