As I followed Anacortes quarterback Rex Larson off the field at Husky Stadium Saturday night, Dec. 2, I saw the senior stop short of the tunnel to the locker room, turn around and take it all in one final time.
Larson’s eyes and slight smile exuded a look of gratitude, intertwined with shock and awe at what he and his teammates had accomplished.
The No. 2-seeded Seahawks had beaten top-seeded Tumwater — a perennial superpower playing in its 12th title game — in their first championship game appearance and did so in historical fashion. Anacortes’ 60 points set a new 2A state championship scoring record.
“Oh my goodness,” Larson said postgame after being told of the record. “That’s unreal.”
But Larson, who finished with gaudy numbers in his final high school game, didn’t do it alone. Nor did the team itself.
The Anacortes community rallied around the team, putting together a town-wide send-off two days before the game and, by some accounts, filled the stands at Husky Stadium with the largest crowd of any of the 12 teams that played in state title games over the weekend.
“I think the whole town might be here,” Larson said after the game. “We were looking at it pregame and we were like, ‘Man, if we can fill up two purple sections, I think that’d be cool,’ but we’ve got this whole section filled out.”
Eight years after athletic director and former head coach Justin Portz was told he “came to the wrong town” looking to establish a championship football program, he and his coaching staff have done exactly that.
Anacortes is no longer just a basketball town.
An unprecedented rebuild
You just don’t see this kind of turnaround in high school football. So often are programs stuck in mediocrity, lacking a winning culture and letting each zero-win or subpar season pass them by.
It’s not an easy thing to pull a program out of. Consistently losing trickles down to youth programs, affecting turnout numbers and interest in the sport.
That was Anacortes, until a group of individuals — including Portz — decided to do something about it. At its lowest, in 2018 (an 0-9 season for the Seahawks), the team finished with 16 players on their varsity roster.
From 2007–18, the Seahawks’ varsity team had a combined record of 34-84, with just two winning seasons in 2010 and 2013.
The 2010 season was one of just three campaigns since 1991 the team had reached the state quarterfinals, but they had never made it beyond that round of the playoffs.
In 2019, the program fielded only a junior varsity team, opting to “burn it down and start fresh,” as Portz put it. Since then, Anacortes is 34-5.
High school football, especially at the 2A level, is dominated by run-heavy, clock-controlling offenses (just like Tumwater, which employs a Wing-T). The goal is to wear down the opposition and dominate the time of possession.
Anacortes does the opposite of that. The Seahawks run the ball to set up the pass — not the other way around.
In Anacortes’ four postseason games alone, Larson compiled 1,239 yards passing and 14 touchdowns. On the other end, his receivers — namely seniors Rylin Lang and Landon Schafer — are as dynamic as they come.
Most teams, including Tumwater, simply don’t get enough reps against a team like Anacortes to be able to adequately defend them. That’s why, despite their own strength, the T-Birds looked shellshocked heading into halftime of the title game, trailing 34-6.
Scoring record in hand, we now know the 2023 Anacortes offense was much more than scary — it was historically powerful, and one of the best in Class 2A we will ever see.
Leading with experience
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Anacortes’ senior class from the past two seasons. The Seahawks’ 2022 graduating class endured a winless season in 2018, and the 2023 class were freshmen during the junior varsity season.
Both groups saw the beginning of something special but never got to see it through to the end.
This year’s seniors were freshmen in 2020 — the shortened six-game season. They rose far above everything that was expected from a group of Anacortes football players.
“[It’s] not only what they did on the field, but it’s their leadership off the field,” Anacortes head coach Travis Anderson said of the current seniors. “That’s what’s going to be missed the most — everything they do behind the scenes, picking guys up, and we’re going to miss them a lot.”
From my time around these players, one thing stuck out to me: They didn’t care about the program’s history of losing. They just loved football and wanted to play.
Why does that matter? In the same way losing trickles down, winning does, too.
It only takes one determined class of athletes to reset a program. Anacortes has now had three of those classes, and the team’s current underclassmen have adopted that mindset, and will propel that culture forward to future seasons.
“We’ve talked about it [all year], leaving our name and legacy,” Lang said. “We wanted to come back in 20 years and be talked about; we just wanted to win it for our community so bad.”
