Every year starts off with a blank slate, high hopes and dreams of a championship run. But for the Healdsburg Greyhounds, 2023 threatens to look too much like last year’s 0-10 season, with the difference of a 42-42 tie that the home team escaped with against Berean Christian.
Still, varsity coach Randy Parmeter has been around long enough to gain some perspective on the sport of high school football, and despite the big goose-egg in the win column, he finds much to like about this year’s team. And he says the kids know it, too.
“The kids are doing great,” he says. “They’re doing amazing compared to last year—I mean, you look at the amount of points we’ve scored this year in terms of success on offense.” Aside from such missteps as last Friday’s 35-0 loss to Maria Carillo, they’ve put points on the board in every game.
Parmeter points to the numbers on the statistics-oriented Cal Preps website, and says the algorithms show that this year’s Greyhounds would have beaten last year’s team, and the year before that as well.
“It’s just a bummer that we got stuck with the schedule that we’re stuck with,” he says. As a late addition to the Healdsburg coaching staff, Parmeter didn’t have any say in who the team would play over the course of the season. “There were a lot of games we never would’ve played, like Fortuna. That’s crazy; they’re a perennial powerhouse. That was put on there by someone else.”
The Greyhounds lost to Fortuna on Oct. 6, 40-7, but truthfully, Healdsburg has given up over 40 points five times, including the season-opening 62-27 circus against St. Helena.
Aside from the 42-42 tie against Berean Christian, Healdsburg’s closest game was a 22-20 loss to Kennedy Richmond, the team they beat in 2021 for their last recorded win. And the league standings are not comprised of statistical matchups, but games played on the field.
Which is not to say an element of just plain bad luck isn’t a factor in the team’s record this year. Take last Friday’s game against Maria Carrillo. Healdsburg receivers fumbled twice on kick-offs in the first quarter, and the Pumas took advantage to jump out to a 21-0 lead before the second quarter began.
But the second quarter was a different story, a scoreless, back-and-forth tussle. The highlight for the home-team crowd was when Hayden Mariani pulled in a long pass from Nova Perrill II and raced untouched into the end zone.
But way back on the other end of the field, a Healdsburg penalty made it all go away.
Just as Healdsburg couldn’t capitalize, neither could the Pumas, at least in the second quarter. Twice the Greyhounds defensive line stopped them on fourth-and-short, and the first half ended with Maria Carrillo’s quarterback throwing for the end zone—where Healdsburg’s Alexander Harms picked it off and ran back over 20 yards before being forced out of bounds.
The rest of this season may not bring an upset over either 6-2 St. Vincent de Paul (here in Healdsburg on Friday) or 4-4 Piner (in Santa Rosa on Nov. 3), but it’s possible. And next year looks rosier still.
“Hayden [Mariani] is a sophomore, and he’s a big-time receiver threat, so he’ll continue to be that way in the next few years as well,” Parmeter said. Quarterback Perrill is a junior, and Harms a sophomore, meaning the three most productive offensive players on the team will be coming back next year.
With all this returning talent, Parmeter expects to return as well. He’s got the most important attribute for a high school coach there is—he’s lived in town for 10 years. He has a son on the football team and two daughters play volleyball. And next year, he says, he’ll have a hand in designing the year’s schedule.
“I’ve got a very good football team,” he says. “And I’m expecting our kids to play hard, you know what I mean? Like I said, what I expect from them is to execute their fundamentals with the best effort that they have. That’s all I ever asked for my kids.”
