HOCKINSON — Sitting in the stands at a Hockinson High School basketball game, Rick Steele extended his hand for an introductory shake.
The man he’d hoped to meet, he’d only heard about. Rather, he’d heard about his youth football teams, which had just finished a season on Hockinson’s freshman team that scored a ton of touchdowns. Steele took notice.
The year was 2014 and Steele had just been re-hired as Hockinson’s head football coach, one year after stepping down due to a promotion at the Vancouver Fire Department that demanded more hours. His first stint, nine years, netted three league titles and he was determined to pick up where he left off, especially after the school posted a 5-4 record in his absence.
That handshake led to Steele and Josh Racanelli getting lunch, where the two football minds traded stories and jotted down formations on napkins. They would become the first renderings of an offense that, years later, has elevated Hockinson into a multi-year state contender.
On Saturday, more than four years removed from that first meeting, the Hawks play No. 3 Lynden (12-0) at 1 p.m. in the Tacoma Dome for a chance to repeat as 2A state champions, with Steele running the show, and Racanelli calling the plays.
Today’s version of Hockinson’s offense, which averaged more than 47 points per game over the last two seasons (and is undefeated over that time), wasn’t adopted in one day.
Years after Steele started the program and built it into a consistent winner, he took the offense to the cutting edge.
That started with hiring Racanelli, who from an offensive philosophy standpoint, is the yin to his yang. Steele will say a team is only as good as its athletes. Together, around a crop of good athletes, the two developed what is now the most productive offense in Clark County.
That shared vision began to formulate on that winter day in 2014, when the two met for lunch.
“You know those gunny sack races, where each of you have a leg in the gunny sack? Yeah, that’s me and Rick,” Racanelli said.
The early years
Steele was Hockinson’s inaugural coach when the school opened in 2004. Hired to build a program from the ground floor, the newly formed Hawks went 0-7 in their first season with a team containing only freshmen and sophomores.
From a playbook standpoint, Steele just went with what’s simple.
“We were just trying to build a program,” Steele said. “We weren’t really worrying about the offense and defense so much, than just trying to get the kids to learn how to play football.”
The Hawks ran the variations of the wing-T, a run-heavy offense built on deception that lines up in the shape of a “T” every play, and the I-formation, a similar formation in which the halfback, fullback and quarterback align in a vertical line under center.
The idea behind those offense? They were easy to learn. That was necessary, Steele said.
“Some coaches have a system, they use it and they never change,” he said. “But we continually look at our players each year and we take our strengths and mold that into an offense.”
Three years in, Hockinson won its first league title. But over the course of the first seven or eight years, Steele never felt like his team was complete. One year the line would be small. The next, turnout was low — issues any high school team reasonably deals with on a year-to-year basis, especially in a town with a population smaller than 5,000 and a school enrollment of less than 700.
Those things started to change when he took over again in 2014. The past five years, he said, have been different.
“We’ve had good lineman, good skill guys and we’ve been able to put those together and, you know, become a pretty deadly football team,” Steele said.
Playing Canon-ball
Ask Steele when his offense took on a new form, he’ll point to the 2015 season.
Up until that point, Hockinson was a run-heavy offense — and a good one, at that. In 2014, his first year back, the team reached the quarterfinals on the backs of running backs Tommy Harshaw and Austen Johnson, who had over 1,000-yard rushing seasons and a burly offensive line that cleared the way for a dominant run game.
But much of that class were seniors, so Steele and his coaches took inventory and went back to the drawing board.
They would return an undersized line, but a sophomore quarterback — Canon Racanelli — with encyclopedic football smarts, an arm that warranted an enhanced passing game and a deep threat, Kedrick Johnson (who now plays for Eastern Washington), to serve as the primary target.
The 2015 season marked a critical juncture in Hockinson’s playbook. That’s when Josh Racanelli dusted off his pass-heavy playbook that his son, Canon, knew to perfection from their years in youth football.
Steele and Josh Racanelli also took a big playbook, and shrunk it.
“Canon knew that offense like the back of his hand,” Steele said.
Hockinson aired it out that year. Canon Racanelli tossed for over 2,500 yards and the team sustained success with a retooled offense to make a return trip to the state quarterfinals, where it was narrowly beaten by Sedro-Wooley 31-28 on a last-second field goal.
Steele half-jokes he used to never be able to convince a basketball player to come out for football. That changed when Hockinson adopted the spread offense. He opined that 14 years ago when he took over, a primarily basketball player such as Peyton Brammer wouldn’t have gone out for football. That’s changed.
“Now every athlete in the school wants to play football because athletic kids like to play the spread offense,” Steele said.
Steele was historically a run guy. Though he said he wasn’t moored to any one system, he served as a coordinator under five different head coaches across Clark County before getting the Hockinson job, and his background was in decidedly run-heavy offenses.
Josh Racanelli, on the other hand, had historically favored an aggressive passing game. As a pocket-passing quarterback in college, first for Boise State, then for Portland State under then quarterbacks coach (now University of Washington head coach) Chris Peterson, he developed his offensive philosophy based on experience.
Heading into the 2016 season, Steele looked to add another element to the offense. He proposed adding read option looks with the quarterback, capitalizing on Canon Racanelli’s foot speed and decision-making.
At first, Josh Racanelli was hesitant. Canon had never really been a runner, and he was undersized. But he liked the idea of having multiple choices on any given play, so he acquiesced.
Having a dual-threat quarterback was crucial to the Hawks’ offense last season during its 14-0 2A state championship run. Canon rushed for 17 touchdowns (tied for first in the county) and 653 yards on the season.
“We’re cutting edge,” Josh Racanelli said. “I think we’re doing we’re doing what what the best college programs are doing and we’ve kind of had the same learning curve that the college’s have.”
Handshake agreement
After their first time grabbing lunch, Steele and Josh Racanelli met five times over the course of that winter. During the third meeting, Steele officially offered him the job as his offensive coordinator.
Previously, Josh Racanelli made stops as a coordinator at Mountain View (his alma mater) and Heritage. Unlike his first two stops, he said, Steele laid out what would be any offensive coordinator’s dream.
“Rick turned the whole offense over to me after we met for five or six weeks in a row and I kind of had to prove that I knew what I was talking about,” Racanelli said. “Not until I met Rick did I get to put … my hand signals and all of my calls, exactly how I like to call them.”
Over the course of the next five seasons, the two combined to mold an offense around a talented crop of kids. Steele joked that he’s in charge of the running, and Racanelli in charge of passing.
Hockinson’s current offense relies on a high-IQ quarterback who can read defenses, check out of plays at the line of scrimmage, and poses a dual threat. It also has benefitted from playmakers out wide, in juniors Sawyer Racanelli and Brammer (Brammer will miss Saturday’s title game with a fractured foot).
And that has created a ripple effect into the younger generations of Hockinson youth football.
Current quarterback Levi Crum grew up in Kalama, so he didn’t play for Josh Racanelli until he moved to Hockinson for his freshman year of high school. But Crum, who has tossed 52 touchdowns and 3,571 yards passing this season, recalls going to watch his cousins Sawyer and Canon Racanelli play youth football games, where they ran a similar plays to what Crum runs now.
“It was just balls flying everywhere,” Crum said, “and I was like, ‘that looks like a lot of fun.’ ”
That’s all part of the allure, said Josh Racanelli.
“We’ve got kids in the youth program that are just salivating and and hoping that they get a chance to be the guy in the offense,” Josh Racanelli said, “because it’s a really fun often to plan and lots of different kids get to touch the ball and and it’s hard to stop.”
On the eve of the program’s second 2A state title appearance in as many years, the Hawks have its offense to credit for what could be considered the renaissance of Hockinson football.
Steele views his offense as a puzzle. Its success depends on his — and his staff’s — ability to assemble the pieces. This year, he says, all the pieces fit.
“It’s still the same puzzle,” Steele said. “Those pieces are fitting well. And I think they will next year is because we got good athletes coming back. You know after those kids leave, maybe the puzzle pieces look a little bit different.”
