Scott Swanson
When Dakotah Keys was starring in track at Sweet Home High School a decade ago, the Meet of Champions was one of his favorites each season.
The event, held then at Willamette University in Salem, brought together the top performers in the 1A through 4A divisions of OSAA for a championship-caliber meet.
This year Keys, now head track and field coach at Sweet Home, will host the meet, this Saturday at Husky Stadium.
The meet started in the late 1970s or early 1980s, former Sweet Home Coach Billy Snow said.
“When I first got here, in the fall of 1984, Gladstone and Cascade were involved with it.”
In those days, the girls competition was held at Cascade, followed by a boys competition, later in the day, at Gladstone.
“Everybody would go up to Cascade for the girls, then move on to Gladstone,” Snow recalled. “Everybody would end up there, eventually.”
Then Gladstone changed divisions and Stayton and Sweet Home hosted the boys meet for a year each. Snow said he and Cascade coaches decided that it was time to find a site to host all the athletes, and settled on Willamette University. The meet was held there from 2003 through last spring.
However, Willamette’s stadium is actually on city property, and Snow said it was becoming increasingly difficult to schedule the event, between city needs and the university’s. Plus, costs were going up.
“It just became unwieldy,” he said. “It was harder and harder to make it work. We had a hard time setting the date and we couldn’t guarantee when that date would be. We’d like to have the meet later in the season, rather than earlier, to give kids a chance to qualify. Some years we were having to hold it the second week in April.”
Even this year, if the state meet were not held a week early, the Meet of Champions would have been held the first Saturday in May, he said.
Keys is looking forward to it.
“When I was in school it was the one I looked forward to every year,” he said. “It’s one of the best demonstrations for 1A through 4A athletic talent in track and field, other than state. To have the Meet of Champions here is the big meet I wanted to host. It’s really exciting.”
“It’s so cool,” he said. “When I first got here, I knew I wanted to put on a big meet here. I was going to call it the ‘Billy Snow Invitational,’ dedicate it to Billy for all he’s done for this program.”
The meet will be held Saturday, April 27, at Husky Field, which has seen some significant upgrades in preparation for the 49 teams scheduled to send competitors, all of whom have met qualifying standards. They will come from as far north as Warrenton and as far south as South Umpqua.
Keys said he knew this was a big opportunity for his home town, and he needed help.
“When I found out we got the meet, I called Billy and Alan Temple and Jim Kistner and said, ‘I need you guys. This is beyond me.'”
The event is run similarly to the state meet – on purpose, Snow said. The goal is to give athletes who might not otherwise see a big meet until they get to state a chance to experience that.
“It’s to allow the better kids, the top athletes in that current year, to get together and compete against good competition. We try to run a good meet, a good, classy meet. This is one of the bigger meets kids will go to besides (state).”
He said the meet is open to smaller schools rather than 5A and 6A Division teams, because if bigger schools were involved, many athletes from the smaller schools would be excluded due to qualifying standards.
“Even at smaller schools, like Monroe, they have two or three girls who are just studs, who could get into any event they wanted to. Hopefully most schools have two or three kids. Even a small school, a 1A school, might have at least one kid who can qualify and compete.”
Keys said the track, which already was refurbished when artificial turf was installed at Husky Stadium in 2015, is being further improved for the Meet of Champions.
New, “better” sand is being brought in for the long jump pits and a new shot put pit has been installed.
There are also plans to put gravel around the discus facility so athletes won’t have to stand in mud and grass.
Snow said spectators will be a little more restricted in their ability to move around, but will be able to get to field events. He said as long as the weather is good, Husky Stadium should be fine for the crowds that are likely to show up.
“There’s going to be some parking, that type of thing. People are going to have to walk a little bit. To watch an event, they may have to be an active viewer.”
Field events will start at 11:30 a.m., with track events at 1 p.m. Admission will be $4 for adults, $2 for students.
Samaritan Health physical therapist Josh Walters will head a training facility that will be located in the weight room, and the Oregon State Police Honor Guard will present the colors.
The Oregon State Police Honor Guard will present the colors and the Sweet Home High School Symphonic Choir will perform the national anthem.
Jeff Drumm, who handles timing at Hayward Field at the University of Oregon, will oversee that aspect of the meet, Snow said. “We have a good guy doing the timing.”
The only thing left, Keys said, is for the community to show up.
“We need them to come out and support not just our kids but every kid that’s here so the teams want to come back,” he said. “Eventually, this is going to be a huge fundraiser for our program. Hopefully we can get local businesses to support the meet, sponsor the meet.”
He said that holding the meet in Sweet Home gives local kids a chance to see what good track and field looks like and gain confidence that they can aspire to getting there themselves.
“This is something the community can buy into. It’s so exciting because it was a big part of my life when I was a kid here. This meet is going to be a benefit for our program.”