WELCH, W.Va. — Fifteen years after their last 10-win season, Mount View authored an impressive run to the Class A quarterfinals last fall. The Golden Knights went 9-1 in the regular season and fell to eventual state runner-up Williamstown in the second round of the playoffs. It was a year not soon to be forgotten in the McDowell County town of Welch.
“I feel like it gave everyone something to look forward to,” said Mount View senior lineman Liam Fultineer. “Because down here you don’t have much to go to. There’s not a mall ten minutes down the street. It gave our people down here something to watch and something to do.”
“Everybody really liked the way that we played,” said Mount View senior running back/defensive back Matt Thompson. “We played with our heart and we left it all out there on the field.”
The architect of that season, Larry Thompson became the new head coach at Wyoming East during the winter. Maurice Gravely now enters his first season with the brown and gold.
“Being in my first year, a lot of these guys still have to be battled tested,” Gravely said. “So I don’t know right now to some extent. I just see what I see. The talent we have, if utilized right, we are going to cause a lot of problems on both sides of the ball.”
Graduation and transfer losses have been significant for the Knights. Most notably, all-staters Elijah Barner and Marques Ray combined for 29 touchdowns. Mount View does welcome back all-state lineman Liam Fultineer.
“It is a good feeling. With any coach having a guy like that, of that caliber and magnitude of what he can do on the field. He’s a pretty good student in the classroom. He works hard. But the sky could be the limit for him,” Gravely said.
After tossing seventeen touchdown passes in his sophomore season, Jesse Rose is a returning starter at quarterback.
“We would like for him to be more of a leader and step that up a little bit more,” Gravely said. “Quarterback is always going to be that twelfth man out there… that coach seeing things that I can’t see. So I have to trust in him the things that he sees.”