‘We’re trying to change the narrative.’ Record doesn’t reflect Mount Tahoma’s improvement in 2022
Four weeks into the 2022 season, the Mount Tahoma High School football team was winless. Casual observers may have looked at that record and chalked it up to another T-Birds team that simply wouldn’t be competitive in the 3A Pierce County League.
After all, that’s been the case all too often in the recent past. While Lincoln has been the gold standard for Tacoma Public Schools football programs the past decade, Mount Tahoma hasn’t had a winning season since 2011. Since then? Four times, the T-Birds have gone winless. In four other seasons, Mount Tahoma won just one game.
So yes, it would’ve been easy to say “same old Mount Tahoma” after an 0-4 start this season. The record, however, didn’t paint the full picture. For starters, Mount Tahoma had played one of the state’s toughest schedules to date, opening against North Kitsap and Eastlake, both Top 10 teams in their respective classifications. Then came two of the toughest programs in the 3A Pierce County League in Spanaway Lake and Lincoln, a Top 10 program in 3A.
Aside from a lopsided loss to Eastlake, Mount Tahoma was competitive in the games, losing the other three by an average of 11.6 points per game.
“We always say, ‘There’s no moral victories,’” said quarterback Derrik McKinney. “But it definitely felt nice — in the past, we were getting blown out by those teams, it wasn’t good games — but these last few weeks, we were still in there, real close games. It just felt good.”
First-year head coach Keith Terry, a Mount Tahoma alum, knew the T-Birds were close. He could see it on the field and in the team’s film sessions.
“Stay consistent,” he told his players. “We come in on Saturday or Monday and watch the film and we tell the truth. Our kids see that we’re right there. They really buy into that and they’ve stuck with it.”
Junior 6-foot-5, 290-pound lineman Marquise Thorpe-Taylor, who holds a Pac-12 offer from Arizona, said he felt like the challenging schedule was a test.
“Coming in, especially our league games, we want to win those,” he said. “But our coaches put us through a gauntlet. They wanted to see our true character. I think it showed who we are.”
Things finally turned last week, when Mount Tahoma beat Battle Ground in a 54-41 shootout. And how’s this for a stat line: McKinney completed 13-of-23 passes for 288 yards and four touchdowns, added 18 carries for 281 yards and four touchdowns, and collected five tackles, three passes defended and an interception in the win.
“I was just trying to execute what we were taught, going through our practice plan,” McKinney said. “The gaps were opening up because the linemen were blocking perfectly, receivers were running their routes great.”
Terry did the stats on Saturday, and couldn’t quite believe what he saw live the night before.
“We’ve got great athletes on the outside and he’s able to throw it around, which opened up things for him in the running game and he just had a night,” Terry said. “He started being really explosive. … You’re at the game, you see the big plays, but then you go back and watch it again and you’re like, ‘Oh, he did do that, he did do that.’”
For as uncompetitive as Mount Tahoma has been in recent years, the T-Birds were a once great football program. Mount Tahoma won back-to-back state titles in 1979 and 1980, beating Rogers of Puyallup in the ‘79 championship game and Issaquah in 1980. One of the team’s mottos this year: raise the standards.
“Nobody rises to low expectations,” Terry said. “We’ve upped those standards for these kids. We want to meet them there. A lot of that is being honest with them and not being uncomfortable having the uncomfortable conversations. Our kids are open to that and they’re receptive to that.
“We’re going to keep on chugging away that way, help bring this community back. Tacoma has a rich history of football and we want to be part of that.”
It might not show up in the win/loss column yet, but the players are all in.
“I hate losing,” McKinney said. “It’s terrible. I’ve always come from winning teams coming into Mount Tahoma. We’re trying to change the narrative, get back up to winning. We’re slowly coming back into that.”
Mount Tahoma (1-4) faces Bonney Lake (1-4) on Saturday afternoon at home in a must-win game for both teams to keep their playoff hopes alive.
