Olympic High School and University of Puget Sound graduate Ethan Goldizen may finally have some breathing room to work with after a chaotic first year on the football sidelines at Kingston High School.
Not only will the 26-year-old have had a full offseason to build a game plan come time for his Buccaneers to hit the turf in 2024, but the program will also kick off its first of at least two years playing in the 1A Nisqually League while remaining a 2A school.
The ideal solution in the eyes of Kingston’s athletic staff – Goldizen included – would have been for the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association to grant the school’s appeal to drop to 1A after it barely missed the student attendance cutoff in the 2024-28 reclassification cycle. Yet it’s this alternative that the coach believes still gives him the chance to begin rebuilding the culture for a football program that has not enjoyed a winning campaign since 2013.
“I think the schedule as a whole is great,” he said. “Obviously going down to 1A, the goal is to have a little bit smaller school competition to build our program in a safe, competitive way, but I’m not going to count out any of these 1A teams. We’re still walking into a pretty competitive league here.”
Goldizen was hired last summer to fill a coaching position that had been vacated twice in the previous seven months. Teaching at Bethel Middle School in Spanaway at the time, he called his acceptance of the job a professional risk to follow his dream of building up a football program. “It was a little bit backwards of what people do when they take the teaching job first and try to find coaching, but football’s very important to me, and I saw what this school was lacking and felt like I could provide something.”
The Buccaneers finished toward the bottom of Olympic League standings again last year with a 2-8 record, including being winless in league, but the move to 1A is already helping bring renewed interest to local football. Over a dozen seniors, primarily wideouts and defensive backs, will be joined by a larger group of underclassmen.
Goldizen as of Aug. 15 estimated that around 67 students had signed up for this season. The Buccaneers had finished 2023 with about 39 players. “I would say, in my opinion, that us going down to 1A opened the floodgates for a lot of people to come out and play football. A good amount of the reasons for kids not playing, good kids that would size up against other teams, was hesitancy that we weren’t 1A when we should be.”
The coach plans to use the larger player presence and the leadership of his upperclassmen to his advantage in year two. Senior quarterback Dewaun Swan is expected to start once again, and he will get the benefit of the Buccaneer’s top receiver in senior Hans Reber as well as the young talents of sophomore Connor Mutch.
Senior Kyler Hedstrom earned second-team defensive honors last season as a defensive back while linebacker Nick Whitbeck will have to fill the shoes of arguably Kingston’s best player in Camden Singer.
As for their schedule, the first two weeks they play Foss and North Mason, both 2A schools, before taking their first trip to Klahowya to play the Eagles since 2021 and home contests against the top two Nisqually teams in Cascade Christian and Life Christian Academy.
