The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

TACOMA - At Saturday's state championship game, the Cardinals' home crowd didn't have a live mascot like Blitz, the big bird of the Seahawks, or the Mariners' Moose, to fire up the crowd.

They didn't need one. They had the lovely WP cheerleaders and they had Melissa Harting, whose one-of-a-kind voice has been booming from the sidelines of ball fields for years now.

We want to salute Harting and the hundreds of other dedicated hometown fans for coming out to support the boys of fall on the other side of the state and for holding a hand in their back during this weekend's landmark title game.

"I've loved football ever since I was a little girl," said Harting, 32, a '97 WHS graduate who is now a certified medical assistant at St. Mary's Hospital in Walla Walla. "I have a hard time controlling myself at football games. I come with the loudest voice."

In person, she revealed to be a bit nervous at times about potentially interrupting her favorite team's plays, but neither players nor coaches nor fans ever complain about it. To the contrary, they always tell her how glad they are to see her because Harting expresses more audibly than anyone what the home crowd is feeling.

"Waitsburg (WP) loves their fans," she said. "It's a huge deal."

It's no surprise that two Cardinals - Dustin Wooderchak and Eshom Estes - from the team that signed two of Harting's jerseys these past two seasons each gave her a small football signed with all their teammates' roster numbers. At almost every Cardinals game (she has only missed two in the past two years), Harting's impressive vocal enthusiasm can be heard over most other sounds at sports venues and the giant arena was no exception.

After a young Waitsburg fan asked her, she took charge of the chants, something she has never done before because she's always moving up and down the sideline and never in the stands.

"Who are we?" she would cry using her hands as a megaphone. Several hundred Cardinals fans would answer: "WP!" The repertoire would go on from there to "WP Power," "Go WP" and so on.

Blue Crystal owner Karen Mohney had been busy pressing the "Who Are We" slogan all week and as a result, the stands Harting was directing were filled with black-clad fans going wild with each WP first down and each WP touchdown, which each came with satisfying regularity.

It was like the bulk of the Touchet River Valley's population migrated to the Tacoma area this weekend to fill the seats looming several stories high behind the WP bench.

They were all a witness to history. Never before has a Waitsburg team brought home the state trophy. Prescott achieved it in eight-men football in 1975. Drawing from those two towns and from the Jubilee Youth Ranch, the combine finally fielded a team that was impossible to beat this year.

Even more remarkably, the Cardinals' title is the second state championship WP has won this season after the Tigers won their 2B division competition down the road in Sumner two weeks earlier.

"It was like a dream come true watching them go all the way after they worked so hard for it," Harting said.

For Harting, the dream began in high school when she forewent playing volleyball to be the statistics keeper for the football team four years in a row. She continued to cheer her team each subsequent year. It helped that her mother, Oma Harting, was a foster parent to several Cardinals: running backs Justin Armstrong, Kris Cady and Billy Brown.

"We have to let them know we support them no matter what - that we're there for them," she said.

As for Harting's voice, she said she's usually hoarse for about a week, but it's nothing some hot cups of tea can't cure.