EUGENE, Ore. – On a final day that began under blue skies and ended beneath threatening black clouds, Kellie Schueler added four more titles to her belt and led the Summit girls to an overwhelming team championship in the 5A division. The appropriately named Storm of Summit scored 112 points, doubling 2nd place and equaling the most ever scored in any Oregon division.
The two 4A team races came down to the final 4x4s. In the girls, Henley trailed Astoria by 9 ½ points. Astoria, fueled by its throwers, had 66 points in the bank but no 4x4 team. Henley had 56 ½ and a relay. They led all the way to win the championship by half a point.
In the boys, Sweet Home, thanks to a 1st and 3 2nds by soph phenom Dakotah Keys, trailed North Bend 57-53 entering the final relay. After a lap and a half they were in 7th place but they fought up to 4th, held that position, and by the narrowest of margins won the title, 58-57.
In 6A boys, Barlow had two of the leading individual athletes in the meet – sprinter/hurdler Eric Capelle and precocious thrower Ryan Crouser – and between them they were part of five victories. That was more than enough to give them the team championship over the defending champions, Lincoln of Portland
The 6A girls title went to Jesuit of Portland, the 5A boys to Marshfield. For Marshfield it was a storybook conclusion to the coaching career of Fran Worthen, herself a star athlete for her alma mater 35 years earlier.
Marshfield had never won the Oregon boys’ championship, even in the days of Steve Prefontaine, who graduated from the Coos Bay school in 1968.
Worthen’s own girls team won a state title when she was a member of the team, and again later when she was coach.
This time they couldn’t match Summit’s scoring juggernaut, but Coach Worthen’s daughter, Alison, won three individual titles in her final high school meet. Two of Alison’s older sisters were also state champions, as was their mother, when she was known as Fran Auer Sichting, almost four decades earlier.
Reporting by Jack Pfeifer, photography by Kim Spir