Cardinals Place Third In State

PULLMAN - To say Monday night's 21-14 semi­final loss to Colfax was bit­tersweet would be an under­statement. The narrow defeat to the number one-ranked team in the state was not what the Cardinals had hoped for on the chilly snowbound turf at Martin Field. A first-ever state championship game in Tacoma on Saturday was more what they had in mind after a first-ever undefeated season. But in the wake of the heartbreaking playoff drama at the big Pac 10 stadium, the 2010 Cardinals drew widespread praise from their fans, their towns and even the Colfax coach for being the best WP team ever to reach the semifinals,winning their third-place trophy with a closer game than any team in Waitsburg's high school sports history. "What a classy group of young men," Bulldogs' head coach Mike Morgan said in a telephone interview on Tues­day. "They had every right to think they were going to go (to Tacoma). We faced a great

club, and there aren't a lot of teams you can say that about." Morgan was as impressed by his team's 2010 2B oppo­nents in Pullman as he is with the growth of the WP football program and the Touchet Valley fans who were so loud even Bulldogs quarterback Alex Teade had a tough time being heard by his team­mates during his two-minute offense late in the first half. "They used to say all roads to Tacoma go through Col­fax, but you might as well say they lead through Waitsburg and Prescott now," he said about the football program head coach Jeff Bartlow and his staff have built. "At some point, Jeff is going to take it out of my hide." Local sports historian and booster Ross Hamann said Waitsburg football teams won third place twice before since 1997, but the previ­ous Cardinals didn't have a loss-free record, nor did they come as close to winning as the 2010 team. Long before the combine, the Prescott Tigers went to the champion­ship game with an 11-0 re­cord and an eight-man team in 1976. The last time Waits­burg placed third, they had lost 48-0 against Davenport.

Despite the disappoint­ment of losing what could have been theirs after hold­ing

a 14-point lead in the first half, the Cardinals knew they had done something big.

"We gave Colfax a game, didn't we," Cardinal Justin Armstrong shouted through his tears at his equally emo­Waitsburg tional teammates right after the game ended. The players milled around the field, hugging each other, drained and deflated from having the wind knocked out of them by the come-from-behind Bulldogs' vic­tory. When they received their third place trophy, they seemed at a loss whether to laugh or cry. "We left it all out there," defensive back Tre Brannock said the next day. "It's one to remember."

The town felt the same way about the nail biter of a playoff game and the unpar­alleled

season that preceded it.

"We're nothing but bust­ing out with pride about their accomplishments," Hamann said. "We've never done this well in a semifinal. All our boys on the football team are champions." Waitsburg High School Superintendent and Athletics Director Stephanie Wood­erchak said the impressive semifinal finish capped a great sports season for the combine overall. "We're very proud of our boys and all our athletes," she said. "We've had a very successful fall season." The students' chance to mark that season in the form of the annual sports awards ceremony, which had been scheduled for earlier this week, will now take place on Monday, Dec. 6, at the Waits­burg High School auditorium. The Tigers' soccer awards were postponed because of the freezing rain forecast Tuesday evening and will be rescheduled.

Hamann said giving Col­fax a run for its money was no small feat. That town's sports programs regularly produce state champions in a variety of sports, whose programs draw from a larger pool of student athletes.

With more than 2,800 residents, the population of Colfax is almost double the size of Waitsburg and Prescott combined (total count: 1,575). Colfax has a high school student body of 220, compared to Waitsburg and Prescott's combined 147. In 2009, the Bulldogs were reclassified from a larger A-league team to a B-league team, though their school district is not the largest in the league.

But even if the Cardinals knew the statistical odds were stacked against them, on Monday they played like confident, all-season winners for most of the first half only to run into a combination of baffling "illegal shift" calls by the flag-happy of­ficials and a Colfax team that switched to an effective passing game in the second half after seeing its running game ground to a halt by the physical WP defense. "They popped us in the mouth right from the get-go," Colfax's Morgan said. "We're a pretty good ball club, and they made us look like kids (in the first half). If we had just our running attack, the game would have been over."