After last year’s loss to Bishop Union in the second round of the CIF Central Section playoffs, players on Morro Bay’s football team wanted to remember the taste of the loss.

They had just fallen to the No. 1 seed in their division, Bishop Union, 28-26. It wasn’t their best performance, as the team had two punts blocked, threw two interceptions and saw multiple balls snapped over the quarterback’s head.

For the whole year, the now-current senior football players and many others kept the MaxPreps scoreboard of their loss as the wallpaper on their phones and as the header image in their senior group chat.

“We wanted to be reminded of how short we came up and how close of the game it was, so we could motivate ourselves to pull through next time,” senior receiver John Myers said.

One year later, the Pirates found themselves in the same situation.

They headed up north six hours to Bishop, California, to take on the No. 1 seed Bishop Union again in the CIF Central Section Division V semifinals.

This time, the Pirates came out on top, 28-20, and move on to the championship game.

“It felt really sweet, and it was just really good to have a great team win,” Myers said. “It brought everyone’s morale up traveling on a long ride like that back home.”

On Friday, Morro Bay will host its first-ever football CIF section championship game against Selma.

“We’re feeling pretty confident,” junior quarterback Sands Dougherty said. “We’re going to hopefully play a good game. Usually, when we don’t play a super good game, the week after we play better.”

While they won the game, the Pirates had four turnovers, nearly allowing Bishop Union to make a comeback. However, head coach Robert Dougherty said the team’s belief in each other helped them pull out the win.

“We really didn’t improve on (turnovers), but this team is very tight, and they believe in each other,” Dougherty said. “They just kept battling, so that’s really the difference.”

The team’s chemistry stems from playing together from a young age. Many of the seniors at Morro Bay have played together since elementary school. Myers was one of the first to start playing in first grade.

However, John’s mom, Valerie Myers, recalls their team didn’t win much.

“It was brutal,” she said. “We used to kind of get mad at the kids because they would take the losses very easily.”

But now, she says her “mommy heart is so happy” that they can compete for a championship in their final run as a group.

“This is why we did it for all these years,” Myers said.

While John Myers and many of the other Morro Bay players grew up together in the area, Sands grew up far past Morro Bay’s shores in Maui, Hawai’i. His father Robert Dougherty, was the high school football coach at Maui High School from 2019 to 2022.

Robert was a quarterback at Boston University and played professionally, but Dougherty didn’t get the opportunity to play quarterback until he arrived at Morro Bay as a freshman.

Dougherty was the kicker for his football team in middle school. To get up to speed, he worked constantly with his receivers during the summer to get as repetitions as possible.

Their work paid off, as the team has become one of the most explosive offenses in California.

According to Max Preps, as of Nov. 24, Dougherty is first in the state in passing yards (4,108) and total yards (4,915), which rank seventh and fourth nationally.

Four Morro Bay receivers, Myers, Ryder Busch, James Nickel and Colton Janovec, rank in the top 10 for receiving yards in their division.

Myers has 1,393 receiving yards, which ranks him first in the Central Section and fifth in the state.

Not only can Dougherty throw, but he can run the ball as well. In order to secure the win against Bishop Union, the Pirates needed to find multiple first downs. Dougherty put his head down and got the Pirates the yardage they needed to run out the clock.

“He’s not scared to take a hit,” Myers said. “Some quarterbacks we’ll see run out of bounds. He’s going to run straight into contact, and he’ll put the entire team on his back to go get five yards.”

The team has used more quarterback runs since losing their starting running back Luca Macari to injury in a scrimmage before the season. When defenses drop back into coverage looking to defend the Pirates’ vaunted passing attack, Dougherty will find holes in the defense to run through.

In their first game against Atascadero, the Pirates scored 54 points, their highest-scoring game of the season. Dougherty completed 10 of his 15 passes, but he dominated on the ground.

He ran for 170 yards on 16 rushes and had three rushing touchdowns in the 54-34 win.

The win was a dominant offensive display, but it also served as a confidence booster for the Pirates. None of the current players have ever beat Atascadero in their careers. The last time Morro Bay beat the Greyhounds was during the shortened COVID season in 2020 when Myers and many of the other seniors were in eighth grade.

“Being able to come out victorious against our crosstown rival was really good for team morale,” Myers said.

However, the Pirates faced the Greyhounds one more time in the second-round of the playoffs. The team’s offense still hummed for a 42-point performance, but the defense stepped up and held the Greyhounds to 14 points and made three sacks.

“I think that gave us a lot of confidence,” Robert Dougherty said. “We were playing better and better as the year went on. Our defense especially improved over the year. I told the team very early on if we can get to playoffs, we’re going to be a dangerous team because I knew what we could be if we come together and do all the right things.”

Over a campfire late at night during their annual trip to Hume Lake, a place he’s taken the teams he’s coached for over 20 years, Robert Dougherty delivered his message about the heights he thought this team could reach.

“A lot of people probably didn’t think we’d get here, but in that group that night, we thought we would,” Robert Dougherty said.

He said the Hume Lake trip is “a tremendous way to build your team fast and get kids to buy into one another.”

“They’re real raw and vulnerable up there, and they bond together really quick,” the head coach said.

Myers and many of the seniors on the team were members of the scout team for the Pirates when they won the division championship and reached the state finals.

There’s a lot of parallels as well. Morro Bay has an explosive offense led by a dynamic quarterback just like they did when they had Nicky Johnson. Myers points out the one difference is this team’s defense.

“I feel like our defense is better as a whole,” Myers said. “I feel like we’re more complete all around on offense as well.”

The Pirates don’t have the typical record of a division championship contender. They ended the season 5-6 and with only one league win. But with every loss, the team was able to build on it and improve the next week.

“If someone gets the edge on us one time, we’re always going to come back with a case of vengeance and be there,” Myers said. “We take every single loss in the season. Every loss has been really beneficial for us in the long run.

“We’re going to bring the fight to whoever it is.”