Tumwater Winning Football; The Sid Otton Story

Tumwater Football Coach Sid Otton patrolled the sidelines of what is now Sid Otton field at Tumwater High School from 1974 to 2016. This after spending time as head coach in Coupeville and Colfax. He retired after 49 years as a head coach and remains the winningest football coach in state history with 394 wins.

Coach Otton stepped down when he knew he was ready and was not beholden by records or outside measurements. How easy would it have been for him to stay 1 more season to complete a half century as a head football coach and no doubt would have topped 400 wins. But those so-called benchmarks are meaningless to Coach Otton. In fact his 5 State Championships though not meaningless, but are the product of everything else he had worked his entire career to do and that was to build the “T-Bird Football Family”.

He is famous for answering one reporter’s question of “How’s your team looking this year?” with ask me in 20 years and I can tell you. This is what made coach Otton so special and so beloved because it was always about the big picture never about the short term gain. When it all came together and when each of the Championship teams won their title’s they all knew it was not there’s, it was the T-Birds and shared with everyone who ever put on the green and gold.

Below is the 10-part series the Eli Sports Network published in 2016 with a new part out each week of Coach Otton’s final season. Below are all 10 parts. Due to moving information from one ESN platform to another over the years some of the pictures have been lost. We tried to restore as much of each chapter as possible but the story is all intact.

We wrote this to chronicle the amazing journey Coach Otton went on from his early days winning his first State Title in Colfax to starting his career in Tumwater with a 7-20 record and wondering if their would be a 4th season. Now days, highly unlikely. This was one of the reasons we wanted to write this as it took Coach Otton 13 years to win his 1st title as a T-Bird. But the program and culture he created is undeniable and could only have done it with adminsitrative support that refused to give-in to agrieved parents calling for his firing in the early days.

Winning is hard. Winning Championships is even harder and coupled with today’s unreasonable expectations makes this story more relevent now than when Coach Otton retired in 2016. Please enjoy this incredible journey called “Tumwater Winning Football”.