Deandre “Biggie” Coleman, the number one football prospect in the Pacific Northwest, has been at Garfield for four years. Carson Dunn, possessor of some of the softest hands in Seattle history, has been at Garfield for four years. Anthony Johnson, a man with a 40 inch vertical and blazing speed, has been at Garfield for four years. These are truly gifted individuals. Why then has the team won only two games in the past four years?

It is possible that Garfield is a victim of circumstances. The arcane organization of KingCo 4A pits Garfield against clearly superior suburban schools. If Garfield returned to the Metro League, then they would be more competitive. However, this is taking the easy way out. The Bulldogs ought to be able to compete at the highest level.

Unfortunately, Garfield is swamped with skinny dudes. The nerdiness of the APP program is reflected in its terrible yield of football players. “I weigh 130 pounds,” says scrawny sophomore Peter Killory. “I don’t want to get hit and ruin my pretty face,” says pansy junior Chris Perkins. Other students, such as hulks Paul Berggren and Michael Harvey, say that they don’t play football for fear of getting injured. Senior Sam Jensen doesn’t like the aggressive nature of high school ball.

The violence inherent in football is a deterrent, but it also provides an opportunity for kids to vent whatever built-up anger they have by bashing others in a relatively safe environment. Perhaps Garfield just doesn’t have enough of the raging future wife-beaters that seem to fill the rosters of Eastside schools. Other students at Garfield simply lack the skills to play football. Sam Dunnington says that his hands are “more buttery than a fat kid’s morning toast.” There is not much room for spindly green-beans who can’t catch a pass.

However, the main reason that people don’t play football for Garfield is that they are busy in other pursuits. Seniors Calvin Moland II and Russell Blount played in the band for three years before joining the team. Juniors Frankie Pavia and Wilson Platt and senior Eli Rumpf have played tennis instead of football. Also, many of the most athletic students at Garfield focus on basketball. Though he does not attend Garfield, the case of Peyton Siva is an excellent example. As a freshman, Siva dominated KingCo 4A football. However, the threat (and reality) of injuries caused him to stop playing and focus on basketball. At other schools, in contrast with basketball-centric Garfield, football prowess is the surest path to recognition and popularity. Jocks rule the suburbs, but at Garfield it’s unclear whether they even exist.

Still, the team that Garfield does field ought to be able to compete from a physical standpoint. The weakness of the team is based of the absence of the intense “football culture” seen on the Eastside. Attendance at practice is not seen as a necessity. There is no true heated competition for varsity spots. Practice itself is sometimes a casual Iversonian affair, featuring no semblance of the hundreds of people marching together seen at even lowly schools such as Newport. Some of the players don’t take pride in the quality of the team.

Much of this can be attributed to the absence of youth football leagues in Seattle. Soccer dominates the fall community youth sports scene. Soccer is fine for girls, but boys need to learn how to hit each other. Eastside schools such as Bellevue run peewee teams as feeders into specific high schools. Among the Seattle schools, only Rainer Beach fields youth teams. Though independent football leagues have tried to break into the soccer monopoly, most children, even those with the desire to play, never end up playing youth football.

The dearth of peewee leagues has several effects. Kids never have a chance to learn the fundamentals of actual football (as opposed to the pansy strain practiced at most elementary school lunches). In addition to basic knowledge, kids in teams that feed into a particular high school gain experience in that school’s offensive and defensive schemes. Garfield is unable to run the spread offense, a system that dominates high school football and which takes advantage of athletic players (which we have an excess of), because it requires too much knowledge of the playbook. When we encounter schools that do have well practiced and executed schemes, our pound the ball up the middle style is embarrassingly exposed for the vestigial doo-doo which it is.

Confidence is crucial in sports. Michael Jordan knew he was going to hit the shot in the 1998 finals. Babe Ruth knew he was about to hit his famed called shot. Garfield football knows that it will lose. This is wrong. The team’s ineptitude has created a culture of failure. “I go to Garfield, therefore I am bad at football, therefore I don’t play,” says senior Gabe Martin. Nevertheless, football is the most glamorous segment in high school athletics, and due to the cyclical nature of sports, Garfield will be back on top. Sometime.