Growing up in Vancouver, Cale Piland knew the history of Southwest Washington high school football.
There was that good run by Evergreen in 1995, then back-to-back semifinals appearances from Mountain View in 2001 and 2002.
“Other than that, Southwest Washington was not seen as a football power,” Piland said.
No big-school team from the county had ever reached the championship game, let alone win it.
That all changed when the 2004 Evergreen Plainsmen, coached by Piland, went 14-0 and won the state title.
Piland, who remained at Evergreen through 2006 and then went on to coach Union in its first seven seasons of football, is out of coaching now. He is the athletic director for Evergreen Public Schools.
And 10 years later, he remains the only coach to guide a big school from Clark County to a state football championship.
“It’s incredibly hard to do. You have to have so many things go right along with so many things that potentially could go wrong, not go wrong,” Piland said. “Oftentimes, those are out of your control.”
Everything went Evergreen’s way in 2004.
“To win that state championship, and in the fashion we did, which was physically dominant, said a lot,” Piland said.
While the team trailed at halftime to Skyline in the finals, Evergreen would go on to win 28-14. The 2004 Plainsmen played just one game that season that was not at least a 14-point margin of victory. They finished the campaign winning by an average score of 40-12.
While Piland is not coaching anymore, most of the rest of the Evergreen staff that season is still coaching or involved in football in other ways. It was up to Piland and his assistants to hit the right buttons with the 2004 squad.
“You want to show your kids the right way to go,” Piland said. “Ultimately, they have to be the ones who make the decision to do what it is you’re trying to lead them to do.”
Piland said he never had a team like that one, a group so talented but also not as serious as some coaches would have preferred.
“That group had its challenges,” Piland said. “But going to work was never an issue. They wanted to compete. They wouldn’t back down from anything.”
Piland’s Evergreen teams ended up winning four league titles in a row, from 2002 to 2005. In 2007, he took over at Union, guiding the new school to a winning record in its first season. The Titans then won back-to-back league titles and advanced to the 3A state championship game in 2008 and the semifinals in 2009.
He resigned as head coach at Union after the 2013 season to take over as the district’s athletic director. In 14 seasons as a head coach (including one year at Juanita), Piland won 75 percent of his games, compiling a record of 117-39.
He said one can never say never about returning to the sideline, but for now he is focused on this job.
Whether he returns to coaching or not, Cale Piland will always be able to say he was in charge of one perfect team.
And still, the only big-school championship team from Clark County.
