And so concludes another year of prep sports on the North Olympic Peninsula.
What a year it was.
It felt like it was ending on a crescendo this past weekend with a spectacular showing by area athletes in track, tennis and softball.
First of all, kudos to the Forks softball team. They play in an incredibly tough league. Four state softball champions have come out of the Evergreen 1A League since 2014. For the Spartans, it’s a struggle just to make the district tournament.
The Forks girls went 2-6 in that tough league, but slid into the postseason as a fourth-place seed out of the Evergreen 1A.
Once they made the postseason, they showed just how good the Evergreen 1A League is. They won two games and qualified for the state 1A tournament. Once the Spartans got to state, they made it to the semifinals. They ended up winning three games and coming in fourth place in the state.
Quite a feat for a team that went 2-6 in league. And they only graduate two starters, so expect the Spartans to be back next year, tougher and more experienced.
Sequim track and tennis
Then, we get to track and tennis. Wow, what a weekend. Three individual state champions and two team state champions.
The Sequim doubles team of Jessica Dietzman and Kalli Wiker lost in the state championship in 2018 to a team from Sammamish. This season, Dietzman and Wiker didn’t lose a single set, much less a single match, all year in storming right back to the state championship match where they met that very same doubles’ team from Sammamish.
Dietzman and Wiker lost their first set Saturday then rebounded with a 6-2, 6-1 finish to win the state title. They had to climb a huge hill to win the state championship and they pulled it off.
By winning, Dietzman and Wiker also won a team championship for the Sequim tennis team as no other squad had more than one player or doubles’ team that placed.
High drama online
The most dramatic win of the weekend came from the Sequim track boys.
At the PDN, we were tracking the team scores via live updates online. Both the Sequim boys and the Port Angeles girls were neck-and-neck for their respective state titles all day Saturday.
By late Saturday afternoon, the Sequim boys were sitting at 39 points, in fourth place in the state behind Pullman, Ridgefield and Tumwater. Tumwater seemed to be in control with about 43 or 44 points.
Then Alec Shingleton had the run of his life in the 400 meters, finishing in second place to pick up eight points. Not 5 minutes later, the results were posted from the javelin, in which Sequim’s Riley Cowan finished second with his season-best throw of 176 feet, 6 inches.
The Wolves went from 39 to 55 points, and suddenly held a big lead over Tumwater and its 46 points with only one or two events left.
Sequim pulled away by coming in third in the 4×400 relay, the final event of the day. It turns out the Wolves didn’t need the points from the 4×400, but it was a great exclamation point on a fantastic day and a championship meet.
If a sporting event can be dramatic over the internet, watching the results trickling in from the state 2A meet on Saturday afternoon actually managed to be high drama.
State championships are rare. Really rare. Some schools have literally never won a state championship in any sport. Port Angeles High School only has one team state championship from the 1980s. Sequim won two team championships within a few minutes. Add to that Murray Bingham’s individual state title in the 800-meter run.
The Port Angeles girls, meanwhile, came in a very close second with 39 team points to Bellingham’s 42. The Roughriders produced a state champion of their own in Millie Long, who broke a school record in the 300-meter hurdles to take first place. Her teammate Lauren Larson got overlooked a little with all the Sequim fireworks going on, but she had an amazing meet herself, coming in second in the 800, second in the 1,600 and third in the 3,200.
Phew! That was our weekend here in the sports department. Literally, after we were down compiling all that, I went down to the Barhop and did my best impression of The Hound (“Give me another!”).
It was an amazing finish to another amazing year of preps. A year that saw an incredible amount of success in Sequim all year long from the fall to the winter to the spring sports, to great seasons for the Port Angeles hoops teams and Forks wrestling.
Summer is a chance for us to breathe … a bit. There’s still plenty of Lefties and Wilder baseball and outdoor sports, including this weekend’s North Olympic Discovery Marathon. So, we’ll be staying plenty busy.
But, the kind of high drama we saw this weekend? Hopefully, it’ll be at least a few months before we see that again.
