Mountain View 10/2/26
It was the first week of October, which meant another round of ritual torture for the Ednold family. On the bright side, memorializing Grandma Ednold on her birthday requires a trip to central Oregon, and there’s always time to take in a football game. When that football game takes place in Bend, as it did this time, it also means a chance to go through countless pointless traffic circles, but I’ve beaten that horse elsewhere so I’ll let it go. Though the Friday afternoon traffic was aided not a whit by those circles, the weather was beautiful as I left the highway and took Empire Ave. east through the northern suburbs toward Mountain View High School.
Mountain View opened in 1978 as the second high school in the fast-growing town. Population in Bend was booming and the 500 residents they’d had when the first high school had opened 74 years earlier had grown to 17,000. That sounds quaint today, after the population has exploded to over 100,000, necessitating the opening of two more high schools in the 48 years since. In 1978 Mountain View served the students on the north half of town and Bend High School served the south half. Forty years later, north Bend (not North Bend, which is another place altogether) also became the home of the last surviving Blockbuster video store, which must say something pretty profound about the people in the Mountain View catchment, although I’m not sure what that might be, exactly.
I ended up heading south on 27th Street and found the school looking a lot like you’d expect a school from 1978 to look. It’s clearly not new, but it’s modern and clean-looking, and I didn’t have any trouble finding a parking spot in the main lot on the north side. I found the field around on the south side and had my choice of entry lines to join. To the credit of the Cougar fans, not only do they have the good sense to keep a Blockbuster in business, but the “Card Only” entry line was completely empty. Of course, that meant standing in the “Cash” line for a few minutes, but it’s nice to see people ignoring the fascist attempts to make ours a cashless economy. Or are those the communists? I can’t keep track. Anyway, good on them.
I gave the lady a crisp $5 bill along with an uncrumpled-at-the-last-minute $1 bill, then the next lady drew a line on my hand with a red felt pen. Does that really work in lieu of a unique cougar stamp? I guess it must, or maybe everyone else got the real stamp and I was just one of the specially-marked few that looked suspicious enough to require special surveillance. I didn’t have time to ask because someone from the Rotary club stuck a Bend All-School All-Sports Fall 2026 program in my chest and demanded I take it. Actually, he was very polite, and it was free, so I followed orders and went to find a seat in the grandstand.
The band had staked out their place on the far east side with the students in the section next to them, so I kept on. I had gotten there plenty early, but the empty seats were filling fast so I made a beeline for the far end, which appeared to be the least occupied. I found my spot on the far western end but it wasn’t long before I was hemmed in on every side. It’s not a small grandstand, but if it was ever big enough for a Mountain View homecoming crowd those days are long gone. It’s a minimalist structure of pure concrete with no aluminum or wood to sit on, just terraced rows of concrete, and I was glad to have brought my cushion to sit on.
I looked across the field to the aluminum visitors’ bleachers on the other side and had a flashback of a late November night several years ago. Little Ednold’s team was playing Mountain View in a playoff game, and on that frigid afternoon some rascally Cougar students had sprayed water on those aluminum bleachers, forming a thick layer of ice and rendering them unusable. Us visitors had crammed ourselves into the grandstand and made the best of it, and I just may have been sitting in exactly the same spot all these years later to watch this game as a real member of the home crowd. Life has a way of playing some funny tricks sometimes.
The natural turf field in between the two sets of fans is surrounded by a rubber running track, and those visitors’ bleachers are set back even further into a berm on the south side of the field. It’s not great viewing from over there, but they are visitors, after all. That running track has a fence around it, making it difficult for us non-credentialed journalists do our jobs properly, but with the size of the crowd it was probably a good thing it was there.
That field, of course, is where Cody and Jacob Hollister played their high school football. Cody was a wide receiver at Arkansas and his twin brother Jacob was a Tight End at Wyoming before they were both members of the New England Patriots when they won the Super Bowl in 2019. Ashton Eaton also went to Mountain View, playing running back and defensive back for the Cougars before attending Oregon and winning a couple of Olympic gold medals in the decathlon. The current Cougars had already beaten West Albany and both Medford schools before losing to Summit last week, and are coming into this 5A Intermountain Conference matchup at 3-1, while their opponents from Crook County have started the season 2-2. Mountain View won a 5A state championship in 2011 and played again in the championship game in 2023 and 2024, losing both title games to Wilsonville. They were semi-finalists last season, so they’re still riding a wave of success.
The night was still warm as the Cougars ran and passed their way through the Cowboy defense for a couple of first quarter touchdowns. The resistance was slight, and the Cowboy offense didn’t seem to be much stronger than their defense. Having to listen to the Cougar band play the Notre Dame fight song after each score made the experience a little bittersweet, but even the biggest silver lining will have a bit of cloud in it, as they say. There were actually two clouds, the other emanating after each touchdown from a concussion grenade detonated beyond the west end zone. The bang left my ears ringing each time, and I was hoping Mountain View’s offensive coordinator would have a little more concern for my hearing in the final three quarters. Such is life for us Cougar fans.
The second quarter was almost a carbon copy of the first, and Mountain View had opened up a 28-0 lead by halftime. For all practical purposes I was deaf by this point, but happy just the same with the big lead, and the real show hadn’t even started yet. It was homecoming night for Cougar Nation, and the coronation ceremony was about to begin.
It was a ceremony that contained elements of a traditional homecoming, but with some modern twists, and though it wasn’t my favorite it was nice and well-organized. A few princes and princesses were presented from each class along with their escorts, mostly parents, while the announcer listed all of their academic, extra-curricular, and community accomplishments that apparently qualified them to be royalty for a week. Everyone passed under a bridge of swords provided by some kind of student cadets and finally a couple of seniors, including a football player (the king) were crowned king and queen, and everyone seemed to approve of the choices. I miss the fancy dresses and jacket-and-tie of the old days, but nobody suffered any sword-induced injuries, so it was all good.
The ceremony was followed by a routine by the dance team, which itself was followed by another dance routine by the cheerleaders, which confused me a little. Why do the cheerleaders get to cheer AND dance when the dance team only get to dance? Both groups danced well, as far as I could tell, so I guess I should just be grateful for two dances instead of just one, but I couldn’t help thinking that the cheerleaders are dangerously close to leaving their lane. If I ever hear about a rumble between those two groups I’ll have a pretty good idea what it was all about.
With Mountain View’s success over the past several years, if not before, they have definitely outgrown the old grandstand. It’s a comfortable place as long as you brought something to sit on, but most of the students had no chance of sitting in the student section and had to find a place around the edge of the field, where many adults joined them. When I’d first started feeling peckish at the beginning of the second quarter I could see that the overflow students had mainly chosen the concession area as their hangout spot, and the concession lines were much too long for me to join them. As halftime was wrapping up I looked to the concession stand at the west end of the field to see if the crowd had lessened at all, and it was as big as it had been all night. If anything it had only gotten worse, and I had to accept the fact that this might be a snackless evening. Hopefully plans are in the works to expand the stadium and give those people a chance to sit down somewhere and get a little more in touch with the game if they want to and give the rest of us a fighting chance of not starving to death before the game is over.
After the Cougars came out and scored early in the second half my ears took another beating, but the clock ran continuously after that so I thought I might escape another Notre Dame/dynamite blast double whammy. They did end up scoring once more later on, and the Cowboys never made any serious threats to score, so the final score of 42-0 told a pretty accurate tale of the Cougars’ dominance throughout.
One final thing is eating at me, so let me get this off my chest before I wrap this up. I’d like to make one small request to any public address DJ’s who might be reading this. I know the chance is slim, but you never know: Please stop playing Country Roads at your ballgames. I used to like that song. Each time I would hear it in some random place or on some random AM radio station I would welcome it. “That’s nice”, I would think, “I haven’t heard that in four or five years, which is just about the right length of time between hearing it”. And it was even fun listening to a hundred thousand Mexicans singing it at the World Cup this summer. That was cute, but Sweet Caroline it is not. Go ahead and ruin any number of lame country songs for me, but let’s quit trying to make Country Roads the next sing-along sensation. It wasn’t built for that, and five years from now when I hear it in some gas station convenience store I would like it to be a pleasant surprise. Thank you in advance.
I feel like I’ve done more venting tonight than Mountain View deserves. The football team put the beat-down on the Cowboys from Prineville, and it was fun to be a part of the Cougar crowd on homecoming night, so I think it’s only fair that I refrain from mentioning any circular roads I may have encountered on my way home. It was nothing but green lights all the way.
Comments