Tag Archives: Seattle Seahawks

Richard Sherman has Cedar Heights covered

Students at Cedar Heights Junior High School (and most staff members) showed up for the school assembly Thursday with no idea what was in store.

When Richard Sherman walked into the room, the gym exploded in applause and excitement, said South Kitsap School District spokeswoman Amy Miller.

Sherman, a pillar of the Legion of Boom for the 2013 NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks, agreed to speak at Cedar Heights’ “It Takes Courage to be Great!” assembly as part of his work with Blanket Coverage, the Richard Sherman Family Foundation.
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Through the foundation, formed in 2013, Sherman provides students in low-income communities with school supplies and clothing so they can more adequately achieve their goals.

Sherman recently launched a new initiative to reach out to schools with large at-risk populations, according to Bryan Slater, Director of Community Outreach for the foundation and a member of its board. Cedar Heights does not fit the at-risk label statistically, said Slater, but Sherman wants to reach out to schools in King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap County. Slater, a teacher in the Sumner School District, knows Ted Macomber, a dean at Cedar and supporter of previous Blanket Coverage events, and so the foundation connected with the school in South Kitsap School District.

Although Sherman did not distribute clothing at the assembly, the Stanford grad did talk to the students about having the courage and perseverance to keep trying even when the odds are stacked against you.
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Sherman fielded questions from the kids, including, “Will you be my best friend?” to “What was your most courageous moment?”

He also invited six students to sign Blanket Coverage contracts to work on improving themselves in the areas of attendance, behavior/attitude or academics. The kids are asked to document where they’ve been falling short in any one of these areas and to list specific actions they will try to take to change their habits. The purpose is to encourage students to take small steps to reach their bigger life goals, Slater said.
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Sherman will personally follow up with the students to see how they are doing with their goals, according to Slater.

“Richard’s role is to kind of be a big cheerleader for the kids,” he said. “Richard doesn’t want this to be kind of a one and done thing. He wants to have authentic, real relationships with the kids.”

On his blog, Sherman on Thursday posted, “Shout out to Cedar Heights Junior High School, I had an amazing time today. These kids truly have a ton of potential; I hope I can help them reach it. We had a few kids sign contracts today to improve in various areas of their studies — it is always encouraging to see a student show their dedication to becoming successful. I hope all the students enjoyed it as much as I did. Keep up the hard work; it will pay off!”
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Sherman has already visited Rainer Beach High School in Seattle, where he had five students sign contracts. With more school visits ahead, how will he keep track of all these kids?

“Richard’s memory is so incredible, when he gets to meet these five or six kids, he’ll remember them forever,” Slater said.

Members of the media were not invited to or notified of the event.

“We’re not really interested in the publicity,” Slater said. “We don’t want it to be construed as a publicity stunt by Mr. Sherman.”

“South Kitsap School District would like to thank Richard Sherman and his family foundation for taking the time to visit Cedar Heights and make a difference for the students in our community,” Miller said.

Go Hawks!

— Photos Courtesy of Blanket Coverage

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You’ve earned the right to cry over this.


Super Bowl XLVIII trophy and the guys who made it happen.
Super Bowl XLVIII trophy and the guys who made it happen.
Several years back Bremerton got a Popeyes chicken restaurant and for a few weeks the lines were atrocious. One of my bosses asked if there had been a pent-up demand for Popeyes. Apparently, but that’s nothing compared to the demand in Seattle for the silver football.

The projected numbers kept growing. It went from an expected to 300,000 to a half a million on Tuesday. The lines at the ferries made it easy to believe the other estimates that came out on Wednesday, that the crowd was up to 700,000. During the party at CenturyLink Field Paul Allen said it was a million. If Allen was wrong he can be forgiven for not really identifying with numbers less than a million. He can also be forgiven because Seattle was celebrating in the house he and you, the taxpayers, built. Whatever the numbers, they were massive.

If there weren’t a million people downtown, it sure felt like it. Imagine if all those people who tried to board boats around Kitsap and trains in the areas surrounding Seattle had managed to get on.

It was cold, it was crowded and it was beautiful.

I saw someone posting on Facebook a wish that we could gather that many people for something perhaps more noble. That’s a worthwhile dream, but let’s not spend a lot of time feeling bad about this. I certainly don’t have a mind sharp enough to tell you why it is we care so much about sports, I just know I’m as big a sucker for this as anyone.

Charlie Peach of Bainbridge Island told me he cried when Percy Harvin ran the second-half kickoff back for a touchdown. I haven’t been a Seahawk fan as long as he has. He was a fan when the team was launched. I jumped on the bandwagon in 2003, when I heard on the radio some guy talking about wanting the ball so they could march down to score. You know what I’m talking about.

Despite my relatively recent adoption of the Seahawks, I’ll confess that I kind of cried too when Harvin scored. I wanted this win as bad as you lifers, because I wanted it for you. I grew up somewhere else and have seen my teams win it all. A lot of you, including a few of my cousins, had not. I know the Storm won two titles, but as Nathan Joyce wrote before the Super Bowl, those titles have not filled the void that has been building since the Sonics won it all in 1979. Sunday was a good day.

So I wasn’t at all surprised to hear the outrageous estimates of the crowd size in Seattle. This victory was special. If the team gets more, the parades and the rallies in the future probably won’t be as well attended. It will still feel great, but this one is special. Years of frustration, at least in football, are over.

America gets to kiss your ring, Seattle. For years you’ve been able to talk about your teams’ greatness, the 2001 Mariners, the 2005 Seahawks, the 1996 Sonics, and everyone else could ask to see the trophy. Now you can show them the proof. And you can puff out your chest and declare yourself a champion.

And don’t be surprised if every time you see the replay of Harvin taking that kickoff to paydirt you shed another tear. Over the past 38 years you have earned the right to be emotional about this.

Editor’s note: This piece was edited to include the mention of the Seattle Storm and to correct the year figure in the last sentence. While we’re discussing this a little bit, let me mention the video. I wasn’t prepared to take video yesterday. That was going to be another reporter’s role, but that reporter couldn’t get on the ferry. Not getting on the ferry became the main story and Josh Farley did an excellent video on that topic. I was left to my own device, my iPhone, which kept running out of juice at inopportune times. That’s why there is no video from the ceremony itself.

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Gorst auto dealer diverts $10,000 in advertising dollars for Seahawks-themed raffle

In mid-December, as the Seattle Seahawks pumped their regular season record to 12-2 in a shutout against the New York Giants, Kenneth Bayne and Kasey Osborne, owners of Kitsap Auto Mall in Gorst, decided to gamble with their advertising budget.

No, they didn’t hit the casinos. They dedicated $10,000 — the amount they would have spent for print, TV and online ads between then and the Super Bowl — to a raffle.

Anyone could enter. The tickets were free for the asking. People who bought cars got 100 raffle tickets. They checked with their lawyers, and as long as no purchase was required, they were on the good side of the state’s gambling commission.

Had the Seahawks fallen out of the running for the Super Bowl at any time, the raffle would have been called off. But we all know how that turned out.

The drawing is at 5 p.m. this Friday at the dealership.

“We’re going to have a huge party,” said General Manager Phillip Olson. “We’re going to celebrate the Seahawks being the world champs.”

Bayne and Osborne are big Seahawks fans, Olson said. Bayne attended the Super Bowl game in New Jersey.

Were they crazy to give away $10,000? Crazy like a fox.

The dealership sold 124 vehicles between Dec. 15 and Feb. 1; last year during the same period, they sold 81. That was an all-time record for the dealership, Olson said.

The dealership gave away 621 tickets via Facebook; 91 people came in to get theirs. And the 124 car buyers each got 100. That makes the odds of winning 1:13,112.

One more little piece of trivia, the dealership was open the day of the Super Bowl, and they sold three cars. But none during game time.

The auto mall is located at 3555 W State Hwy 16, Port Orchard, WA 98367.

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Some unseemly bragging about how I predicted a Super Bowl rout

Here's your proof. I called it.
Here’s your proof. I called it.
I am bragging. That’s not an admirable quality. I can accept that.

Yesterday, and I have to post this when “yesterday” is still yesterday, I responded to my cousin’s Facebook post about the game. It was more than two hours before kickoff. Maybe it was because I was sitting in church that I felt so accurately inspired, but it was accurate nonetheless. I said something few outside the Seahawks’ locker room were willing to say, that Super Bowl XLVIII would be a rout.

The picture here is your proof. “Hawks will win and it won’t be close,” I wrote. In reality it was just a feeling, but I had thought about the game like everyone else had for the two weeks leading up to it and there was some logic to it. And even though I can profess some prescience, I didn’t think it be as brutal as it was.

Here were my three reasons my feeling was supported by evidence.

1. As highly regarded as the Denver Broncos offense was, it only put up 26 points on the Patriots and 24 on the Chargers. The top four scoring defenses were in the NFC (Seattle, San Francisco, Carolina and New Orleans.) New England ranked 10th and San Diego was 11th. Those are good, but not elite like Seattle and San Francisco. Seattle had given up 14.4 points per game. New England and San Diego both averaged around 21.

2. I thought the difference would be the Seahawk offense. I figured Russell Wilson would play well, that Denver would have little answer for his ability to escape and find opportunities, and that Percy Harvin might play an even bigger role in the offense than he did. Denver’s defense gave up almost 25 points per game this year. That might be a little misleading, because when your offense is explosive as much as Denver’s had been, you’re on the field a lot longer and many points come in garbage time. But I thought Seattle’s offense would fare well, because it put up 23 on San Francisco and New Orleans, two vastly superior defenses.

3. In 2006 the Seahawks should have beaten the Steelers. Seattle was better than Pittsburgh, but played poorly. Yes, I know the refs didn’t perform so well either, but that loss was clearly on the Seahawk players. They played awful, awful, awful in key moments. I trusted the psychological make-up of this team to not implode like that one did. Perhaps what convinced me of this team’s mettle was the way it battled back against San Francisco in the NFC championship game. Wilson fumbles and the defense holds for just a field goal. Then the D figures out how to contain Kaepernick. This team was tested in a way that 2006 team was not before the Super Bowl, and it answered. I figured it would again, if necessary, but that it probably wouldn’t be to near the degree the test the 49ers presented.

Despite all that, I did not envision this kind of blowout. Another cousin was in a pool and had the number “3” for the Seahawks and “4” for the Broncos. I wrote to him, 33-14 Seahawks. That’s what I figured, that the Seahawks would clearly be better than the Broncos, but that they would have to preserve a lead, not start sending in backups for mop-up duty.

In the end, though, they did everything right, the refs were a non-factor and the Broncos contributed with a few mistakes. The Seahawk defense stopped the yards after catch. Manning couldn’t run like Kaepernick. The defensive line altered throws and one turned into a pick six. Harvin broke a kickoff return, something you could realistically imagine but not predict. And Seattle’s offense kept converting on third down and breaking tackles.

Even I had no idea how right I would be.

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Flyover could get Seahawk fans even more cranked up

How can The Clink get any louder than the last time the Saints were here, when the 12th Man broke the Guinness world record for crowd noise? Cap it with a flyover.

The Seahawks contacted the Navy and requested just that. I reckon they asked if Naval Air Station Whidbey Island could send an EA-18G Growler down, oh, about when the 12th Man flag is climbing the pole.

A Growler — the electronic warfare version of the Navy’s Super Hornet fighter jet — emits a maximum of 150 decibels. Amazingly, you could’ve hardly heard it over the seismic crowd on Dec. 2. That’s when 68,387 fans combined to reach 137.6 decibels after the Seahawks stuffed New Orleans on a third-down play late in the first half of a 34-7 Monday Night Football victory.

Naval Air Station Whidbey Island spokesman Mike Welding confirmed the Seahawks’ request, which was denied.

The Department of Defense, because of across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, mothballed community outreach programs in March. The military withdrew from 2,800 outreach events around the country. In October it brought back the Navy Blue Angels, Air Force Thunderbirds and other attractions, but not everything. There’s a 45 percent reduction in the number of events from last year that will result in savings of $104 million in fiscal 2014. Flyovers are among those events.

The Air Force typically performed 1,000 flyovers a year, but under the new outreach plan will hardly fly any. There’s no public flyover program at this time. I would think it’s the same way with the Navy, and that’s why the Seahawks’ request was denied. Decisions are made in the Secretary of Defense outreach office.

The Seahawks didn’t contact the Army or Air Force at Joint Base Lewis McChord, according to spokesmen there. But if they were snooping around for a flyover from the Navy, I can’t imagine they gave up at the first rejection.

Can’t wait to see what they came up with.

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Following Seahawks win, the Bremerton boat was a bulgin’

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Like many of you, I savored the Seattle Seahawks’ trouncing of the San Francisco 49ers a couple Sundays ago, a big win and a great start to a promising season that continued with a victory versus Jacksonville this week.

But as heavy rains had delayed the game versus San Francisco, I got a little worried, too.

With the delay, Bremertonians and other Kitsap County residents who took the ferry to the game had pretty much one option to get back here: the 10:30 p.m. ferry. (Not counting those of you who drove to the game via the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.)

Yes, there’s a later boat, but 12:50 a.m. is just too late to wait, especially on a school night. We’ve all been in this tight spot before. Fortunately, the game ended with enough time to get to the 10:30 p.m. boat. (And with ticket prices being what they are, I’d be there for every moment myself.)

But would the 10:30 p.m. boat hold everyone? We’re talking about a lot of fans here. I went to bed thinking good thoughts for those coming back to Bremerton, and sent a note off to Washington State Ferries asking about how many people climbed aboard the next morning. I also put a note on my facebook page.

To my surprise, those who responded said it wasn’t too bad. The Walla Walla was working the route, which helped because of its size. Everyone made it aboard, it seems.

A week later, I finally got those ridership stats. The ferries counted 1,057 passengers on the 10:30 p.m. sailing. Not even the Bainbridge Island boat at 10:40 p.m., which was that route’s most populated run of the day, reached that number (it totaled 907). Bremerton’s route carried 2,560 people altogether that Sunday (Sept. 15), meaning that one sailing had more than 40 percent of its ridership for the day.

The WSF’s Ray Deardorf said that even if the Walla Walla (capacity 2,000) hadn’t been working the route, the Kitsap — usually the smallest boat on the Bremerton run — could’ve accommodated the load, with a maximum capacity of 1,200.

Yet had the Kitsap made the journey, some 400 people wouldn’t have had a seat to sit on, he added. “An uncomfortable crossing,” he said of the possibility.

Yep, those of us in Bremerton have our gripes about the frequency of the ferry sailings. But it’s nice to know that that boat might be bulging, but there’s lots of room on our ferry vessels.

 

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