By ADAM McFADDEN

Kirkland Reporter

Go back to the 1980’s. Legendary coach Chuck Tarbox made the Juanita football team into a perennial state power, fans came to games and paid attention, and children grew up wanting to play for Juanita.

But once Tarbox left, something was lost. The program went into recession and changed coaches often. The wins dropped, the numbers dropped and the interest dropped.

Juanita and its fans are hoping first-year coach Shaun Tarantola can bring all of that back to Juanita.

Tarantola has brought the buzz, now the Rebels need to provide the performance to back it up and rebuild Juanita into a power program. In order to help do that, Tarantola has teamed with Juanita’s feeder schools to try and get junior high players introduced to Rebels’ offense as soon as possible. One thing that makes this a difficult issue is that ninth graders are still at junior high in Kirkland, so the football development schedule changes.

Tarantola pointed out three negative effects that having ninth graders at junior high has on a football program. First, the players are removed from your system for another year and are one year behind other schools when they enter their sophomore season. Second, it’s difficult for junior high students to get involved in the weight room program that they would be able to as high schoolers. Finally, there’s a mental affect. Even though a tenth grader may be physically ready, often they are not mentally ready for the game right away if it is their first year at high school.

Tarantola said one big advantage of having ninth graders in junior high is experience.

“You’ve got two full teams that are ninth graders that are getting reps,” he said. “So in theory your sophomore class should have two quarterbacks that have started a full season, ten offensive lineman, four receivers, and so on. They have actual game-day experience. It should provide us with more depth and competition.”

Of course, all of that depends if the players are learning the right things in junior high so they don’t have to learn an entirely new system in high school.

To help start the learning process, Tarantola has started working with Finn Hill Jr. High and Kamikain Jr. High, Juanita’s feeder schools.

Finn Hill head coach Mike Massena said he has about 12 plays (six pass, six run) from Tarantola to work with on the varsity team. Using the plays now allows the players to get used to the wording and get a feel for the offensive gameplan that they will see at Juanita. The Finn Hill coaches expect this development to pay big dividends for Juanita in the near future.

“Each year we’ll add a little more,” Massena said. “By the time they’re juniors (the varsity players are mostly freshmen now), there will be a dramatic difference up there.”

The results at Finn Hill have been promising. In the season opener on Sept. 26 against Redmond, the Finn Hill varsity team ran Tarantola’s simplified offense and won the game 21-7. The varsity group finished the season 4-1.

“The biggest challenge is timing,” said Ryan Barr, a Finn Hill coach. “It’s really hard to get that timing down for any groups younger than the ninth grade level.”

Tarantola brought a fly offense to Juanita. The offense uses pre-snap motion heavily, which is why timing is so important. The offense usually has a number of fakes and often causes defenders to pause and find where the ball is.

Numbers in the Finn Hill program are already benefiting from the buzz Tarantola has brought to Juanita. Barr said at the end of last season there was an informational meeting for everyone interested in joining the football team. About 15 students showed up. Currently the team has close to 50 players approaching the numbers Barr and Massena experienced when they played for Finn Hill football in Juanita’s prime.

“When we were here there’d be 100 kids out on the field,” Massena said. “You had a varsity squad, a JV squad, a JV A squad and a JV B squad.”

Part of the reason Tarantola came to Juanita with such enthusiasm is because of what he did at Evergreen High School (White Center) as the head coach. He spent three seasons turning around the Evergreen football program.

In his past two seasons, the Wolverines went 17-4 and won a share of the Seamount League title in 2007. This season Evergreen has found things more difficult after Tarantola’s departure, stumbling to a 1-6 record and an eighth place finish in the Seamount.

The pre-Tarantola Rebels weren’t terrible, they just weren’t very good. The team averaged three wins per season from 2002-2007, but never went winless in the KingCo. But the Rebels suffered from a lack of competitiveness, and perhaps more damaging, a lack of interest.

Juanita has certainly been in worse straights: The Rebels had gone five years without a league victory before Tarbox’s arrival for the 1980 season. The turnaround was fast, Juanita won a division title in Tarbox’s second season and reeled off a stretch of eight consecutive division titles. The Rebels won back-to-back state titles in 1984 and 1985, then followed up with a second place finish in 1986.

“It’s been dead for so long around the program,” Barr said. “When we were kids we couldn’t wait to go to high school at Juanita. You would go into grocery stores on a Friday and checkers and people in line would be all excited to go to the game.”

Juanita won’t win a state title this season, but the signs are all around that people are once again excited about the Rebels. Barr said during a recent hair cut, someone asked if he was going to the Juanita game. Barr also noticed traffic is getting heavier around the area before games. They’re just small details, but they carry a potentially big message.

After nearly two decades, it looks like that Friday-night buzz is starting to come back to Juanita.