Royal futbol drawing some similarities from Knights football

Rodney Harwood

| May 22, 2018 1:00 AM

When Royal City soccer coach Jens Jensen married the farmer’s daughter, making Knights football coach Wiley Allred his father-in-law, I’m thinking he somehow he linked the two programs through some strange act of karma.

But as time goes on, I am seeing a direct correlation to Royal City football and Royal City futbol. I will have to admit up front I’m not on top of soccer as much as I’d like to be. I mean, when Angel Farias gets a step on the defender (in football), it’s not offsides.

But the Knights football and futbol teams do have a lot in common.

The football team pushed its winning streak to 41 with a third straight 1A state championship this past fall. According to MaxPreps, it’s the sixth-longest streak in the nation. Allred (217-26), who was inducted into the Washington Football Coaches Hall of Fame, passed longtime coach Frank Naish for the 15th all-time winning percentage (89.3) for Washington state coaches with 200-plus victories.

The Knights futbol team is currently on a 15-game winning streak, coming off its second consecutive SCAC East conference championship. They pitched their eighth consecutive shutout and 15th of the season and head into the Final Four having played 878 minutes without allowing a score.

I’m seein’ some karma here, because the football team defense was equally as dominant. Going into the 1A state championship game in the Tacoma Dome it allowed just 3.46 points a game with eight shutouts in 13 contests. They didn’t give up a touchdown until seven weeks into the season when Connell scored on a kick return (kind of a freak thing), then a fluke sack-and-score and finally the first offensive touchdown of the year. The football Knights played lock-down defense behind an offense averaging 56.6 points a game, and outscored the opposition 309-to-21 since that Connell game.

There’s a couple of key players in both programs. Alonso Hernandez was an inside linebacker with some pop, knew how to bring it. Sometimes I’d like to see those same smash-and-bash skills at the midfield on the soccer field. I mean, you get two yellow cards before getting tossed, right?

The other key element is the speed of Angel Farias. Touched by an Angel had five punt returns for a touchdown and made some spectacular catches as a wide out. On the defensive side, the Knights cornerback had Meridian’s Bryce VandenHaak wondering what he had to do to shake this guy in the 1A football title game.

Farias uses that same speed in the futbol game on the defensive line. Farias can run stride-for-stride with anybody in either game and is a goalkeeper’s best friend. Just ask Ty Miller.

Where the football team has the Big Dogs, guys like nose tackle Logan Gomez and defensive end Rams Gonzales. The futbol team has the “El Torro” strikers in the Torres brothers Miguel and Isidro. There’s not a lot of pushing Miguel or Isidro off the ball when they get a full head of steam for a team that has scored (46 goals during the 14-game winning streak.)

Both football and futbol have their superstars. The football team sent Kaden Jenks off to NCAA Division I (FCS) Weber State University a year ago where he is expected to compete for a starting quarterback position next fall. They haven’t run out of Jenks on the Royal Slope just yet. Sawyer led Royal to its third consecutive 1A state championship and a victory over previously unbeaten Meridian. Jenks finished the season 149-of-249 for 2,790 yards and 40 touchdowns.

The futbol team has Royal High School’s first athlete to receive a NCAA Division I scholarship to a Power 5 conference in center midfielder Michael Rojas. Rojas is the trigger man in the middle and a constant threat to score. But it’s his distribution skills that earned him a scholarship at the University of Washington this fall.

Whether they’re playing football or futbol, the Royal Knights know how to bring it and the numbers speak for themselves.

Rodney Harwood is a sports write for the Columbia Basin Herald and can be reached at rharwood@columbiabasinherald.com