Sean C. Morgan
Gary Barr of Salem is new to the Sweet Home High School softball team, but he’s not new to some of the players.
Barr, 56, has taken over the helm of the Huskies, replacing Casey Humphrey, who resigned after coaching the team for one year.
He said he got interested in coaching at Sweet Home partly because of his interaction with some of the players, whom he has coached individually on their softball skills, and with whom he was impressed.
Coming to Sweet Home “was just one of those fortunate things,” Barr said. He decided to apply for the Sweet Home position after coaching Emili Riggs, Nicole Bell, Katie Virtue and Shantel Pitts, along with a couple of other girls.
About a year ago, Barr said, “I went in and told my wife, these Sweet Home kids are the best. They have high character standards. They are so nice, so courteous, work so hard. I said that would be a great school to coach at, a very good fit for me.”
Barr is a native of the Salem area, graduating from McNary High School and Oregon State University.
He is a system software engineer with the state, working on the large Unix computers in the state Data Center. He has worked with the state for 28 years.
He has been married for 29 years to Dani, who works at the Data Center as a network analyst.
Barr started coaching 21 years ago, when his oldest daughter was 7.
Their oldest daughter, Meaghan played softball at West Salem High School, where she batted .497 as a senior. She played at George Fox University as a freshman and was second in home runs. She is married and is a certified public accountant.
Their middle child is a son, Ben, who graduated from the University of Oregon Business School last year.
Their youngest, daughter Abby, played softball at Western Mennonite High School while he coached there for two years. She went on to pitch for a year at Eastern Oregon University, and now she attends Chemeketa Community College in Salem. Barr’s first year with Western Mennonite was the first year the softball team had ever been to playoffs. The team finished second in state. His second year, the team made the playoffs.
Prior to his Western Mennonite stint, Barr coached Little League for five years with his oldest daughter. Then he started an American Softball Association program called the “Scorpions.” He ran the program, with up to three teams, for 15 years. The program was year-round, with about a one-month break.
After he resigned from Western Mennonite, he opened Salem Diamond Sports, a hitting and pitching coaching business, six years ago. The coaching is on hold while he coaches Sweet Home softball.
“I wanted to coach in a small community for a lot of reasons,” Barr said. He likes the feeling of community in small towns, and he likes rural people.
When he hits the highway after work, he said, his heart rate slows down, he’s relaxed and ready to coach.
“I’ve had so much help from so many hard-working, nice people,” Barr said. “People have just bent over backward to help me.”
Barr said he is best at teaching skills, and he coaches by staying positive.
“One thing I’m really big on is athletes playing relaxed and confident,” Barr said. “They can’t be tight if they want to do their best in competition.”
He lives by three rules, he said.
First, he must appreciate the athletes as people, praising the positive things they do, when they hustle, get to practice on time or get good grades.
Second, he must respect them, he said. That means avoiding embarrassing them around other people.
Courtesy is the third rule, he said. Some might think that makes a weak coach, but that’s not true. He lets the girls know the rules they cannot cross. It’s not a big deal with this group, which motivates itself.
“It’s a coach’s dream here,” he said.
Barr teaches life lessons from sports too, he said. Each day, the team spends 15 minutes talking about the lessons they learn and how they can apply to life, such as patience, persistence, how to treat people to be successful and responsibility on the field and in life.
Barr praised the administration in Sweet Home and especially Athletic Director Steve Brown.
“Steve Brown has been a mentor to me in the most positive way, and it has been wonderful working with him as well as the rest of the administration,” Barr said.
Barr wants to keep improving the facilities, he said. He had a lot of people and family members helping him out on field day.
“We have a lot of generous people donating money,” Barr said. They step up with $500 or $1,000, and the softball board helps coordinate where to spend it.
“Also on my plate is to get in a system of drills and skills and strategies we can use starting at the elementary level,” Barr said. “They’ll learn more at the junior high. By the the time you get to high school, there’s little new.”
The idea is to make Sweet Home a softball power for years to come, he said.