Uncommon formations can level the playing field

YAKIMA — In football, the rarely-faced formation can be the great equalizer.

When the wishbone offense was unveiled in the late 1960s, it wreaked havoc with defenses that had only a week to prepare for its unfamiliar nuances. As more teams turned to the ’bone, its quirks no longer flummoxed defenses and it fell out of favor.

Nearly four decades later, the spread is the offense du jour, and teams running the wishbone or its cousin, the triple-option veer, are the rarity. So the few offenses employing those styles have the advantage over defenses that prepare for it so rarely.

And so it is with the double-wing offense.

“It takes preparation time away from teams that are used to facing more open offenses,” says retired Kelso coach Ed Laulainen, who coordinates clinics for the Washington State coaches Association. “Last year the talk was all about figuring out how to defend the spread option.” This year, he says, double-wing “has become kind of a hot item,” and defending it will be a clinic focus this winter.

Not only is Toppenish running the double-wing to near perfection under first-year coach Jason Smith, so is undefeated Chelan. And so is Class 2B North Beach, where Hugh Wyatt, largely considered the state’s double-wing guru, is in his first year as head coach and has already turned around a moribund program.

“It’s difficult to prepare for us, because it’s difficult to construct a scout-team offense that gives them anything close to the look they’re going to see on Friday night,” says Wyatt. North Beach is 2-1 and has already scored nearly as many points in three games as it did in all of 2007, when it went 1-9.

But the newness factor isn’t the only reason Smith turned to the double-wing. Because the offense relies not on size but on precision, an undersized team like Toppenish can, by executing its intricate blocking schemes well, hold its own against larger teams.

“I know what kind of kids we typically have,” Smith says. “They’re not that large, but they have big hearts. The angles that are created by our alignment, I was hoping it would be advantageous to us blocking bigger guys.”

Wyatt, who helped Smith introduce Toppenish to the double-wing over the summer, isn’t surprised by the Wildcats’ quick success.

“I think they’re the ideal kids for this,” he says. “They’ve got a good work ethic. They’re very coachable. They’re tough.”

And they’re undefeated.