2004 Cedar Park Timberwolf Football

Game-by-Game Narratives
2004

EPILOGUE

It was a season of overpowering excellence, brought about by a confluence of excellent players, excellent coaches, and excellent performances. It might never happen again. It might happen next year. But this year, this one three-month slice of life, belonged to our greatest-ever football team. They earned this remembrance. Here’s hoping their memories will never fade.

In the weeks following the season, it was easy to recognize Cedar Park fans about town. They were the ones with the satiated smiles and the callused forearms, the latter incurred from constantly pinching themselves throughout the previous two months. 2004 Timberwolf football was the kind of experience a pathological liar might devise to construct his own glorious false past. Yet this book and the corroborated recollections of our entire community are testament to the fact that all this really did happen, and it happened just this way.

About two-thirds of all our school records across a broad swath of categories were set this season, and many of them might be considered insurmountable. At the very least, most will likely remain untouched until the next time a Timberwolf football team gets to play fourteen games.

Many people remarked on the obvious similarities between the Timberwolves and the Texas Longhorns in 2004. Both had stout defenses. Both gave up a lot of kickoff return yardage. Both had excellent place-kickers. Both had a quarterback feared more for his running than for his passing, but who, at times, threw beautifully. Both had incredibly productive, skilled, and dependable running backs who’d come close to breaking yardage and touchdown records for their schools. Both used a shotgun zone read option play to spearhead the running attack. Both logged a win over a sub par team when it looked like they might not pull it out. Both teams threw more to their tight ends than their wideouts. Both had a hard-hitting linebacker named Johnson. Both won 11 games. Both capped off great years with outstanding post-season performances, their final wins exciting, high-scoring, down-to-the-wire victories over traditionally strong programs played out on the floor of a storied football cathedral.

As it turned out, the Timberwolves’ schedule was a great benefit to their run. Starting off with two strong non-district teams like Heights and Hays is never a bad thing, and the relatively easier non-league opponent Ellison came at just the right time to stop the slide and get the T’wolves’ confidence going. When district play began we assumed, based on records at the time, we were facing the easier teams first, helping to ratchet up the momentum. Playing very strong league foes near the end made for a virtual playoff run in its own, preparing the team for the tough tasks lying ahead in post-season play. And the chance to play – and win – on the hallowed ground of Texas Stadium in Irving was an experience none of the players, coaches, or fans will ever forget.

Among many remarkable facts about 2004, perhaps the one most illustrative of the program’s impressive turn-around was this: the Timberwolves beat six teams against which Cedar Park had previously been winless. They registered the school’s first-ever wins over Westwood, McNeil, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Leander, and Copperas Cove, going 6-0 against these schools. Coming into the season, CPHS’ all-time record against them was 0-13.

And, in confirmation that our team was indeed good right away, dispelling our earlier doubts, it turned out that two of the initial district victims weren’t such bad teams after all. Westwood went 4-2 after their 26-0 loss to the Timberwolves, and finished the regular season with, statistically, the best 5A offense in all of Central Texas. After a 20-0 pummeling at the hands of Cedar Park, scrappy McNeil reeled off four straight impressive wins, their only other regular season defeat coming in the closer at Pflugerville, and they qualified as the third 15-5A playoff team. The Mavericks did themselves and the league proud (along with improving Cedar Park’s power rating) with two wins in the Division I bracket of the playoffs before falling to eventual state D-I champion Tyler Lee. In their eight games after being completely throttled by the Timberwolves, McNeil went 6-2 and stormed to their Regional Finals. It took a state championship team to knock them out, and yet Tyler Lee didn’t come close to dismantling the Mavs as completely as did our own Timberwolves. Incidentally, the team that took the nation’s number one ranked high school team Southlake Carroll to the final play in the DII 5A state championship game was Smithson Valley, who’d entered the finals with a phenomenal 13-1 record. Their one loss occurred at home, to Pflugerville- another Timberwolf victim. Smithson Valley also beat Westwood by only ten points, just a week before the Timberwolves beat them by twenty-six. Thus, Cedar Park performed decisively and measurably better against Pflugerville, McNeil, and Westwood than did two teams that played in Texas 5A state championship games (winning one of them), proving not only the T’wolves’ quality, but that of the league Cedar Park dominated, as well.

Despite our worries at the time of the early victims’ poor records to that point, of the teams Cedar Park beat in the regular season, only Round Rock, Stony Point, Westwood, and Ellison ended with losing records, even though Westwood went 4-2 in their last six and would have been the fourth 15-5A playoff team if the new expanded rule had been in effect in 2004. Our opponents further proved their quality – and thus ours – in post-season play. Seven of the fourteen games in 2004 were played against teams that would qualify for post-season action, taking part in a total of sixteen playoff games, winning ten of them. Timberwolf victims – teams that lost to Cedar Park by an average of sixteen points – won six playoff games between them, giving affirmation to any doubters that Cedar Park was for real.

Often lost in the glare, the names of our offensive linesmen don’t always get their due, as ink and airtime tend to gravitate to those who move the ball and those who stop them. Let their names be recorded here for a long and much deserved remembrance- Travis Ledger, William Innes, Riley Callahan, Eric Avilla, and Taylor Allen, along with tight ends Daniel Billingsley and Tim Emmons. Along with regular contributors Taylor Frankenberg and Kyle Bayer, these were the young men up front who built the road the Timberwolves drove to victory.

Replayed over and over in the hearts and minds of every Cedar Park fan, player, and coach, the fantastic season of 2004 will never really end. Years down the road, a Korey Washington or a Zac Landry or an Albert Johnson or a Brandon Haug or a Wes Wagener or a Rupert Edwards or a Daniel Dilworth or a Chris Wieland or a Jonathan Collier or a Kyle Williams or a Trey Hawkins or a Nick Davis or a Trevor Myogeto or any one of the members of this outstanding team may find themselves sitting in the stands at a Cedar Park football game, come back to watch their alma mater play. Perhaps they’ll cock an ear when some fan nearby says, “I remember that season in oh-four when Korey and Rupert ran for thirty-five hundred yards… when Wes Wagener kicked that field goal that won the game in Texas Stadium… when Kyle Williams ran that fumble back to save the Leander game and took a pick back for a score on the second play of the game against Mesquite… and when Albert Johnson and Brandon Haug knocked everything that moved to the ground. Our defensive line was a black hole. Running backs went in, but they never came out. I remember all the big interceptions by Dilworth, Williams, Myogeto, Landry, when our secondary was the place where quarterbacks sent passes to die. Good Lord, what a team. What a team.”

And perhaps Misters Crawford or Callahan or Hawkins or Collier or Ledger or Edwards or Haug or Myogeto or Wagner or Dilworth or Allen or Farst or Billingsley or Emmons or Innes or Graham or Davis or Ferguson or any one of them sitting there and listening in will smile, perhaps even blink a moistened eye, in fond remembrance of the year when “Timberwolves Rule” wasn’t just a paper run-through sign, but the stone cold reality of the day.

For in 2004, the Cedar Park Timberwolves made a glorious surprise run at the Texas state 5A football championship: without possible argument the greatest of all American scholastic sports titles. They didn’t win it, but that was okay. Their greatest fans will still talk of their spectacular achievements for a lifetime. A book was even written about this gloriouis run, and many players and their families will keep this modest chronicle of their cherished memories for the rest of their lives.

Eventually overlooked, perhaps taken for granted by future students, a row of monumental trophies will one day stand forgotten, locked in a case outside the Timberdome, slowly succumbing to the passage of time: District Champions, Bi-District Champions, Area Champions, Region II Finalists. The wood, chrome, and brass may someday fade, but the remembrance of that glorious ride never will.

Years on, evidence of this team and its bright streak across the Texas sky will slowly distill to a musty collection of artifacts: a tattered jersey, a soiled sock, a decaying yellow newspaper clipping, a cracked and aged game ball, dried mud on an old shoe, a frayed picture of long-lost friends… all stuffed in a box on a shelf in a back room.

But, from time to time, on a slow rainy day when the triumphs and travails of everyday life can be comfortably swept aside, someone will reach up to that shelf, dust off that old book, open it in awe…

…and remember.

Acknowledgements

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