New Sports Sheriff in Keizer August 15, 2010
Richards, originally from Butte, Montana, played college sports at the University of Montana. He has since coached football and wrestling at the high school and college levels. Ten years ago, he became athletic director at McKay High School. Richards sat down to answer a few questions. Lance Masterson (LM): Why McNary, why now? Ron Richards (RR): When Mike Maghan talked about retiring, I decided I’d like to finish my career out at a school like McNary. One that can compete across all sports at the state level, on the state stage. I thought that would be a fitting end to my career. In addition, student leadership and character building are passions for Mike and me. I’d like to continue his work here at McNary. LM: What differences are there between student-athletes at McNary versus their peers at McKay? RR: Well, the biggest difference is that there are more students that have a real interest in athletics at McNary than at McKay. What I’ve noticed at McNary, regardless of whether it’s a boys or girls sport, whether it’s an individual or team sport, they’ve had the athletes that have been able to advance and compete at the state level, and I find that intriguing. LM: I imagine you’re aware of McNary varsity girls winning 41 of 42 league games in volleyball, basketball and softball during the 2009-10 seasons. Pretty impressive? RR: It sure is. Again, all sports here at McNary, depending upon the year, have had some really impressive feats. The girls doing that last year. Two years ago, the baseball team coming out of nowhere (to win a state title). Last year, the wrestling team, in my mind, coming out of nowhere to win the Central Valley Conference championship. I’m the commissioner of wrestling and if I were to pencil in who was going to be the conference champion going into that tournament, McNary was one of them, but wouldn’t have been my first choice. LM: What about the youth sports and how they feed into the McNary program? Is that different than what you saw at McKay? RR: It’s my understanding that there’s a very strong youth program in Keizer. I think anytime you get a small-town atmosphere, and I like that McNary feeds into the small-town atmosphere because it is the high school of Keizer. Rather than one of six, it’s one of one. My background has been in that type of deal. I really think it’s easier for the community to get behind their youth sports when the goal is to move their kids up into the same high school. LM: How familiar are you with the coaching staffs here: RR: Not very. I mean the ones that I’ve dealt with when I was the commissioner, and I’ve been a commissioner for a couple of sports. I’ve dealt with those people personally. The rest of them, just meeting them before games or talking to them. A couple of our coaches I met with in June. And I’ll be meeting with all the fall coaches before the season kicks off. And then the whole coaching staff once they all come back. LM: What’s the status on the search for a new varsity baseball coach? RR: The status on that is that we’ll be interviewing soon. It came to my attention late, and it was too late for Mike (Maghan) to really do anything about baseball, and too early for me to do anything about baseball. We did know that the McNary baseball program is one that deserves a statewide look. I’m a firm believer that you should be able to grow your own coaches, and be able to work within your system to be able to replace them. But when you’re competing at such a high level, you also want to make sure that you don’t allow any rock to go unturned. You want to make sure you’re getting the best candidate. I believe that we’ve got some solid candidates right here, but I also want to have a look and see what the availability is statewide. We’re getting pretty close to sitting down, getting a group together to start interviewing coaches. And, of course, we’ll begin the interviews with what we have here at McNary High School. We’ll be looking at others who have applied and deciding whether it’s worth it to bring outsiders in. At this point we haven’t decided whether we’ll be focusing internally or whether there’s some good candidates outside who will fit our needs that we should at least listen to ...” LM: What does it mean not having Redmond in the Central Valley Conference? RR: Well, the main thing it means is we don’t have to travel there. It’s not mandated that we travel there for any reason. We’ll still be playing Redmond from time to time, because if we’re looking for a quality game and that sports gives us that quality game, we’ll travel or have them come here. But we don’t have to, so we get to choose our times. We don’t have to travel to Redmond in February. We don’t have to travel to Redmond at the beginning of April when you get that April snowstorm that makes the pass really bad. LM: That said, do you think a six-team Central Valley Conference is too small, too local? RR: It’s too small. What we wanted to see, meaning people who think like I do, we wanted to see conferences with eight teams. We thought there was real value playing outside your conference ... but there’s also real value in a strong large conference. We thought eight teams was the best. Not everybody agreed with us. LM: Describe your philosophy as athletic director. RR: Oh boy, that’s a real difficult one. My philosophy is to hire the best people and let them coach and do what it takes to get things done. I’m really a hands-off guy. I try to hire the best people and let them do what’s best. That being said, I’m real big on leadership and character in the way athletes present themselves in representing the school. In education what we’re trying to do is to build future leaders and future citizens of our communities. To do that we want to make sure that we’re always building character, that we’re always building leadership in bringing those intangibles together. So it’s two-fold. I’ll have more of a hands-on in the leadership end of it, and more of a hands-off in the sports end of it. Often times, with my background, the first thing people ask me is, wow, you can give the football program all sorts of input. That’s not how I operate. I operate as hands-off. If anyone has a question as to how they believe they should coach a team, I’m a sounding board for them. I’ll listen to them. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, if you will, and I know I don’t have all the answers. Richards also touched on the OSAA new playoff format. Here are the highlights from that discussion. LM: You’ve got changes coming to the OSAA playoffs format. Can you explain these changes? RR: Oh, you bet. Football and all team sports are the same. That’s the easy part about it. The OSAA looked at the six-classification system and found some flaws. The flaws were that leagues were too small and travel was too far. In order to accommodate that fact, that not everybody lives in the metro area, they had to do something different. And, of course, what they did is that they created some hybrid leagues to lessen the impact of the Salem schools, for one, traveling to Redmond in every sport, often more than one time per season. This change, in turn, changed the state’s structure as to how do we advance people to the playoffs. A group of athletic directors - we like to think of ourselves as being the leaders in Oregon athletics - we got together and talked about it. LM: And what you came up with is revolutionary. RR; It’s new ground. What type of format can we put together that would accommodate all of our needs? We came up with the format that we wanted to put real value on conference champions. And then we wanted to create opportunities for teams that may falter during the season. What we did is put together a plan that has automatic berths right into the state playoffs. And then we put together a plan where if a team falters during the year but ended up coming on strong because they had lost players or didn’t gel early, that opportunity wouldn’t be gone at mid-season. That opportunity to be able to still get to the state’s stage would be available at the end of the season. LM: How did you accomplish these goals? RR: Well, we said none of us would schedule a last game of the year. Instead what we would do with that last regular-season game is match up leagues to select the last berths for the state playoffs from those remaining teams. In essence, what it does for football and for all of our team sports is to guarantee the top three teams into the state playoffs, automatically. Then it takes the fourth place team and the fifth place team and the sixth place team, and gives them the opportunity to get to that state stage by winning their last regular season game. Our fourth place team would play a sixth place team from another league. Giving that sixth place team an opportunity to move on ... The fourth place team would have the advantage because they’re going to have the home field, the home court, whatever it is. That’s their advantage; they don’t have to travel. So we weighted it a bit by designating who is going to be home regardless of record, it’s how you finish in league. LM: What about the team that finishes fifth in league? RR: Fifth place teams play one another, and each league will alternate as to who is home, because they should be fairly equal ... Let’s say for example that the Central Valley Conference’s fifth place team will be home. Then next year our fifth place team will not be home. They’ll be the road team. LM: How does this impact Class 6A teams that are in hybrid leagues? RR: We’ve got six hybrid teams right now, including Redmond, in Class 6A. So what we’ve done is put those six hybrid teams into a league and said ‘you select who is going to be the automatic qualifiers.’ We don’t care if you play head to head. We don’t care if you use power poll. We don’t care how you select it. You all come together and decide who those three teams are. And then we’ll use the power ranking to find out who is four, five and six, and we’ll match them up with the other league to see who has a chance to get in. We totally left it up to them to decide. |
Arguably the most powerful person in Keizer when it comes to sports is the athletic director at McNary High School. And for the first time in 15 years, there’s a new AD in town. Ron Richards came from McKay to replace former AD Mike Maghan, who retired earlier this summer.