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Huskies looking at slightly different athletic landscape this season

Scott Swanson

As Sweet Home High School’s fall sports kick off with pre-season action this week for almost all sports, the Huskies are moving into some new territory following some Oregon School Activities Association redistricting moves.

The Oregon West Conference gets a slightly different look this year and Sweet Home’s football team will be looking at a significantly different landscape as fall sports kick off this year.

After the Oregon School Activities Association’s Executive Board last spring signed off on the plan for the next four years, North Marion was moved into the OWC, replacing Sisters. North Marion, whose mascot is the Husky and whose colors are green and white, closely resembling Sweet Home’s own, last competed in a league with the local Huskies in 2005 in the Capital Conference.

The school also has also, since then, competed with Sweet Home in special districts in swimming and wrestling, but not much in other sports, though the local Huskies blanked North Marion 35-0 last year in football.

Sisters is no longer a 4A-level school, having moved to the 3A Mountain Valley Conference along with Elmira and Siuslaw.

It’s football where the big changes have occurred for Sweet Home.

Last year’s league line-up in the sport was largely then-OWC schools, but this year the Huskies have been placed in a seven-team 4A Special District 3, which will essentially combine most of the OWC with three Sky-Em teams: Cottage Grove, Junction City and Marist. The OWC teams will be Cascade, Philomath, Stayton and Sweet Home.

The change is due primarily to the OSAA’s attempts to keep the sport competitive and consider team participation numbers, particularly for safety reasons.

Former Sweet Home Football Coach Rob Younger, now executive director of the Oregon Athletic Coaches Association a member of the OSAA’s Football Ad Hoc Committee, which advises the OSAA Executive Board on gridiron issues, said participation in the sport has dropped across the nation over the past decade, which has been exacerbated by COVID.

“What we see in most states is (participation) has leveled off,” he said, adding that he’s hoping the changes will encourage an increase in participation.

“The committee’s done a lot of research, getting information from schools – not only the schools involved, but those in the surrounding area,” Younger said, “A lot of things were considered, first of all, player safety and the success ratio of those teams.”

Teams have to meet a “grid” before the OSAA will let them play up or down, depending on their success rate and numbers, he said.

“Woodburn is a good example,” he said, citing the former 5A school that played in the OWC for the last four years, but has moved back up to 5A in all sports except football, in which it will compete this season in Special District 2 with teams in the northern Willamette Valley. “They are playing down from their level of enrollment because, when you look at their past successes, they’ve met the criteria. We talked to other schools and to Woodburn.”

Other considerations, he said, are “geographical location” and travel, which explains Sweet Home’s grouping with other mid-valley schools of similar size.

Newport has moved down in football and will compete in the 3A District 2, which includes Scio, Jefferson, Santiam Christian and 2A schools Salem Academy and Kennedy, which are playing up.

North Marion will play football in 3A Special District 1, with Banks, Corbett, Valley Catholic and Yamhill-Carlton, all former 4A teams that have moved down to 3A.

Dan Tow, Sweet Home’s athletic director, said both Newport and North Marion have “been struggling in football with their level of talent” in recent years.

“They’ve tried to make adjustments because of competitiveness and the nature of football – injury factors, etc. When you have a situation where it’s a big mismatch, it’s one thing to lose a game by a lot of points, but you can also have five or six kids get hurt.”

The OSAA has also tried to slightly increase the size of the football districts from the number of teams in most of the 4A leagues “so teams can play a valid league schedule.”

Special District 3 will be provide challenges, particularly with Marist, which lost 49-34 in the 4A finals last year to Marshfield after beating Sweet Home 49-12 at Husky Field earlier in the season.

“Marist, obviously, has been a really strong team the last few years,” Tow said. “They’ll be the favorite. Cottage Grove was dominant in the past, but the last few years they haven’t been as strong as five or six years ago.

“I think it’s a good group.”

Ashland, which has been a contender in the 5A Division in the past, has moved down to 4A in football and will fill the one non-conference slot for the Huskies, visiting on Oct. 14.

“That’ll be a new one for us,” said Tow, who has been at Sweet Home High School since 1990. “I don’t know if Sweet Home has ever played Ashland in football.”

He said that pairing was somewhat the result of coaches’ rankings of teams in Sweet Home’s Special District 3 and Special District 4, in which the Grizzlies will compete with 4A schools that include former 5A competitors Marshfield, North Bend and Klamath Union.

“It seems kind of crazy because a few years ago they were 5A or 6A, but when the coaches did the rankings, they said this is kind of where Ashland is. It’ll be a tough match-up for us.”

Huskies’ Participation Numbers Up

Tow said Sweet Home is enjoying renewed interest in sports, and numbers for football and volleyball are particularly high this year.

“We had over 50-some girls try out for volleyball,” he said, adding that “20-some” were freshmen.

“It was hard on the volleyball coaches. They had to make some cuts.”

Soccer numbers, he said, are about normal, but boys Coach Eric Stutzer said earlier this month that he was a little surprised when 16 boys showed up before pre-season practices started for a non-mandatory workout – enough for a full team.

“I don’t know for sure if we’ll be able to field a JV boys soccer team,” Tow said late last week, when officials practices had begun.

He said he thinks young people are beginning to emerge from the COVID complications to their lives.

“When you think of it, a lot of kids were stuck at home for a while there,” Tow said. “They didn’t like it. When COVID first started happening, right before spring break, they just thought it would be a longer spring break. But it didn’t take very long before they missed their friends and missed school.

“I had lots and lots of kids tell me, ‘I want to come back.’ It’s great for them to be active. It’s especially hard if we had a kid who wanted to come out and be involved.

“”Cuts in volleyball, that just stinks. We need to find ways for them to be active. They want to be part of something.”

Cross-country still needs competitors to be able to field full teams, Coach Dave Martin said.

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