JOYCE — The Crescent Loggers have a new paint job.
“You should see what they did to the locker room,” new head football coach Brian Shimko said.
“There’s some really good pride going on up there.”
The locker room used to be, Shimko said, “Dark, dark blue.”
During a tour of facilities around the time he was hired in the spring, Shimko said Crescent athletic director Dave Bingham gave him permission to do whatever he wanted with the look of the locker room.
So the players and some parents got together and painted it the school’s colors, blue and yellow.
It was a team-building activity that junior lineman Wyatt McNeece said also built pride in the Crescent football program.
“You look in there, and I don’t want to, you know, speak to the far future, but that’s something you tell your kids about,” McNeece said after a recent practice.
“That’s something that not a lot of people did. It’s a small community, and you get to say that you were part of that, and people will know, ‘Oh, you were a part of that?’
“It’s just a great thing.”
The spruced-up locker room is one of the early steps toward restoring the pride in Crescent football, something Shimko is first-hand familiar with, having played for the Loggers during their 8-man football heydey of the mid-80s to mid-90s.
Shimko graduated in 1994 and helped earn one of the state placement trophies in Crescent’s trophy case. The Loggers placed third his senior season. Two years later, they won their only state championship.
Since finishing 2012 with a 7-3 record, Crescent has struggled to a combined 2-16 mark the past two seasons.
Shimko and assistant coach Kelly Flanagan both came to Crescent after several years of coaching success in the Port Angeles Future Riders program.
They put the Loggers through a full summer of football, including conditioning and the allowed number of practices. They even played one 7-on-7 game, against Port Angeles.
The players continued their conditioning without the coaches after the summer season ended.
Leading the conditioning and weightlifting sessions is former Crescent track and field star Tommy Farris, who won a state championship in the javelin in 2008 and then moved on to compete at the University of Washington before Tommy John surgery derailed his college athletic career.
Farris recently moved back to the area, and this summer he began working with Crescent athletes, passing along the knowledge he gained training as part of a Division I athletic program.
“It’s something I want to do all year,” Ferris said after another well-attended conditioning session last month.
“The boys are working harder, they’re getting stronger. It’s going to be a whole different team.”
Farris, who played three sports at Crescent, is excited about the commitment of the athletes, which he said far exceeds his playing days when he had to recruit his fellow students to play football so the Loggers would have enough bodies to field a team.
“I’ve got a big heart for this school,” Farris said.
“We’ve got two great coaches right here, coach Kelly and coach Brian, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what program they have in store.
“And they’ve got the kids fired up. I’ve never seen turnout like this before in the summer, even when I played.
“We’ve got an amazing start going right here.”
The excitement in the new era of Crescent football, which officially begins Friday night at Clallam Bay, extends beyond the program.
Players’ families and others in the Joyce area have been getting involved.
That hasn’t been lost on the players.
“The community’s been in here, they helped us paint our locker room, they helped us fund with the car wash. Everything like that, the community’s just been such a big part,” McNeece said.
“I think it’s motivation, like, look at all these people, what they’re doing. Work hard for them.”
Rangers’ new HQ
Crescent isn’t the only team that hit the weights with more intensity this offseason.
“I put on a little bit of weight, so hopefully I can truck through some kids,” Quilcene quarterback Eli Harrison said after a recent practice.
The Rangers have a different set-up this season: their locker room and weight room are now both in the portable nearest to the football field.
“We’ve got new weight room. We’ve got a new locker room,” Quilcene coach Byron Wilson said.
“The administration has backed the heck out of us. They really took good care of us.
“It’s a coaches dream. For a small-school football program, we got it made.”
The Quilcene players have put the weight room to use, the proof coming from many of their nearly 30 players having added significant strength since last season.
There is bad news, though: the Rangers will have to wait another week to get an idea of what kind of a difference that extra strength will make in 2015.
Due to low turnout, Lopez, Quilcene’s scheduled Week 1 opponent, canceled its football season, and the Rangers were unable to find a replacement opponent.
That means their season opener won’t be until Saturday, Sept. 12, when they travel to face Mary M. Knight.
Experience and youth
The excitement about new Port Angeles coach Bret Curtis and his coaching staff is probably best quantified in the number of Roughriders who have been participating in preseason practices.
That number has reached as high as 80. At least half of those players are freshmen and sophomores. The Riders also have a fairly large senior class of 12-15 players.
Those seniors are obviously focused on having a successful finish to their high school football careers. But they also seem invested in the Port Angeles program beyond this season.
During the first week of practice, three of those seniors — Ryan Rodocker, Billy Minks and Taylor Millsap — all mentioned the future while discussing the present.
“We’re looking pretty strong. We have a lot more players than we had last year, so a lot of depth,” Rodocker said.
“And there’s a lot of younger kids, and if they keep working on it, then in a couple years, the team’s going to be stacked.”
Said Millsap, “We have a lot of players this year . . . and a lot of them are younger kids, and so the next couple years things should be good after we’re gone.”
Minks emphasized the need for the older players to set the tone.
“It’s really important, because for all the upcoming freshmen and stuff, they need to learn the values of being on the football team, and [that] just being on the team, it’s a privilege to be here,” Minks said.
Port Angeles opens the season Friday at Port Townsend in the second game of an all-North Olympic Peninsula doubleheader at Memorial Field in Port Townsend.
Chimacum and Sequim open the doubleheader and the area’s football season at 5 p.m., and Port Townsend and Port Angeles will follow at 8 p.m.
Three other games will features area teams: Clallam Bay hosts Crescent, and Forks plays at Vashon. Both games kick off Friday at 7 p.m.,
Two-time defending 8-man football state champion Neah Bay opens with an 11-man game for the third straight season. The Red Devils will face Northwest Christian of Colbert, which is near Spokane, at King’s High School in Shoreline on Saturday at 3 p.m.
Neah Bay’s past forays into the 11-man game have gone about the same as most of its 8-man games: the Red Devils defeated Darrington 50-6 in 2013 and blanked Ocosta 60-0 last year.
Spartan media
Forks, under new head coach Craig Shetterly, is making a bid to be the most modern of the nine North Olympic Peninsula high school football teams.
Off the field, at least. And in the digital realm.
The Spartans have their own website (www.forksfootball.org), a Twitter account (@ForksSpartanFB) and a Instagram account (@forksspartanfb).
And all three are put to use on a regular basis, particularly Twitter and Instragram.
For instance, Forks’ captains were announced on the Twitter account Tuesday: “Proud to announce the 2015 Captains for our Spartan Football Program: Reece Moody, Kenny Gale, Billy Palmer, Cole Baysinger.”
On Monday, a video clip of late, great professional wrestler “Macho Man” Randy Savage was posted on the Instragram account with the intent to motivate the players for their season opener against Vashon.
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Sports Editor Lee Horton can be reached at 360-417-3525 or at lhorton@peninsuladailynews.com.
