Northstrom back again, returns to coach Gig Harbor girls soccer team

As the saying goes, out with the old and in with the new. But in this case, the saying doesn’t apply to the Gig Harbor High School girls soccer team.

The team is welcoming back Todd Northstrom as their head coach after Stephanie Cox stepped down. Northstrom is familiar with the program having spent years coaching both the boys and girls soccer teams at Gig Harbor in years past.

So this isn’t his first rodeo, having 17 years’ worth of experience coaching one team or the other for the Tides.

“I took over after Jenny Krueger was the coach around 2004. I did it for three or four years and then I was done,” Northstrom said. “Then I came back and I helped when Dani States was the coach. She needed a JV coach and I [agreed]. And then I got brought in when Stephanie came in.”

In their first and only year together as co-coaches in 2015, Cox and Northstrom split their duties and coached to their strengths on the ball. Cox was a defensive coach, and Northstrom coached the offensive attack.

After 2015, Northstrom shifted his focus back to only the boys team and coached them until he stepped down in 2018, making way for current head coach Joe Ross.

In the past, if a teacher wanted a coaching job and they worked in the building, it was theirs. This time was different, however. After being asked by Gig Harbor’s athletic director Bob Werner if he was interested, Northstrom had to go through an entire interview process in order to get the job.

“I’m pretty jacked to do this, but with all this COVID stuff who knows [what will happen],” Northstrom said. “I’ve sat in on a couple meetings on what the WIAA has done. They’re kind of like everything else, nobody really knows what’s going to go on.”

While the fall sports are under an unprecedented level of uncertainty due to concerns of the COVID-19 pandemic, Northstrom did find out that the girls soccer season is scheduled to begin March 1.

However, they will only be get in a shortened season composed of a very little amount league games and possibly some non-league games. Though there is still uncertainty about that happening as well.

“Our season will be a very short season, with six league games,” Northstrom said. “I can still get non-league games. I’ve gotten a couple of emails from Frank Hankel from Curtis and some other guys I know that I’ve coached against for years.”

Practices won’t wait until March as the girls soccer team was given the go-ahead to begin as there will be a training period once the school year begins in September and October.

Northstrom and his team will be allowed to work out freely, albeit under the restrictions of COVID-19 social distancing. Of course those precautions include taking temperatures of the girls and only allowing them to work in groups of five.

The WIAA also has shortened the amount of practices each player needs in order to participate in the first game from 10 to five. It may not be a lot to get the team to start to gel with each other, but that’s the hand Northstrom has been dealt with the rearrangement of all the sports this upcoming year.

“I really don’t know that much about the team. When I walked away, I walked away from coaching,” he said. “I know some of the girls from family people I know and kids I have in class. Nice bunch of kids and there’s about five of them that won the state title when they were freshman.”

He will have a short amount of time with the players to build up the new offensive system which he hopes to keep it as simple as possible, but fun and engaging for his new players.

“Stephanie’s process was cool because she was very open-minded and she’s a defensive minded coach so she let me do the offense,” Northstrom said. “I’m pretty much an offensive guy and I will tell me teams that I like defense, but defense takes a lot longer to build. This year we have shorter time to do that so we got to focus on the team with the most goals wins.”

Because of the limited contact between him and the players, Northstrom has not been able to get much done in terms of summer conditioning for the Tides. Most of the girls are still playing for their club, so it would be a hassle to gather them for running drills.

Even with all the changes and uncertainty that face the Tides, Northstrom still holds one of his core tenants above all else: the student part of “student-athlete”.

“It’s the same message all the time: you are a student-athlete and student is first,” he said. “Our focus is making sure that students are getting it done in the classroom, and that they are representing our school and community well. As much as soccer is a great thing, it’s kind of secondary and it’s more about becoming well rounded as a person and a teammate.”

This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 6:00 AM.