By Jordan Duncan
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
After a lopsided 41-7 opening round playoff loss to the Skyline Spartans last November, the Mount Rainier Rams did not feel despair. They weren’t even supposed to be there.
The Rams had won a total of four games over five seasons between 2011 and 2015 and were the laughingstock of the South Puget Sound League. Things changed for the program in 2016, when the Rams went 7-3, earning a berth in the 4A state playoffs and appearing to have begun a new chapter in the book of Mount Rainier athletics in the process.
“Even though we lost, everyone was still unified. We all understood that we lost together,” said senior wide receiver Terrell Grier.
The unity and togetherness are fruits of the intense but meaningful labor by head coach Tremain Mack and his staff over the last five-plus seasons. Before taking over as head coach in 2012, Mack joined the team as a defensive coordinator under then-head coach Scott Leick in 2011.
Mack and others had always sensed a pervasive negative vibe surrounding the school’s football team, and he knew that it would take time and a major shift in outlook for that to change.
“It’s not just how people outside the program felt about the program, it’s people that were in the program.
“If you’re at Mount Rainier and you’re saying, ‘I’m not playing for Mount Rainier, Mount Rainier sucks,’ that’s a problem. When the community has the same feeling and they’re sending their kids elsewhere, that’s a problem as well,’” Mack said.
The outlook shift meant creating a new culture. Mack wanted his players to feel like they were a part of a real program, like the one he played under during his college days as a Miami Hurricane. But that also required focus on the players’ part, something he says was lacking in his early days as head coach.
While the state requires a 2.0 GPA for students to play sports, Mack upped his requirement to 2.5. He has one other requirement – that students are playing another sport in the offseason, and if not, they’re heavily involved in workouts and activities with the football team.
In Mack’s first years as head coach, getting kids to come to workouts was a struggle. He recalls times when only five or six players would show up. That number has grown in recent years, and today he says he consistently has about 50 players at workouts.
“Each year, regardless of what the record was, we had kids believing and starting to understand what it took to be successful,” Mack said.
The players knew the 2016 season was different from the start. The feeling around the school and overall attitude towards the team reflected excitement, a refreshing change from years past.
Senior quarterback JJ Young sensed it as the team stormed out of the gates. With a 5-0 record early in the season, he says that a lot of underclassmen looked up to the team, which boosted everyone’s confidence.
Grier elaborated on the feeling of unity the team shared.
“The atmosphere my freshman, sophomore and kind of my junior year was that everyone wanted to be about themselves," he said. "We were individualized and everyone wanted to think about themselves rather than the team. My senior year, everyone wanted to be a part of the unit, they wanted to be synchronized and make sure we were all on the same page."
Junior halfback and linebacker Justin Martinez echoed Mack’s sentiment about the increased turnout at offseason workouts and credits the team’s turnaround partly to that.
Martinez was also the catalyst for another tenet that drove the team’s turnaround – holding one another accountable. When a fellow teammate’s grades were slipping, Martinez took that teammate to each of his classes in which he had missing assignments, supervised as he completed them, spoke to his family about his behavior in school and even took his phone before classes in the morning.
