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We had a good season in 1977. We were coming off a
down year in 1976 when we finished 10 -12. We returned nine players from
the prior year. They included Jerry Bielinski, Scott Brittain, Tom
Deichert, Don Dickens, Ian Gilyeat, Todd Maas, Ken Plowman, Jim
Thornburgh and Joe Walthall.
To this group of seniors, we added Kevin Backlund,
Randy Chopp, Brian McDonald and Scott Sampson. Our starters were
Thornburgh, Brittain, Dickens, Deichert and McDonald who was a junior.
These were good kids that were fun to coach.
Kevin Backlund was probably as interested in
basketball as any kid I’ve ever seen. He still plays. He and Walker go
over and play in the South Kitsap League or they play in these
three-on-three tournaments. He never started for us; he was one of the
first subs.
Gilyeat was a great kid. McDonald was very shy;
wasn’t really outgoing. Todd Maas was good kid who played hard. Plowman
always kept thinking he should be a tight end in football. Scott
Sampson, pretty good ballplayer.
We played well in the regular season. We took both
games from Port Angeles and that is always good. We split with West,
Bainbridge, Central and South Kitsap and we won both games against
Sequim and O’Dea. We did loose twice to North Kitsap who had a fine
coach in Jim Harney. We finished the regular season with a 14 – 6 record
and that got us into the tournament. I was surprised to get there
because we had no big kids. They didn’t have a tremendous amount of
speed but they played pretty well together.
In the district tournament, we beat Enumclaw and
then beat North Kitsap when it counted most. That put us into the
regional tournament which was now a 16 team event. We lost to R.A. Long
by 10 and then we came back and beat Lake Stevens by a point and then
lost to Centralia by 15 in a loser-out game. We finished the season with
a 17 – 10.
This team had good kids; enjoyable and they played
about as well as they could play. Maybe somebody else could get more out
of them but I thought that they played about as well as they could
play.”
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