Gridiron Classic schedule
CAMAS, Clark County – Who says you have to build slowly and wait to be successful in high school football?
Not the Union Titans.
Union High School, a second-year program in the Evergreen School District in Clark County, is about to play six-time champion Bellevue in a battle of 13-0 teams for the Class 3A state championship Saturday night in the Tacoma Dome.
“Every day I wake up, I think, ‘We’re going to the state championship, and it’s sweet,’ ” said Titans linebacker Taylor Nelson, the Greater St. Helens League defensive player of the year. “We always kind of talked about it. We knew we were young last year, and after what we did (going 6-3), we said we could go for a state championship.
“But in the back of my mind, I didn’t really think we could do it.”
Who would have thought it possible for a second-year program, especially grouped on the same side of the 3A bracket as No. 2 Ferndale and No. 3 Lakes?
“It’s got to be the right place, and the right situation,” said Graham-Kapowsin coach Eric Kurle, who knows something about starting a program after he left Bethel to lead the fledgling Eagles. “The No. 1 thing is continuity in the coaching staff, and creating expectations. You’ve got to have that feeling of, ‘Hey, we’re going to win right away,’ and they have.”
It’s difficult to find a program to compare with Union to at this stage – 20 months after the Titans first came into existence.
Skyline is the obvious one, and the parallels between the two schools are striking. Union is located on the easternmost part of the Vancouver area – so far east, it sits a few blocks inside the city limits of Camas, on a bustling and fast-growing plateau in the county.
The Spartans opened in 1997 on the fast-growing Sammamish Plateau. In their fourth season, they defeated Lakes for the 2000 3A title.
Foss may have come closest to what Union is accomplishing. The Tacoma public school won the 4A title in 1975, in its third season.
Union is setting a new standard for early success, and it isn’t hard to see the reasons for its rapid ascension in the 3A ranks.
Cale Piland spent six seasons as the coach at Evergreen of Vancouver, leading that school to a 4A title victory over Skyline in 2004.
In the summer of 2007, Piland was hired as Union’s football coach and its full-time athletic coordinator. Six of his staff of 15 assistants came with him from Evergreen, including defensive coordinator Ken Frisch, offensive line coach Mark Rego and defensive line coach Mike Kesler.
That fall, the Titans played a full league schedule (3A Greater St. Helens League), which isn’t common for a first-year program. They won their first six games, four of them against non-league foes, and finished 6-3.
Many of Piland’s program-sustaining attributes – attention to fundamentals, good conditioning and a physical play – carried over to Union from the outset.
“When you open a new facility, you have a one-time shot to do things the right way. You don’t come in and have to undo anything, so it starts with the leadership at the top,” Piland said. “The kids realized what we stressed to them was important. We worked very hard. We asked a lot of our kids, and they didn’t balk at it at all.”
Expectations were high this season as Piland had his team open by playing three 4A playoff schools from 2007 – Skyview, Evergreen of Vancouver and Heritage.
“I think they came out with a confidence that I don’t think a lot of other teams have when they’re that young,” Frisch said. “We threw a lot at them, they absorbed it like sponges, and I think they’ve come out better for it.”
It’s one thing to be competitive. It’s another to put yourself in position to play for the 3A title.
Nobody in the program figured the Titans would be playing in December. But nobody put a ceiling on the season, either.
“They told us the bar would be set high, and even in our first year, we weren’t going to make excuses. We were going to be a varsity football team, and play football games,” Nelson said. “That was our mentality.”
Immediate success is a lightning rod for envy and suspicion. Some in the district think Piland pillaged Evergreen of its top talent when, in fact, only about one-third of the team’s roster is made up of players from the old school, or the feeder school to the Plainsmen.
The football team’s numbers reflect a nearly equal distribution of the student population among the three older schools in the district.
Of course, that doesn’t take into consideration how a state-of-the-art, $62 million school can attract students – including athletes – from all corners. The athletic facilities, featuring two weight rooms, are second to none in the district, and the campus is designed almost like a college.
But all the money in the district and all the talent in the county can’t account for what the Titans have accomplished, beating programs far more accomplished, and much further along.
“Yeah, it’s happened right away. The neat thing is, a program you start from scratch, there’s a lot of energy around it,” said Piland, a former Pacific Lutheran player. “They want to be the first one to do this, and the first one to do that. There’s some natural and inherent credibility in that.”
Todd Milles: 253-597-8442
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