Seattle Seahawks name Papermakers’ coach Adam Mathieson ‘high school football coach of the year’

That leadership was apparent to anyone following this year’s Camas High football team. Prior to that Dec. 7 championship game, the Papermakers had been on an impressive winning streak, winning their first 13 games of the season and being named the 4A Great St. Helens league champions before winning four postseason games to qualify for the Class 4A championship game — the Papermakers’ fourth title-game appearance in the past 12 years.

“We had wonderful veteran leadership,” Mathieson said. “There was a connectivity that’s probably more apparent in a town like Camas compared to a suburban school, where kids come from different middle schools. Our kids love to be around each other. I felt this was a team that very much wanted to achieve things at a high level, not only for themselves, but for the person next to them.”

And they did it all with a new coach. Mathieson, who served as an offensive assistant in 2023, for a Papermakers squad that lost in the first round of the 2023 Class 4A state tournament, was named head coach in January 2024, after then-head coach Jack Hathaway resigned. Hathaway chose to stay on this season as one of Mathieson’s assistants.

Mathieson served as the head coach of the Mountain View High School football team from 2008 to 2022. During his tenure there, the Thunder football team won 108 games and six league championships, advancing to the Class 3A state semifinals in 2018. Prior to coming to Mountain View, Mathieson had coaching stints at Meridian High School in Bellingham, Washington; at Ferndale High School in Ferndale, Washington; and at Western Washington University.

He said the first thing he did when he came into the head coaching position at Camas High was to try to figure out what the team had done well in the past and try to keep those things going.

“Then you go, ‘What are some of my principles, things that I’ve got to do, that I want to add in?’” Mathieson said. “What I’ve found is that all of these programs, whether it’s Ferndale or Meridian or Camas or Western Washington University, all those coaches did things very similarly. Achieving at a high level is not nearly as complicated as many people want to make it out to be.”

As the Papermakers’ new head coach, Mathieson eschewed lofty, big-picture goal-setting and instead focused on week-to-week improvement. On a wall near Mathieson’s office hangs a chart, laid out in a grid-like fashion, on which the Papermakers’ captains affix stickers indicating their assessment of the day’s practice session.

“They either put a sticker going up or they put a sticker going down,” Mathieson said. Up means the team got better. Down meant they did a little worse.

“Over the course of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, weeks, we will have bad days. We will have days where we don’t get better,” Mathieson said. “But, if you show up each day, and you love your teammates, you put your work in and you try to do your job the best you can, you’re going to stack more good days together than bad days, and eventually that’s going to result in some type of success.”

Mathieson said he never set his goals too high.

“Fortunately, we were perfect for the first 13 games of the season. They stacked enough good things to look at the scoreboard and like the result,” he said. “But I never set out with a goal of winning a league championship … or winning a state championship. It was just like, ‘Can we get better every week?’ If you stack enough 1-and-0s together, you’re probably gonna like where you’re at. And we had a group of kids that bought into that. They just went to work.”

After a few hard-earned wins on the road, however, Mathieson and his players started to realize they might have the chance to go all the way this season.

On Oct. 11, the Papermakers defeated Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) HIgh School, at that point ranked No. 1 in the Class 6A Idaho state poll, 38-21. Seven days later, they knocked off Monroe (Washington) High School, which was ranked in the top five in the Class 4A Washington state poll, 49-14.

The victories made the long bus rides — they got home at 4 a.m. after the Coeur d’Alene game and 3 a.m. after the Monroe contest — a bit more bearable.

“Those are tough trips for a high school kid,” Mathieson said. “I don’t want to say that’s not normal, but to play as well as we did in those two games against two really, really good football teams, all of a sudden you’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got a chance here.’ I think that was the first time that maybe the team or even the coaches felt like, ‘We’re going into league play, but we’ve played some really good competition, and we took two really good back-to-back road trips. We’ve got a chance.’”

The Papermakers featured a dominant offense, which scored more than 40 points per game, led by senior quarterback Jake Davidson, who led the state with 3,711 passing yards and 53 touchdowns.

The 6-foot-3, 190-pound Davidson, who added 399 rushing yards and five scores on the ground. was selected as the 2024 MaxPreps Washington High School Football Player of the Year, the 2024-25 Gatorade Washington Football Player of the Year, and The Columbian’s 2024 All-Region Player of the Year.

“I’m super proud of the way he led the team, battled through different injuries and things like that that people don’t even know he was dealing with,” Mathieson said. “To score 58 touchdowns in a high school football season, be (state player of the year), it’s a special time for him. We’re in the memory-making business, and he provided a lot of memories for himself and for his teammates.”