Small senior class leads College Place into 2nd varsity football season

The good news is that the College Place High School football team will have seniors this season. The bad news is that there will only be eight of them.

With only juniors and underclassmen on the roster, the Hawks played their first varsity season in school history last year, going 1-9 — beat Highland 29-8 in their first game — and 0-7 against SCAC East foes. But the outlook for this season is no doubt brighter with a senior class coach Donald Ponds feels is capable of leading the younger guys.

“We have a small senior class, but the seniors that are going to be playing are a good group of guys,” Ponds said. “Really talented guys that will be able to come in and help.

“We’re gonna need more, some more horses. But we’ll be more competitive, and we’ll be a little bit more disciplined this year, and I think that can be attributed to our seniors.”

Among those seniors are quarterback Miguel Moreno — the All-SCAC East first team punter last season — and wide receiver/outside linebacker Cameron Lindstrom, who Ponds said had the talent and frame at 6-foot-4, 170 pounds, to play at the next level.

But with the 40- to 45-man team featuring mostly underclassmen, more important than the seniors’ talent will be their leadership abilities as they establish the climate of College Place football for years to come.

“What we need from the seniors is leadership — they’ve gotta grow up,” Ponds said. “One of our themes this year is ‘Man Up.’ These guys get to set the tempo, they get to set the tone. They get to instill pride and what it means to step out on the football field. They’re gonna be the first to have a senior night, the first to graduate from here, and that’s huge.”

Of course having the right coach in place will be key as well, and Ponds seems qualified as anybody to jump start the football program.

Before being hired on as an assistant for CP’s first freshman team in 2014 — he’s been the program’s head coach the past two years — he guided Class 2A Renton to three straight four-win seasons after winning just one in his first campaign, in 2010.

“There were times when that program had to forfeit games because they didn’t have enough kids to play,” Ponds said. “I took that challenge on, and in the four years that I was there, we played every single game. That roster started off with about 20-something kids, and when I left we had about 55 or 60 kids.”

In a situation at College Place where success, at least for this season, will likely be measured in the team’s effort and improvement more so than wins and losses, Ponds is embracing the challenge

“It is a challenge, and there are times when I feel like I kind of want to step back,” he said. “But the challenge is what keeps me going. What we find out is that some kids just don’t want to play football. And with the information available now, there are a lot of kids deciding that they don’t want to play. And that makes it tough on the recruiting end ... but the challenge is what keeps me going.”

Ponds heaped praise on assistant coach Tim Hutchinson, who came over from the McLoughlin High School staff, for helping him with kickstarting the program.

College Place will again open its season against Highland, this time on the road, at 7 p.m. Sept. 1.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 11:21 AM with the headline "Small senior class leads College Place into 2nd varsity football season."