Without a doubt, this year has been a tough one for the Oak Harbor boys and the Coupeville girls high school basketball programs.

Now that the regular seasons are over for both squads, the tenacity and determination of both teams’ players and coaches deserves to be addressed.

Prior to the start of the campaign, Wildcat coach Mike Washington and

Wolf Pack mentor Blake Severns knew they would be putting young and relatively inexperienced teams on the court.

Both squads had talented players on the roster but the fact of the matter was, although having the skills to play the game, varsity experience was something the players lacked.

One of the first things a coach learns is that no matter how good you think your young players may be when you send them out on the court or the field to compete, when they go up against opponents with two or three years of varsity experience, the experienced players will carry the day in nearly every game.

Why? Because the experienced players have been there before and they’ve done that. Not that they possess more talent than younger players, they simply know what is going to happen in game situations, how to react and what changes need to be made before the score gets out of hand.

I learned very quickly (and the hard way) in my first season coaching varsity football that experienced players on the opposite side of the ball will give you major headaches.

Coming off a successful season as a middle school head coach, I had a bunch of freshmen playing in their first season on the varsity team that I thought were pretty darn good defensive football players.

Most of them were country kids, rawhide tough and the topic of conversation around the locker room wasn’t who was the best Hip-Hop or Rap singer. Instead, is was the advantages or disadvantages of owning a Chevrolet or Ford pickup truck as opposed to a Dodge, and which one was the better rig.

When things went wrong on the field, “We gotta cowboy up,” were the buzz words.

The team won one game that season because I had my freshmen, for the most part equally strong and determined, pitted against experienced offensive linemen and the veterans just killed us. They “techniqued” us to death and any “young mistake” we made, they capitalized on.

The same was true during the the Wildcat boys and Coupeville girls basketball seasons this year.

Severns had some good young players on his roster, four of whom played on last season’s undefeated eighth-grade team, and matched up with a few veterans, the Wolves had high hopes when the season began.

Unfortunately, Coupeville is one of only two Class 1A teams in the strong 1A/2A Cascade Conference and the Wolves were simply out-personneled by more experienced teams.

At Oak Harbor, the Wildcats graduated three of their top scorers off

last season’s team and Washington often had no seniors in the lineup.

Both school’s team played their hearts every time they went out on the floor, never quit and kept their heads up even though they got hammered, sometimes badly, game after game.

To their credit, players and coaches at both schools kept plugging away despite the consecutive losses that piled up.

As I can attest, losing games tends to make a coach’s hair turn gray fast and in Severns’ case, you can become a poster person for Rogaine almost overnight.

As a sports editor I felt privileged to have the opportunity to report on both teams even in defeat and if you think the kids ever gave up, you didn’t attend enough games to be able to form that opinion.

What I’m waiting for is the 2009/10 basketball season. Coupeville has four starters returning along with a bunch of other players who now have a year of varsity experience under their belts.

At Oak Harbor, Washington will be able to put five players on the floor who were all starters at one time or another this year.

Folks, I’ll see you at the games next year and we’ll all watch what happens to the fortunes of Wildcat and Wolf basketball this time around. Things will get better.