HARD TO IMAGINE a season getting off to a rougher start than Erik Wiker’s did.
After all, the longtime Sequim football coach was lying in a hospital bed the day before preseason camp began.
Having undergone an emergency appendectomy that Sunday after doctors diagnosed him with appendicitis, he was hardly in tip-top shape when the Wolves first hit the practice field Aug. 17.
That didn’t stop him from being there for each and every minute of camp, however, from the opening practice all the way through team two-a-days.
Wiker said he’s always been able to recover quickly. So even after doctors told him he might want to take off work for a couple of weeks, he planned on being with his team.
“The surgeon was real nice,” said Wiker, entering his eighth year as Wolves head coach. “She [said] by Wednesday I would be able to yell.
“I couldn’t yell by Wednesday,” he added with a smile, “but I could yell by Thursday. It hurt a little bit, but I could do it.”
Chalk it all up as another example of Wiker’s unparalleled dedication to Sequim football.
Nobody could blame him if he moved on to a higher profile job across the bridges after all the success he’s had at Sequim the past seven years — six league titles in seven years with a 62-16 record.
But the 41-year-old — currently the area’s longest-tenured football coach — seems content to continue guiding Sequim into uncharted territory.
The Wolves reached the state tournament just one time prior to his arrival, but now have gone each of the past five seasons.
“I never convince myself [we’re going to be good],” Wiker said. “I always believe and try to be proven wrong.”
Few have done so in the past seven years.
Rated eighth in Class 2A in the Tacoma News Tribune preseason poll, Wiker’s Wolves once again will put the onus on their Olympic League opponents.
Look for more on Sequim and the rest of the Peninsula’s teams in our special football preview section in the Sept. 2 editions.
Reclassification soon
One of the interesting side stories to this year’s preps season will be what shakes out of upcoming reclassification discussions by the WIAA.
As some of you might recall, the last round of reclassification altered the high school athletic landscape considerably.
A large part of that was because of the new method used by the WIAA to separate classes; one that mandated a certain number of schools be placed into each classification.
Thus, whenever a school opted to move up a classification — as numerous small Metro League schools have done without fail for years — a school at the bottom of the group was kicked down a class.
This came as a great benefit to Port Angeles and its teams, which dropped all the way to Class 2A after 23 schools with smaller enrollment figures opted up to 3A.
The Roughriders thrived as the fifth-largest 2A school during the 2010-11 year, sending athletes to state in 18 of 20 sports.
There is some thought that the WIAA will not follow the same method this fall, instead defining classifications with hard enrollment figures.
If such is the case, there is a distinct possibility that Port Angeles will rise to the 3A ranks once again.
PT on move?
Another possible change to watch out for is which league Port Townsend athletics calls home in 2012-14.
Port Townsend will most assuredly be a 1A school a year from now.
But after taking its lumps as the smallest institution in the Olympic League the past six years, the 1A Nisqually League has to be looking more and more attractive.
Not only would the Redskins get to compete in the same league as rival Chimacum, they’d also be on equal footing with everyone else in their league.
Obviously, that hasn’t been the case in the 1A/2A/3A Olympic League.
And several coaches aren’t thrilled about it.
Stay tuned.
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Matt Schubert is the outdoors and sports columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. His column regularly appears on Thursdays and Fridays. He can be reached at matt.schubert@peninsuladailynews.com.