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Dustin Gouker / The Bulletin
A long, hard road
By Bill Bigelow / The Bulletin
Published: February 12. 2008 4:00AM PSTA league composed mostly of Eastern Oregon schools and featuring Saturday night tipoffs created different travel challenges for basketball teams in the old Intermountain Conference
It was fast approaching midnight as the school bus pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, headed back to Bend from some distant Eastern Oregon town.
In the darkness weary basketball players, some leaning their heads on makeshift pillows of sweatshirts or jackets against frosty windows, nestled in to sleep, lulled by the drone of the bus as it labored over snowy mountain passes and across the frigid High Desert.
At the front of the bus stood a solitary figure, self-appointed to keep the driver alert as the team rolled through the night toward home.
“I did that for years,” remembers Ron Ricketts. “I was concerned about the bus driver getting sleepy. I’d stand in the stairwell — which was probably illegal, I guess. I’d talk to the driver, pour him coffee. … And a lot of times it was a five- or six-hour trip — if the roads were good.”
That was a generation ago, a time when basketball players wore their hair long and their shorts short.
Ricketts was head coach of the Bend High School boys basketball team. And if you think travel in the Intermountain Conference is challenging today, consider the league of the not-so-distant past, when two high schools — Bend and Redmond — were the only Central Oregon stops on a circuit that included not only current IMC members Pendleton and Hermiston, but more faraway eastern outposts La Grande, Baker City and Ontario.
“Some of the coaches today … they wouldn’t do it,” says Ricketts, who’s 72 now, of the travel demands of the old IMC. “But it was never a bother to me.”
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In the IMC of Ricketts’ time — he was varsity head coach at Bend High from the 1974-75 season through 1983-84 — the schedule for Central Oregon’s teams typically included road trips for Friday-Saturday games at Hermiston and/or Pendleton and/or La Grande. (Until 1973, the league stretched even farther northeast to take in McLoughlin High School, aka Mac-Hi, in Milton-Freewater.)
Another weekend trip would account for games at Baker City (then known as simply Baker) and Ontario. And unlike today’s IMC, when the schedule for travel weekends normally lists varsity start times at 7 o’clock on Friday nights and 2:45 on Saturday afternoons, the games back in the day were almost always played at night.
“Most of those night games were 8 o’clock games,” recalls Greg Hammond, who coached at Ontario from 1975 to 1981 and came to Bend High in 1985 to become head boys basketball coach and, later, director of athletics.
“One of the best things we ever did,” Hammond adds, “was go to Saturday afternoons.”
That change, as Hammond remembers it, came in the mid-1980s. By then, high school basketball games were no longer the wildly popular small-town attractions they once had been — certainly not in Bend, where community allegiances became divided in the late 1970s with the opening of Mountain View High School.
“Basketball, back in the ’70s … man, that gym would be full,” recalls Dennis Nielson, another former Bend High coach. “I mean, the place would be packed. It’s not the only thing for people to do now. But back then, that’s what people did: go to the basketball game.”
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Nielson preceded Ricketts as head coach of the Lava Bears, guiding the boys basketball varsity for four seasons starting in 1970-71. He was never a fan of the IMC schedule.
“I was not much of a traveler,” admits Nielson, who is retired now and lives most of the year in Vancouver, Wash., spending his winters near Palm Springs, Calif.
“Ron and I both tried to get ’em to change (game times) to Saturday afternoons,” Nielson insists. “But I guess they were worried it would hurt the crowds. So instead, we’d get home at 3 o’clock in the morning.
“I think the kids adapted (to the long trips and late return times) a lot better than the coaches did,” Nielson reflects. “For me, it would carry over to Monday.”
Sean Corrigan was a point guard for the Lava Bears and later, after Mountain View opened, for the Cougars. As he remembers it, the players took the inconveniences of the old IMC pretty much in stride.
“That was just the way it was in the league back then,” Corrigan recalls. “Besides, we were young guys, hanging out with our buddies. We never thought twice about it.”
Ricketts says that for east-side road trips, his teams typically would travel after Friday night’s game and stay in a motel at the scheduled Saturday site. The advantage of that strategy, according to the coach, was that the players could eat dinner after the game and then wind down for an hour or so during the bus trip from, say, Ontario to Baker City.
The disadvantage? Having most of the following day to kill while waiting for a nighttime tipoff.
“It seems like we spent most of the day Saturday dillydallying around,” Nielson remembers, “waiting to play ball.”
“The coaches had us pretty well organized,” says Corrigan. “We always ate together. Sometimes we’d try to find a gym and do a walk-through (practice.) The coaches had to find something for us to do … they had to be creative. I think it was probably more burdensome for the coaches, because they had to look after us. And we could find plenty of mischief.”
“The (varsity) game Saturday wouldn’t start until 8, and the motel wanted you out by about noon, normally,” says Hammond. “We’d put all the varsity players in one room, the JV in another room, and the coaches in another room — and hope they’d let you hang out until 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon.”
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Daniel Barendse remembers the Saturday hours spent waiting for game time.
“We didn’t have PSPs (PlayStation Portables) and iPods and all that like kids have today to entertain themselves,” says Barendse, who played basketball at Redmond High from 1974 to 1977. “There was just a lot more camaraderie. We played a lot of cards … and some of us actually tried to get some homework done.
“There was not a lot to do in Baker, Oregon, on a Saturday afternoon.”
There WAS, however, the bowling alley.
“It would be freezing, and we’d bundle up and walk half a mile from our motel to the bowling alley,” remembers Steve Wagner, a Redmond High basketball player in the early 1970s.
“We’d go down there — pretty much the whole team, I think — and play games. But not video games like they have now,” Wagner recalls. “Pinball, or pool. No bowling. Basically, we were just killing time. … Nowadays, they’ll take the teams to a mall. But back then you weren’t going to find a mall — not in Baker.
“So we’d all play pinball.”
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By 1980, the Intermountain Conference had expanded to include two more Central Oregon schools: Bend’s Mountain View High was newly opened, and Crook County High in Prineville had been elevated in classification from its status in the then-Class AA Greater Oregon League to the AAA IMC.
The league also by then was no longer for boys only. In 1977-78, girls basketball was added to varsity sports offerings by Intermountain Conference schools.
Jim Coon coached Bend High’s first IMC girls basketball team. Among his memories of that maiden season were the road trips.
“It was an awful travel situation,” he recalls.
The idle time on Saturday mornings and afternoons made it difficult for visiting teams to be ready to play at night.
“If we could get access to a gym and shoot around, we did,” says Coon. “But other than that, it was a lot of sitting around in the motel, waiting. That made it tough to be mentally — even physically — ready to compete.”
And after the game, there was the dreaded trip home.
“It was practically ridiculous, really, getting back in at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning,” says Coon. “And we ran into some pretty hellacious weather.”
He remembers one particularly long and harrowing return from La Grande, in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon.
“It was a Saturday, and it happened to be an afternoon game,” says Coon. “It was a good thing, because we left La Grande at 5 in the afternoon, and man, it snowed all the way back until we pulled into the parking lot at Bend High.”
It was just about daybreak when the coach and his team finally filed off the bus.
“Thank God I was young and flexible,” says Coon with a laugh. “Or maybe young and dumb. I couldn’t do that now, that’s for sure.”
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The late-night journeys home sometimes generated more tales to tell than the games from which the teams were returning. Barendse recounts a particularly “brutal” Saturday night ride from Ontario back to Redmond.
“The temperature was below zero,” says Barendse, “and our whole bus was freezing up in the inside.
“There was literally ice building up from the condensation on the windows. It was a nasty, nasty trip,” says Barendse, who now arranges for presumably more comfortable — and considerably shorter — bus trips as athletic director at Rex Putnam High School near Portland.
Ricketts recalls a number of IMC travel misadventures, including the time when a return ride from the east side became a midnight odyssey on the “Blue Goose.”
“It was a converted Greyhound bus,” Ricketts says of the Lava Bears’ transport on that cold winter night. “The school district owned it, and it was old, old, old. We called it the Blue Goose.”
No doubt they called it a few other things after the driver hit the light-dimmer switch on the floorboard — and the headlights went out.
The ol’ Goose went dark in the tiny Highway 97 town of Moro, more than 100 miles north of Bend.
“It was about 2 o’clock (a.m.), and it was snowing,” Ricketts remembers. “And the driver couldn’t fix it.”
The emergency plan was to phone the school principal and athletic director, who would then notify parents of the bus delay.
“So I tried to call,” says Ricketts, “but the only pay phone in Moro wouldn’t work. And this was long before the days of cell phones.”
Then the bus driver had an idea.
“We still had the marquee lights up on the front of the bus, and they provided a little bit of light, especially in the white of the snow,” Ricketts recounts. “The driver said to me, ‘If you can stand in the stairwell here — which I normally did anyway — and tell me when I’m getting too close to the edge of the road, I think we can make it.”
And make it they did — even though it was nearly dawn by the time the Blue Goose rolled into Bend.
“Our kids had a lot of trust in the bus driver,” says Ricketts, “and some trust in me. I don’t think it bothered them at all.”
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While Bend High had its Blue Goose, Redmond had its own ride.
“We had the ‘Panther Bus,’ ” recalls Pete Rencher, Redmond High Class of ’72. “There was a panther (the school mascot) painted on it. It had reclining seats — really pretty nice, for the day.”
Rencher was a standout on some highly successful Panther basketball teams and still calls himself “a Redmond Panther to the end.” He remembers the trials of the trails in the old IMC.
“Hermiston, Pendleton, Mac-Hi, La Grande, and there was Baker and Ontario, too,” Rencher says, reciting the list of the league’s east-side stops during his playing days. “It was a killer to travel all that way. Oh, yes … I remember driving over Cabbage Hill (a steep and twisting highway grade climbing into the Blue Mountains east of Pendleton) in the snow in the middle of the night.
“It was a major travel ordeal,” he says. “And it was tough to win those games.”
But, as Rencher and the others interviewed for this retrospective piece all agreed, that was life in the Intermountain Conference in the 1970s.
“It was just the way it was,” says Coon. “As coaches, and as players, you did what you had to do.”
Ricketts says that given the chance, he’d take on the long road of the old IMC all over again.
Or most of it, anyway.
“It wasn’t always a good experience,” he admits. “But we survived.”
Bill Bigelow can be reached at 383-0359 or at bbigelow@bendbulletin.com.
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