Scott Swanson
Felix Wilkerson flips through the old album, full of newspaper clippings and photos.
“That’s the season, right there,” he says.
That would be the season of 1976-77, when Wilkerson, Sweet Home’s basketball coach at the time, watched his team achieve what no other Huskies had up to that point: Make a run at the “Big Dance” in Portland.
“The individuals we had on that team were an exceptional group,” he said.
Sweet Home had languished for years in the large-school division of the state, which was then simply split between large and small schools.
“We had not been successful,” said Wilkerson, who was hired in the fall of 1969 and took over the team in 1972 from Harold Miner. “When I first got here, Corvallis, Albany only had one high school. Sweet Home was stuck in there with them; we had to play those guys in football, basketball, everything. They were bigger programs.”
Change began with an influx of talented coaches, along with a switch that sent the Huskies to a different league.
Then-Sweet Home Supt. Doug-las Olds told high school Athletic Director Frank Costa that he wanted to “hire some coaches” who could turn things around, Wilkerson recalled.
“That’s what happened. Paul Dickerson ran the baseball program for many years, very successful, really a good coach. Then you had Norm Davis, Bruce West, Doug Peargin, all kinds of really good coaches that came along there, with Rod Rumrey and the football program.
The other big change, Wilkerson said, was Sweet Home’s move to a new conference, the Coast-Valley League. Albany had built South Albany High School and Corvallis had built Crescent Valley, which didn’t leave room for the Huskies in the Valley League.
This was the Coast Valley Conference, composed of 12 teams divided into two divisions.
The Coast Division was made up of Dallas, McMinnville, Newberg, Forest Grove, St. Helens and Astoria.
The Valley Division was Sandy, Estacada, Canby, Molalla, Silverton and Sweet Home.
“Because there were so many schools, we played each team twice in the division for 10 games and each team in the other division once, so there were 16 league games, actually,” Wilkerson recalled, adding that each division was divided into two halves, with a first- and second-half winner who would then face off for the chance to represent the conference at state.
By the end of the 1977 season, Sweet Home and Sandy faced off to represent the Valley Division, while Astoria and McMinnville played to represent the Coast Division.
Holding a colored special newspaper section from the era, Wilkerson observed, “This is just a conference playoff thing, but it looks like you were going to the state tournament. It was kind of elaborate.
“It was a big deal.”
Sweet Home was led by senior point guard Tim Seiber, a three-year starter at the position.
“He gets a lot of the credit for the success because he ran the team, got the ball where it needed to be gotten, and was successful in bringing it down against any kind of pressure,” Wilkerson said.
Seiber was also a scorer – 690 points in high school, who went on to play at Western Baptist (now Corban).
The lineup included two other seniors, Brad Borigo and Jim Jordan, junior Matt Wilkerson and sophomore Ed Brennan.
The top scorer for the Huskies was Matt Wilkerson, who went on to play at Boise State after scoring 1,343 points in 70 games (19.1 ppg) and pulling down 802 rebounds (11.5 ppg) on the varsity in high school.
“The other starters on that team ended up scoring quite a few points too,” Wilkerson said, noting that Borrego finished with 514 points and Brennan 541 during their varsity careers.
“They were the best team I ever had play for me,” said Felix Wilkerson, who also took a team to the postseason in 1981. “I think they were the best team that Sweet Home had ever had, up till that time. I don’t include the 1980s and ’90s because they had good teams too.”
Wilkerson said that then-Vice Principal Dick Price, who had contacts in Northern California, got them into a Christmas tournament in the Bay Area.
“That was something Sweet Home had never done before,” he said. The Huskies won two games and lost one.
Seibert got a chance to show off his skills when one team tried to pressure him.
“He ripped them apart,” Wilkerson said. “It got to the point they didn’t even want to attack him out there. That’s how accomplished he was at bringing the ball down.”
As the season progressed for the Huskies, fans started buying in.
“The excitement just built up gradually,” Wilkerson said. “It got bigger and bigger as we got closer to the end, there.”
Though the Huskies had lost twice to Sandy during the regular season, dwelling in the “Coast-Valley League shadows of Sandy’s triumphs” throughout the season, as The New Era writer Dayton Turner put it, but in the conference championships they came out on top, then beat Astoria to earn the No. 1 seed going into state.
“The game against Astoria turned out to be kind of a one-sided deal,” Wilkerson said, adding that halfway through the second quarter the score was “24-0 or something like that.”
“But the neat thing was that the coach from Astoria sent a letter to me and to the high school, complimenting the fans and the people of Sweet Home for their good character and behavior because they were getting beat pretty bad. Instead of having people heckling them, giving them a bad time, no one did.”
Turner reported in The New Era that “seven busloads and who knows how many carloads” of Husky fans traveled to Portland for the Wednesday night game against Churchill.
“This was the state tournament and this was Sweet Home’s first-ever appearance, having missed the first 58 such tournaments.”
The opening game against Churchill proved to be the end of the run for Sweet Home, after 6-7 Matt Wilkerson was whistled for four quick fouls and had to be benched a minute into the second quarter, with the Huskies up 25-23. But they stayed ahead, finishing the half with a 37-33 lead. They held on again in the third to stay on top 48-42 with Wilkerson still on the bench, but Churchill had started to rally and tied the score 50-all at the end of the period.
Wilkerson had re-entered the game with a minute left in the third, and then lasted a minute in the fourth quarter before he was whistled with his fifth foul, after having not fouled out in his 23 previous games.
“We knew he had a history of foul trouble,” Churchill Coach Ken Harris told Turner after the game. “Our plan was that if we could get him to foul a couple of times on defense, we could draw some offensive fouls from him too.”
Turner reported that Sweet Home collected more offensive fouls in that game than it had the entire season, especially after “Sweet Home was tooted for 12 fouls and Churchill for one” in the second half.
The tournament ended with a bit of a thud for the Huskies when they lost the next day to South Albany, a team they had beaten by 17 earlier in the season, after what Turner described as a “tense” performance – “missing free throws and banging lay-ins off the backboard.”
There was some consolation in that Astoria went on to win the consolation championship.
“They did our league well in representing us that way,” Wilkerson said.
But he’s proud of that 1976-77 team and so was the community, he said, producing a large green and gold pillow crocheted by Marilyn Seiber, Tim’s mom.
“What brought this all up, was I had this sitting around,” Wilkerson said. “It has four sections on it, showing what happened. It just showed the love that this woman had for this team.”
Turner wrote that the “experience was something else for Sweet Home High School and townspeople.
“The Huskies, while possibly suffering from some tournament-type pressures, were not humiliated at any point. They played commendable ball. The crowd from Sweet Home was fantastic and earned third place in the sportsmanship competition.
“Many left there last Thursday with a taste of what it was like and hoping it will not take another 58 years for the Huskies to return.”
It didn’t, especially after Sweet Home changed divisions in 1981, the year the Huskies returned to the state tournament under Felix Wilkerson. That fall assistant Ed Nieman, a SHHS alum, took over when Wilkerson stepped down.
“Ed took teams to the state tournament quite frequently,” Wilkerson said. “He took first, second, third several times. He had a really good run.”