The 2024-25 season will be the first of a new chapter for the Mossyrock boys.
Not only will the Vikings have to fill the shoes of Zack Munoz, Luke Cooper, and Hunter Isom, a trio of seniors that helped them reach the 1B State Championship Game as the No. 7 seed last fall, but they’ll have to do it back in the C2BL.
Mossyrock is back in the 2Bs after a short stint in the 1B, and Mossyrock coach Tom Kelly acknowledged that there will be far fewer gimmes than there have been the last two seasons.
“There’s some very good teams,” Kelly said. “In 1B, it would sometimes be every two or three games … (In 2B), it’ll be tough every night out.”
The Vikings got their first taste of C2BL action on Wednesday, and it was as close as Kelly expects it to be over the course of the season.
Mossyrock went up by double digits early, as it often did against 1B foes, but the Ducks stormed back to make it a game, which didn’t happen much over the last few years.
Kelly — who has spent time as the girls’ coach at multiple schools, including Centralia and W.F. West (where he won a state championship in 2018) — has had plenty of experience rebuilding and reloading on the fly.
Without the three seniors and Tyce Vigre, who is now at Toledo, Kelly will have his hands full finding players to fill those roles.
Through the first few weeks of practice, though, he has liked what he’s seen.
In their opener against Toutle Lake, Kelly turned to freshman Kevin Mitchell and eighth-grader Colby Cournyer, who both started the game and went on to combine to score 10 points.
“The sky is the limit for those two,” Kelly said.
Some of the more usual suspects are back and ready to get back to Spokane as well.
Ethan Johnson has already made his mark early with a 29-point performance against Toutle Lake, and Easton Kolb and Shaun Fry played key roles in the win, just as they did at state last season.
The 1-0 start in C2BL play is the start Kelly was looking for, but he knows they’ll have to continue to grow to return to the 2B postseason.
“It’s pretty exciting looking forward,” Kelly said. “We got a lot of work to do, don’t get me wrong, but it’s there. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.”
