Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Ken Roberts has been named the new head girls basketball coach at Sweet Home High School.
Roberts, a retired junior high teacher, has coached a variety of sports for years at the junior high and high school level. Among those sports are football, basketball, volleyball and baseball.
He coached girls junior varsity basketball one year under Coach Jason Gorham, who resigned recently to take a teaching job at Cove High School and be nearer to family in eastern Oregon. Roberts also has worked as a volunteer with several programs, working as an announcer, keeping stats and compiling season statistics. He also has contributed as a football writer for The New Era in recent years.
“I don’t have a huge background,” Roberts said. “I’ve followed the program. I know in my mind I’m ready to go.”
He said he is looking forward to taking the program’s helm.
“The girls know that I care about the girls sports as much as I care about the boys sports,” he said. “Jason will be hard to replace because the kids really like him.”
As he takes the reins, he has plans, Roberts said.
“This is the only job I probably would ever take, and yes I am excited about this,” he said. “I think the number one thing, I want to develop a feeder program from the ground up.”
He wants to get something started with the younger children, and “I want to be visible as a coach to elementary and junior high kids.”
The goal is to get young players learning the basics and moving from there when they reach the high school level, he said. “The best schools have developed these kinds of programs.”
This year, he put an eighth-grade traveling team together just for this purpose, he said. There was a seventh-grade traveling team also. Both played full seasons on top of the junior high program.
“Last year, as soon as girls were done, we went right into a traveling season,” he said. He would like to join forces with the schools in the Sky-Em conference and put together an off-season league. The big 5A and 6A schools all do this, he said, but only the better 4A schools do it.”
At the third- and fourth-grade levels, he would like to see teams focus on fundamentals, Roberts said, not so much on playing actual games. Once games are part of the picture, the players have to start focusing on offenses and defenses to meet the competition. The teams by necessity must lose their focus on fundamentals.
Second, and “I think Jason did this really well, this isn’t just about basketball,” Roberts said. “This is about kids, helping them make good decisions, building character.”
He hopes winning comes with it, but the important thing is to help athletes develop a quality character, he said.
As far as specifics on the floor, much of what a team will do depends on its personnel, Roberts said. “All good programs basically are quick, athletic, know how to full-court press, know how to half-court trap, and that’s what we will do.”
The degree to which this describes his team will depend on how well they can execute it and the kind of players he has to work with.
The Huskies will need to be able to break that press when they see it in their opponents, he said.
“You don’t see it quite as much at any level with boys, but even with high school boys it can change the game. You have to be able to do these sorts of things.
“I didn’t always believe in that, but the past 10 years, when the writing’s on the wall, you have to do it.”
All of that must be adjusted for the specific players, Roberts said. “We don’t get to recruit. You play with the kids you’ve got, so you work with what you have.”
“It’s really hard to leave here,” Gorham said. “We’ve made a lot of friends here. I’ve really enjoyed our time here. It’s been hard to say goodbye and move on.
“Ken’s been in education a long time. He’s going to do a great job with the kids. He’s going to keep them working hard, and they’ll be well-prepared.”
“He’s had the desire to be our head basketball coach for a long time,” retiring Athletic Director Larry Johnson said. “He has the opportunity now to really make that extra commitment of time to do that.”
He has been an assistant in the program twice, Johnson said, and involved at some level in many high school programs.
Already, he has been to the junior high and started working on bringing up the number of girls in the program at the lower grades, Johnson said, and he is really committed to getting the right people and enough people to get programs running in the lower grades.
“He brings a lot of basketball knowledge with him,” Johnson said.
Roberts is a District 55 School Board member. As a board member, by state law, he is not permitted to receive compensation as a coach.