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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. 55 to 60,000 diehard football fans routinely pack Autzen Stadium to watch Oregon football play, as they did this past weekend. But even though Autzen Stadium is less than two miles from the football field at South Eugene High, it might as well be 1,000 miles away, given what's happening, or rather, not happening, with South's 2026 football team. Today on the show, you'll hear from a sports reporter at the Register-Guard about the difficulty South is having just to get enough students to come out for the team, and what that situation might say about the future of football in our state. Then, at the end of the show, we'll check in with one of our reporters about a new study suggesting the spotted owl is now functionally extinct in the Pacific Northwest. Jarrid Denney is a high school sports reporter for the Register-Guard. Jarrid, great to meet you. Thanks for coming in and talking to us.
Jarrid Denney: Likewise, Michael. Thank you so much for having me on.
Dunne: I read your articles about South Eugene, the Axe and the football program. Just get our listeners up to speed. What's been happening in the run-up to the 2026 football season?
Denney: It's been a bit of a bummer for South Eugene. Folks who have spent a lot of time around here know that South Eugene is one of the more respected academic schools in the state, and it has a ton of fantastic athletic programs. But its football team has struggled over the last half-decade, and it didn't field a team in 2021 or 2022 due to participation issues. A lot of football teams around the state struggled after the pandemic just to keep their numbers up, so South Eugene was one of many schools facing that battle. But they're going through something similar this year. They made the tough decision at the start of August to alter their varsity football season and drop out of the Midwestern League, where they were slated to play. They've since put together a schedule that's a bit cobbled. They played a varsity game last Friday, and they have a few junior varsity games on the slate. A lot of folks have been trying to solve this at the school, and they've got a good staff right now, led by head coach Eric Scott, who really cares about those kids and is doing everything he can to get more of them out. It's tough over there.
Dunne: And I'd imagine, like you mentioned, especially after the pandemic, a lot of Oregon schools had difficulty fielding a team, but I'd imagine a lot of those schools were smaller than South. South is a pretty good-sized school, isn't it?
Denney: Yes, absolutely. It's the largest high school in Lane County, or I should say in Eugene-Springfield. It's not quite on par with the Westside schools, or maybe some of those east of Portland, but it's pretty close. Take Sheldon: I haven't counted up their roster this year, but they're usually good for 50, 60 or 70 players. South Eugene had 24 kids at practice the other day before their Friday game against Phoenix.
Dunne: Is this an evolving situation? Is there hope they'll get more kids to come out and play football so they can add more games, or is that pretty much impossible this late in the season?
Denney: It's not impossible. But if you ask me, the problem at South Eugene right now is that it doesn't have a feeder program, and that's what the coach and athletic director are working to solve. It's hard to fix on the fly. You can't really do that in season when you're busy coaching the team you currently have, and their athletic director runs a robust athletic department that has a lot more going on than just football, so his hands are pretty full, too. But having talked with both of them the last couple of weeks, that's something South Eugene Athletic Director Jim Moore and football head coach Eric Scott are trying to solve. They're trying to get a middle school program going, because if you don't have one in 2026, that's kind of a death rattle for your football team.
Dunne: And that's interesting, because, as you mentioned, a feeder program, your hope is that local junior highs will have at least flag football or touch football that might bring at least a knowledge base of tackle football into the community, so kids can take off once they get to high school. Is that basically it?
Denney: Absolutely. And it's just tough when you have kids who have never played football before showing up on the first day of ninth- or 10th-grade practice, and they go out against a Thurston or a North Eugene team that has all-league and all-state kids. It's going to be a tough situation. There's not a lot anybody can do about that. Football is such a serious, intense sport at this point that kids are starting at 4, 5, 6 years old. I know that's sort of always been the case, but with college recruiting the way it is, parents are getting their kids into the game pretty early. So if you're not starting until ninth grade, unless you're a really special athlete, you're going to be behind.
Dunne: Yeah, and it's sort of ironic in that, full disclosure, my kids went to South Eugene, and South Eugene is known as the school where a lot of University of Oregon professors send their kids. Of course, the U of O is inexorably tied to football. So it's kind of odd that the school many faculty send their kids to is struggling just to have a football program, when they teach at a university where football is job one to some degree.
Denney: Absolutely. And I think it's been really interesting to see the public perception of this story. I've filed a few stories on it over the last few weeks, and looking through our Facebook comments, there are a lot of folks with opinions on why this is happening. South Eugene has a very robust boys soccer program and an incredible boys cross-country program with a lot of really special kids right now. It's not like South Eugene is just bad at sports. To your point, it's even more interesting in that sense, since the school doesn't lack for athletes. It just doesn't have that built-in football culture. A lot of folks want to point fingers and say South Eugene kids aren't rah-rah tough and don't want to go out there hitting people like some football schools do, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that there isn't a built-in football culture there right now, because there isn't a middle school football program.
Dunne: You know, especially in the last decade or two, especially with what we've learned about the dangers of football, as you're covering high school sports, and football tends to be the marquee sport to cover, are we starting to see, either nationally or statewide, that participation numbers are down? And is it possible that CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is part of the reason?
Denney: Absolutely, and it's funny you ask that. When I was working at the Corvallis Gazette five or six years ago, I spent about two months on a story trying to answer that question: Why is football participation down in Oregon? This was before the pandemic, so we don't have that factor to consider. I compared the rosters in that area from five or six years earlier, and almost everybody was down. I spent a lot of time thinking about the CTE angle. I think there are a few factors. The safety issue is always going to matter to some football parents. My dad didn't let me play high school football because I was a 130-pound high schooler. It wasn't going to be fun for anybody out there. But what I found is that if you have a healthy middle school or youth program feeding into your high school program, you're much more likely not just to be successful or win 9 or 10 games every year, but to have 50, 60 or 70 kids who are prepared and ready to play football in a healthy, safe way, instead of learning on the fly in their first week.
Dunne: I'm also curious, because Oregon athletics has gone through major transitions, often because of funding, and a lot of sports aren't necessarily available at the junior high level. I don't know if you had a chance to talk to the coach and the athletic director about doing it another way, say, some kind of sign-up league where kids could play, as opposed to, you know, when I was a kid, you played touch or flag football in eighth grade, and that gave you a foundation to go play football at the freshman level once you got to high school. Is there a way to do it that doesn't have to run through the 4J system?
Denney: That's an interesting angle I hadn't necessarily thought about, but there absolutely is. There are a lot more opportunities to play flag football when you're younger, or to do 7-on-7 football, which has become sort of the new trend in high school football over the last 10 years. Something I think a lot of folks don't consider is just how much it costs to run a high school football team, how much helmets cost, how much pads cost, and how much…
Dunne: …insurance, and all that stuff.
Denney: And how much it costs to travel, the way the leagues are laid out in the state. Sometimes you've got kids from Sheldon riding a bus two hours to South Medford on a Friday night for a league game. I think that's sort of ridiculous, especially when a lot of school districts are facing budget struggles. Why are we doing that? That's an interesting aspect to me.
Dunne: Well, and you mentioned Sheldon a couple of times. As many people know, that's the high school of Justin Herbert, the famous U of O quarterback who's now a very successful professional athlete. I wonder if you could talk a little about that idea of tradition. You've said South used to have a pretty robust football team, maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago. How does that factor into this? Is it successive losing seasons, and people lose interest? Because I don't think this would ever happen at Sheldon. Sheldon would always be able to field a football team, and I think some of that comes down to tradition.
Denney: Absolutely, and it's funny timing to look at that, too, because Sheldon is coming off its worst year in quite a while, for a few reasons. But I think you nailed it: You don't inherently have to have that tradition, but it sure helps. It helps young Sheldon players go out there in fourth and fifth grade on Friday nights and watch these guys who are like superheroes today, and they want to be them someday, so they sign up for Pop Warner, they sign up for their middle school program, because they want to be the next Justin Herbert. I was out covering North Eugene baseball last season. North Eugene had an incredible breakthrough year. They won their first Midwestern League title in about 10 years, and I was chatting with some of their players after that game. They all said, 'Hey, we grew up coming out here watching North Eugene be really good at baseball, and we went to the American Legion games for the Eugene Challengers, and all we ever wanted to do was play for the Eugene Challengers.' When you're doing that from age 7, 8, 9, it sure does help.
Dunne: In the last five years or so, anybody who watches football, especially pro football on Sundays, is starting to see a lot of commercials for flag football. And I imagine Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, isn't looking at South Eugene and thinking the sky is falling. But I'd imagine it's a symptom of what could be a larger problem, because the NFL can't exist without a huge number of students playing high school football, with some of the best going on to college and then, of course, some of the best going to the NFL. From what you've gleaned as a sports fan and as a journalist, is there concern that this problem at South Eugene reflects something bigger for the nation?
Denney: It's a funny question. I consume a lot of sports media, and I'm a journalist, though I haven't covered a lot of NFL in my life. But there's always been a sense that the NFL is too big to fail, that it captivates America. I think we're at a reckoning point with the recent reports on CTE, and the research that's been done over the last 10 to 20 years. There have been some things in youth and high school football that folks are doing to be more cognizant of that. You see a lot of teams wearing guardian helmets now. Pleasant Hill was a school around here that was a pretty early adopter of that.
Dunne: Those are the bulky covers that go over an existing helmet to help limit concussions, hopefully.
Denney: Absolutely, and thank you, Michael. I was at South Eugene's football practice last Wednesday, and I counted, I could be wrong here, something like 20 out of the 24 kids had guardian caps on. So they're obviously doing their due diligence to take care of their kids, and I think that's an awesome thing. It also adds to the budgetary aspect. Guardian helmets aren't cheap. It'll be really interesting, I think, to look 10, 20, 30 years down the road and see what the NFL looks like. The Eugene-Springfield area is going to put out 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe on a good year 10, Division I college football players every year, and I think this is one of those years where we have close to 10 around here, and that's really awesome. Maybe you get a Justin Herbert who goes on to play pro football, but it's fascinating to look at how this affects local schools and how that trickles up to the college and pro level.
Dunne: Well, switching sports, we just had the World Cup. You've mentioned South Eugene has a tradition of playing soccer, or football in the European sense. Do you think that with the World Cup being so widely watched, athletes who might have played football are saying, 'Wait a second, this is becoming incredibly popular,' and that in an environment like South Eugene, which is already a soccer school, we might see soccer become the big sport on campus in 10 or 20 years?
Denney: Yeah, absolutely, and I'm a huge European football fan myself, so that's something I spend a lot of time paying attention to. I'd be interested, and maybe that's something I should look into, in the numbers for soccer participation post-World Cup. I know there's been a lot of chatter. When I was doing that enterprise story on high school football participation about a half-decade ago that I mentioned earlier, cross country was the fastest-growing sport in America at that point. The folks who didn't have their kids playing football sent them out to run 5Ks. I think most medical experts would tell you that's probably a little healthier on your joints long term than getting hit at football practice. But I am really interested. It didn't necessarily seem to happen after the last couple of World Cups, but since part of this one was hosted here, I'll be interested to see the ramifications on a soccer town like Eugene, and a soccer town like Salem. Those have really great soccer cultures, and I want to see what that looks like 10 years from now.
Dunne: Yeah, Jarrid, my last question for you: What's the best-case scenario for South Eugene football, at least for this season? You've talked to the athletic director and the coach. Realistically, what are they hoping for?
Denney: Play games. Get out there and play games. They played last Friday against Phoenix, a Class 4A school. For those who don't follow it closely, Class 4A is the third-largest classification. South Eugene is a Class 6A team, the largest classification. Part of that is because once they canceled their schedule, they had to rebuild it and find teams with open slots, and that's really hard this time of year, since these things are planned out a half-year in advance. So it didn't go well for South Eugene; they lost that game. But what's important is that they're getting reps, and these guys are figuring out how to get out there on Friday nights, go through the warmup routine, and deal with things not going their way, how to get up off the mat and go back out the next week. That's the hardest thing in football: getting your butt kicked and having to go back out there. That's why I really appreciate the way the South Eugene athletic department and coaching staff are going about this, because it's not about wins and losses. They're not out there ripping into kids if they drop a pass in practice. They're trying to build them up and show them the fundamentals of the game, because, quite frankly, you don't know what you don't know. You have to go out there and experience it. So the thing for them is just to continue practicing, continue playing games, even if it's just junior varsity, and keep building that momentum, because the stops and starts have been the problem. Last season, South Eugene opened against North Eugene, a very good Class 5A school with a lot of tradition and a lot of talented athletes, and they played them close in the first half. South Eugene was winning in the first half, and then a receiver got injured, a lineman got injured, and when you have that few kids, you're moving players around positions, and it falls apart quickly. So the challenge for them will be building a little depth, getting kids who aren't in their first, second or third week playing football, and figuring out how to sustain that. I think it's possible. Folks want to act like this is mission impossible. But when I was talking to Eric Scott, their coach, the other day, he had a nice line. He said, 'Rome wasn't built in a day,' and he's right. It's going to take some patience, and it's going to take some patience from the community. It's not my job to be subjective, but my last thing to say would be: Give him a chance, and don't punch down when it isn't looking as great out there as you think it should, or when it doesn't match some preconceived notion of what South Eugene football should be like. It's going to take time.
Dunne: Good enough, good enough. He's Jarrid Denney, who covers high school sports for the Register-Guard. Jarrid, really appreciate you coming in and talking to us.
Denney: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate you having me on.
Dunne: Now let's check in with our own reporter, Julia Boboc, about her story on the plight of the spotted owl. KLCC reporter Julia Boboc, it's always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for chatting with us.
Julia Boboc: Thanks for having me, Michael.
Dunne: So you had a big story, which I think many people in Oregon know about, on the famed spotted owl. Talk about what this latest study suggests about the population of spotted owls here in the Pacific Northwest.
Boboc: Yes. This latest study from the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State University showed that in many areas of the Pacific Northwest, specifically in Washington and on the Oregon coast, there aren't enough northern spotted owls to reproduce or really recover their population in those areas, which is a sad fact for the owls and for conservationists. But for more optimistic people, it also shows that in surrounding areas there are enough owls that conservationists can focus on those areas to help bring them back.
Dunne: OK, so let's talk about the areas where things aren't going well. What are the main reasons for the sharp decline in spotted owl populations?
Boboc: Yeah, there are two big reasons for the northern spotted owl's general decline toward extinction. The first is the logging industry, which has removed a lot of their habitat, the healthy forests in our area. The second is invasive barred owls, which are bigger than spotted owls and outcompete them for food, space and habitat. The Trump administration's argument for more logging seems to be focused on decreasing the risk of wildfires: You cut down trees and they won't catch fire. But you're also losing a lot of the wildlife that relies on those areas to survive.
Dunne: Do conservationists look at this and think, OK, let's focus on areas where the population is at least hanging on, and maybe have to abandon the areas where, as you said, they're functionally extinct?
Boboc: It does sound like that's the case. They're not fully gone in those areas, so there are still owls there, but so few that not much can be done for them in those specific spots. But in the areas where they are still there, several conservation groups, including the Bird Alliance of Oregon and the Cascade Raptor Center, are working to keep the birds in those areas.
Dunne: Well, I really appreciate your reporting. Julia Boboc joins us to talk about the spotted owl. Julia, thank you so much for coming on.
Boboc: Thanks, Michael. Always great to talk to you.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Postpartum depression and psychosis have been in the news lately, and tomorrow on the show we talk with a local nonprofit that works with mothers and families to understand and overcome this sometimes-debilitating illness. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
