DARRINGTON — On the walls in Greg Powell’s classroom at Darrington High School, there are maps, posters and other typical tools that most history teachers employ.
But on one wall, to the right just inside the door, is a display that evokes a different kind of history.
It’s a living history of the past 26 years in the small logging town of 1,362 at the western base of the Cascade Mountains, in the form of photos of each of the 26 varsity volleyball teams Powell coached until his retirement from the program this spring.
The hairstyles have certainly changed, and the uniforms have gotten a bit snazzier over the years, but the countenances on the faces of the 124 girls in the photos are largely unchanged by the passage of time.
Excited but uncertain smiles in the first few years give way to the assured confidence of the last few, but every face radiates hope and anticipation for the season to come.
There are sisters and cousins, mothers and daughters.
Team managers during their elementary school years reappear a few photos later as varsity players, and then later as assistant coaches.
But the 124 girls in those 26 photos — if they’re not already linked by blood or friendship — are connected by having been coached and taught by Powell, the man who built the Darrington volleyball program from the cornerstone into a sturdy house.
It may be hard to imagine that a program that enjoys Darrington’s recent run of success — nine consecutive Class 2B state tournament berths with four straight trophies — once struggled as mightily as the Loggers did when Powell took the reins in 1989.
He had been in town for two previous years and served as the junior high coach after running the junior varsity at Selkirk High School.
Powell said that in those early years, volleyball was either a way for basketball players to keep in shape or a refuge for girls that were, in Powell’s words, “sort of non-athletic” but wanted to be involved in sports.
It was a time where volleyball was struggling for legitimacy alongside basketball as a viable competitive sport for girls, especially in a smaller community such as Darrington, which already had a successful basketball program.
“I think some of those girls thought, ‘Bump, set spike. How hard can that be?’” Powell said.
What Powell needed, were athletes who took volleyball as seriously as they did basketball.
“I wasn’t trying to take anything away from basketball, but I just wanted the same dedication to volleyball,” Powell said. “It took a few years, but after a while that wasn’t even a concern anymore. I started getting athletes who considered themselves volleyball players.”
Powell said a youth program started in Darrington around the same time he took over the high school team, and once those girls reached the high school after learning to love the sport as well as its basic skills, the Loggers were off and running.
“Seven or eight years later I started to see girls coming into high school who had some skills,” he said. “They could move their feet, could do the basic things and really loved the game. That was a really big deal.”
It took just five years for Powell to lead Darrington to its first state tournament, qualifying in 1994 and going 1-2.
“To not only get there for the first time, but win a match that first time, it was really thrilling,” Powell said. “Everyone was so proud.”
Kirristi Green, née Vincent, graduated a year before the state tournament breakthrough but remembers the occasionally tumultuous early years of Powell’s tenure.
“You’ve got a lot of sassy small-town girls. We all have got mouths,” said Green, whose daughter Jordyn Stafford graduated from Darrington earlier this month after a two-year varsity career under Powell. “It was a little bit of a hate-love relationship. You hated him sometimes because of his ways, but you loved the sport and it just made you try harder.”
Stafford said her mom helped prepare her for life with Coach Powell.
“She did prepare me mentally for how it was going to work, but she couldn’t prepare me for the physical part,” Stafford said. “She told me all through middle school that he’s got to look at you and see that you want it.”
In testament to the steadfast belief in his system that has allowed the Loggers to succeed across eras, Green could not think of a single difference from the way Powell coached her in 1992 and 1993 to the way he coached her daughter 21 years later.
“I think he just has confidence in himself and he was just going to stick with what he was doing,” Green said of Powell. “He coached the same and went to state every single year. He just has faith in the girls after they earned their spots.”
That is a common refrain across the years with Powell’s players. Once a regular spot in the rotation is earned, he allowed his players to work through their struggles without fear of losing that spot.
“I think that comes from being an educator as well as a coach,” said Linne Haywood, who teaches English, leadership and public speaking at Darrington and has been an assistant coach under Powell for six years. All three of her daughters and two of her nieces have gone through the Logger volleyball program.
“We’d like to see the kids try and get out of jams themselves and be problem-solvers.”
Another hallmark of Powell’s tenure at Darrington was his continuous desire to learn and improve as a coach, and to keep pace with the changes and advancements in the game. Throughout his career at Darrington, he posted practice plans scripted down to the minute to keep his players on task.
“Mr. Powell was very active when it came to scouting and when it came to coaching clinics,” said Baleigh Rumsey, one of seven senior volleyball players to graduate from Darrington this year. “He has a lot of close ties with college coaches and coaching his daughter Mandy really helped him to see what competitive volleyball was like.”
Mandy Powell, the youngest of Greg and Margo Powell’s four kids, was not only the first of the 124 varsity players Greg coached at Darrington to commit to an NCAA Division I volleyball program (University of Idaho), but she also was the only one to play club volleyball.
Powell said numerous attempts have been made to start club programs in the community that would help dedicated players hone their craft year-round and expose them to more top-flight competition from around Snohomish County, but nothing has stuck.
“We’ve tried to get things started here, but having to go 30 miles down the highway to go places is tough, plus a lot of the girls play basketball,” Powell said. “If our girls practice in the evenings and then have to go an hour somewhere for club practice, it just doesn’t work. Plus, money is always an issue in a poorer community.”
Proximity and genuine care for players is another common denominator throughout Powell’s tenure. As the only history teacher at Darrington High School, every volleyball player learns from Powell as a teacher as well as a coach. Most said he’s a little more laid-back in the classroom than he is in the gym.
“As a coach, he’s very strict and he knows what he wants from each and every one of us,” said Tayler Hoftell, a 2015 graduate and four-year varsity letter-winner. “It’s a different vibe in the classroom. During volleyball practice you only think about doing everything he asks. It’s a little more relaxed in class, but he’s the most caring coach I’ve ever had. He really wants the best for us as players and as a team.”
Powell, his assistant coaches and players say that the closeness everyone in the program feels toward one another is the main difference between their experiences at Darrington and those of players and coaches at larger high schools.
“I don’t see a difference in how they (teams from bigger schools) play,” Stafford said. “I moved to Bellingham and played at Sehome and the competition may have been a little bit better, but at Darrington we played 4A schools at tournaments and won. I felt really proud about that.”
The affection Powell’s players feel for him is obvious and sincere. They recall his favorite words and phrases like “crisp”, “weak sauce” and “Oh, for Pete’s/heaven’s sake,” the latter being the harshest expression of anger or frustration any of them can remember him letting slip.
And the affection is mutual.
“I run into a lot of these girls all the time now. I see them at weddings, graduations, and whatever the case is, they’re basically all friends,” Powell said. “I’ve got 124 friends. That’s the most important part, honestly. If I talk to these girls, we hardly ever talk about volleyball. I really do treasure their relationships and all the commitment, time and trust they gave me.”
Why else would Greg Powell collect every Darrington uniform after every match and wash them himself, which he did for the duration of his coaching career with the Loggers?
“He really went over the top as a coach,” said Margo Powell, who has been married to Greg for exactly 26 years, the length of his Darrington coaching career. “He did it because it’s something he believes in. He really believes in volleyball.”
Lisa Wright, who played for Powell from 1996-1998 and became the first Logger to play beyond high school when she suited up for Everett Community College, has the unenviable task of stepping into Powell’s shoes as Darrington’s coach next season.
She was the head coach at Concrete from 2004-2006, but returned to serve as Powell’s assistant in 2012.
“The year I came into high school, I could tell that he really expected to go to state every year,” Wright said. “That was a new idea, and now it’s basically a given. You have to work hard for it, but we expect nothing less than to make it to a state tournament. The girls’ goals are higher now than when he started.”
Wright has to be her own coach and find her own voice, but Powell’s influence will never be far from the Darrington gym.
“I learned all the basics in his program, and I’ve learned how to methodically plan everything we do,” said Wright, who has already displayed a flair for the fund-raising and ancillary duties to running a program that fatigued Powell in recent years. “I will carry on many of the traditions that he started, and I hope to be half the coach he was.”
Wright has two daughters, 11-year-old Alyvia and 8-year-old Claire. Alyvia will try out for the Darrington Middle School volleyball team this fall, while Claire enjoys playing football, of all things.
Mothers and daughters playing volleyball in Darrington. Whether Greg Powell is coaching on the sidelines, watching proudly from the stands or a thousand miles away, his legacy will endure.
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