POULSBO — The Sequim Wolves knew who they had to stop from W.F. West.
Two minutes into Friday night’s Class 2A state playoff at chilly North Kitsap High School, it was clear they wouldn’t be able to.
Quarterback Mitch Gueller scored touchdowns on the Bearcats’ first two snaps and finished with 294 yards of offense to lead his team to a decisive 52-21 victory that ended the Wolves’ season.
“We talked about it all week, having to stop this kid because he was good, and it just didn’t happen,” Sequim junior Jack Wiker said. “He’s fast, big. He made people miss.”
The state appearance was the Wolves’ sixth in a row, a feat matched only by perennial power Lynden.
Yet Friday night’s loss marked the fifth time in six years Sequim saw its season end with a first round exit.
Only the 2009 team was able to advance to the quarterfinals.
W.F. West (9-2 overall) became the third Evergreen Conference team to eliminate Sequim (9-2) from the playoffs during that run.
Of course, it didn’t help that the Olympic League champions had to take on the Bearcats minus star quarterback/linebacker Frank Catelli for the third week in a row.
“We overcame a lot of things [this season],” Sequim head coach Erik Wiker said. “You take our best player, who is really great, out [for 4½ games], I think that we accomplished a lot of things.
“[The loss] will sting now, but in the long run [we] had a great year with the kids that [we] had. I think [we] achieved or over achieved.”
It was obvious from the beginning that the absence of Catelli’s defensive presence would be a problem against Gueller and the Bearcats.
The 6-foot-3, 205-pound senior ripped off touchdown runs of 60 and 73 yards on W.F. West’s first two plays from scrimmage.
Gueller delivered a powerful stiff arm, then weaved his way across the field on the first one, then simply out-ran Sequim’s defense on the second to help put West ahead 14-0.
Quarterback Jack Wiker threw the first of four interceptions on the Wolves’ next play from scrimmage, and the Bearcats scored another TD four plays later to go up 21-0 three minutes into the game.
“He’s gifted, he’s a great player,” W.F. West head coach Bob Wollan said of Gueller. “If he gets loose, he’s gone.
“He can make a bad play look good and he can make us look pretty smart over there with his ability.”
The Bearcats rolled for 382 yards rushing and 450 all together.
Gueller, a Washington State baseball signee, accounted for more than half of that.
By the time he left the game at the end of the third quarter, he had 226 yards rushing on 14 carries and another 68 yards on 7-of-13 passing with one touchdown and no picks. He did fumble twice.
His one scoring strike, a 20-yard pass to Alex Cox, was the last of four first-quarter touchdowns for the Bearcats as they went up 28-0 and never looked back.
“We were kind of frantic after those two touchdowns,” Sequim senior lineman Brendan Carpenter said. “I think it was deflating; I think we took it a little too hard.
“If we would have just kind of rolled with it we could have kept going.”
Instead, faced with a large deficit so early on, the Wolves failed to generate much of a run game against the Bearcats.
Sequim had just four runs go for more than six yards, three coming after the Bearcats went ahead 52-7 at the end of the third quarter, and had 127 total yards on the ground.
Jack Wiker, replacing Catelli at QB once again in the Wolves’ shotgun attack, could not channel the same magic that led his team to a come-from-behind 40-34 win over Eatonville the week before.
The junior ended up throwing the ball 38 times and completed just 18 of those for 154 yards.
He was intercepted four times while hounded by the Bearcat pass rush and had another 83 yards rushing on 19 carries with two TDs.
Lopaka Yasumura added 38 yards rushing and one touchdown on seven carries for the Wolves while also catching four passes for 53 yards.
Receivers Tyler Forshaw (four catches, 21 yards), Michael Ballard (3-30) and Nick Ramirez (5-38) were all targeted often as well.
Yet none of them were able to connect with Wiker on any big pass plays with the Bearcats quick defensive backs making play after play in the secondary.
“The quarterback was the main concern, just his ability to run the football. He’s a real playmaker,” Wollan said.
“We wanted to account for that and take away their running game, and I thought that was really key for us to make him as one-dimensional as possible and get him to throw the football around.”
Sequim tacked on two touchdowns on its final two drives of the game, one ending on an 11-yard Wiker run and the other a 26-yard Yasumura run.
By that time, however, the 40-point running clock had already been triggered and time was running out on the Wolves’ season.
“Obviously they miss their big guy [Catelli],” Wollan said. “He’s just a force defensively, and another weapon.
“In high school, it doesn’t matter where, if you miss the wrong one or two guys, it changes the dynamic of your team.”
Sequim graduates 15 seniors from this year’s team, which claimed the program’s seventh league championship in eight years under Wiker.
Among the players moving on are Catelli, the co-Olympic League MVP, and Forshaw, the league’s defensive MVP.
“I think it was a great season,” Jack Wiker said. “We had to overcome so much with Frank going down and all the other stuff that we had to go through.
“It could have been a lot worse and we made it as good as we could have.”
W.F. West 52, Sequim 21
W.F. West 28 3 21 0— 52
Sequim 0 7 0 14— 21
First Quarter
WF—M. Gueller 60 run (Huang kick)
WF—M. Gueller 73 run (Huang kick)
WF—Hanson 2 run (Huang kick)
WF—Cox 20 pass from M. Gueller (Huang kick)
Second Quarter
S—Wiker 1 run (Koonz kick)
WF—Huang 27 field goal
Third Quarter
WF—Hanson 5 run (Huang kick)
WF—Steen 25 run (Huang kick)
WF—Cooke 2 run (Huang kick)
Fourth Quarter
S—Wiker 11 run (Koonz kick)
S—Yasumura 26 run (Koonz kick)
Individual Stats
Rushing— S: Wiker 19-83, Yasumura 7-38, Forshaw 2-6. WF: M. Gueller 14-226, Hanson 9-71, Steen 2-35, Downs 3-23, Cooke 5-20, T. Gueller 1-7, Sanchez 1-4, Gray 1-4, Spahr 4-0, Shoemaker 1-2.
Passing—S: Wiker 18-38-4, 154. WF: M. Gueller 7-13-0, 68; T. Gueller 0-1-0, 0.
Receiving—S: Yasumura 4-53, Ramirez 5-38, Ballard 3-30, Forshaw 4-24, Miles 1-5, Campbell 1-4. WF: Rothlin 2-24, White 2-21, Cox 1-20, Hanson 1-5, Watson 1-(minus 2).