Sherwood 11/7/25

The early evening was dark and damp as we made our way through Yamhill County wine country on the first Friday after falling back the previous Sunday.  It wasn’t raining, but looked like it could if it chose to.  We came into Sherwood through the back door, so to speak, on the section of Highway 99 just south of Sherwood known inauspiciously as the Herbert Hoover Highway.  After a short tour of the heights south of downtown that offer panoramic views of the surrounding countryside, we found Main St. and followed it across the railroad tracks to the old heart of the town, and when we got there we knew it.  The old plat of a dozen or so blocks sits in contrast to the modern boulevards and housing developments that have grown up around it, and most everything else is at least a hundred years younger than some of the old buildings downtown.  It’s beautiful, though, and I only have one small bone to pick with whoever is in charge of that area:  Their Christmas lights were up and shining brightly on November, 7.  That’s not right.

Sherwood was founded and platted by James Smock in 1889, and was originally called Smockville.  Even though I'm sure Smockville never hung up their Chistmas lights earlier than would be proper, the residents thought they could do better than the name Smockville, and in 1891 they got together to decide on a new name. One guy who was originally from Sherwood, Michigan proposed naming it after his hometown.  Everyone seemed to agree that it was an improvement over Smockville, and Mr. Smock became the first postmaster of Sherwood that same year, which must have been a little bittersweet for him.  Two years later the town was incorporated, and some time after that they began hanging their Christmas lights way too early.

Sherwood is in the Tualatin Valley and I can remember when it was its own little town between Tualatin to the east and Newberg to the southwest.  In 1980 there were just over 2,000 people living there.  Now there are ten times that many, and the distinction between Sherwood and Tualatin has blurred as the aggregation of industrial parks and big box stores has filled in the space between them.

I tried to ignore the lights as we entered Clancy’s pub, situated in one of the old brick buildings, aided by a pint of Pallet Jack IPA from Barley Brown’s in Baker City.  Clancy's is a popular place, and though it was nearly empty when we entered, it was packed when we got up to leave an hour later.  Then it was time to drive back to the western side of town and the huge new high school that would be hosting a first-round playoff game.  We drove under the brightly illuminated, brand new pedestrian bridge that allows students to walk from the high school to the rest of the town without contending with the traffic on the highway, and followed the traffic up the road behind the school to find a place to leave The Bucket.  There were a couple of lots to choose from just west of the field, up on a terrace overlooking Aaron Contreras Stadium, named for an alum killed in Iraq.

Sherwood High School has been around since 1970 and is the only high school in the Sherwood district.  By 2016 the student body was outgrowing the original school and a new high school was opened on the western edge of town for the 2021-22 school year.   Hey!  Did you know Baltimore Orioles catcher Adley Ruschman went to Sherwood High School, class of 2016?  Ok.  Everyone knew that.  But did you know he played football for the Bowmen too?  Ok.  Me too.  Did you know he holds the state record for kicking the longest field goal, at 63 yards?    Geez.  Ok.  Did you know that game was played in gale-force winds, and an earlier 41-yard attempt had come up short?  A little bit later, with the wind at his back, Adley bested the previous record by 8 yards and, wind or no wind, 63 yards is a long way.

The Sherwood Bowmen won that playoff game against Tigard in 2015, but lost to West Linn in the semi-finals.  They have played in several state championship games though, with losses in 1993, 2004 and 2005 at the 3A level.  A few years later, competing at the 5A level, they appeared in four straight championships from 2010-2013, winning two of them, over Marist both times.  In 2015 they moved to the 6A classification and have had a lot of success at that level but haven’t been in a championship game since their loss in 2013.

This was the opening round of the 16-team 6A playoffs, and the matchup didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  Maybe Sherwood received the 6 seed because they’d won their 6-team Pacific Conference, but the Bowmen had been stomped 49-7 early in the season by top seed West Linn, and 43-0 by a Tualatin team that finished fourth in their own league.  The opponents, the Cavemen from Grants Pass, had lost three tough games and finished second in 9-team Special District 1, earning them the 11 seed.  Personally, I thought it would have been more accurate to swap the seedings and give Grants Pass the home game, and that a little north state bias had crept into the process, but I was hoping the Bowmen would prove me wrong.

The OSAA charged us $10 each to enter the stadium through the ticket booth on the west side of the field, and we walked down the steps to field level and headed towards the grandstand on the south side.  With the school being relatively new, all of the facilities were new, which meant the stands, though large, were of the dreaded aluminum variety.  It was all shiny and clean, and mostly covered, with a large press box at the top. The interior was well-lit, but the rain from the previous days had covered everything that wasn’t under the cover in a shallow layer of water. 

As nice as the facilities are at Sherwood, I don’t care for the way they designed their seating arrangements.  The roof was purposely designed to leave the lowest half-dozen or so rows exposed to the elements.  Under the roof the west section is reserved for the band, the east section is reserved for visitors, and the middle section is reserved for VIP boosters – “LANYARD HOLDERS ONLY”.  So, if you aren’t a visitor, a member of the band, or a VIP, you sit in the puddles of water that have collected on the aluminum benches down below.  Maybe the thing that bugged me so much about that was the velvet rope that cordoned off the VIP area.  All they were missing was a beefy bouncer keeping the riff-raff from mixing with the VIPs.  In the end, it didn’t matter. We had our cushy seats to sit on and it didn’t rain during the game, and the sightlines were good and we were perfectly comfortable sitting with the hoi polloi, but if you want to separate your fans into haves and have-nots, there’s nothing better than a red velvet rope to put people in their place. If I were attending a college or professional game I would expect to pay extra if I wanted a nicer place to sit, but I hope this doesn't become a standard fund-raiser for high school sports. If you have a child on the team or leading the cheers you've paid enough already. You should have access to whatever seat you want to sit in without paying extra to sit with other parents who are apparently in a different tax bracket than you. But that' just me.

And while I’ve still got my soap box with me, let me just say to anyone in the process of designing a new giant high school:  Please plan for more than a single concession stand.  As I said, the facilities at Sherwood are all top-notch, and the combined concession/bathroom structure beyond the east end zone is very nice.  But a brand new school with over 1700 students will need a second concession stand, or at least one twice as large as Sherwood’s. My popcorn and coffee were good, and the folks doing the work were great, but the line got a little much at times.  Just trying to be helpful.

Other than those things, everything about Sherwood High School really is super-nice, from the artificial turf to the track around it, and beyond.  There is even visitors’ seating in a smaller uncovered set of bleachers on the north side of the field that many Grants Pass fans chose to sit in where they could be led by their cheerleaders.  That was a good thing because the big stands on our side were almost completely full.  The Bowmen band were good and loud, and the cheerleaders…

Let’s talk about cheerleaders for a minute.  As I’ve seen once or twice before at larger schools, Sherwood had two sets of cheerleaders.  In all, there must have been 60 or 70 of them.  One group were in their little cheeleader outfits and the other got to wear sweats during the chilly game.  One group did their thing in front of the band and student section, while the other were at the other end, in front of us.  They coordinated to do the exact same cheers in unison, but you could tell they considered themselves two separate groups.  Then at halftime, the one group took off their sweats and did a dance routine on the field and I thought I had identified that group as the dance group, but when they were done the other group went out and did a dance of their own, so I still don’t know who was who or what was what.  They were all good, and I guess that’s all that matters, but it’s all just gotten so confusing. 

The Bowmen ran onto the field through their paper banner, trailing red smoke under a gibbous moon (I just learned that term), somebody flipped a coin, and Sherwood set up to receive the opening kickoff.  I didn’t know then whether the winners would be Bowmen or Cavemen, but one way or another this game would be won by men.  The Bowmen didn’t score on that first possession, but the Cavemen scored on their first two possessions and it looked like the bracket makers might have made a big mistake.  The Caveman quarterback was the best I’d seen in a long time, and the Sherwood secondary looked lost trying to defend the receivers in blue and white.  The first quarter ended with Grants Pass up 14-0. Things didn’t stay that way, though, as Sherwood found their running game in the second period and used it to score three touchdowns of their own.  They could have tied the score going into halftime but one of their extra point tries was blocked, and they had to settle for being down by one, 21-20.

The halftime show featured the two dance routines, but the highlight was watching a random student try to make a 25-yard field goal to receive some prize that I couldn’t hear above the band music.  He was a big guy, and certainly looked confident, but the first attempt never got off the ground and the second was only slightly better.  I wondered if he knew he was going to miss or if he really was confident of success right up to the point where he wasn’t.  Anyway, he got a nice round of applause for his efforts and it was a welcome distraction for a minute or two.

As the players came out for the second half it was exciting to have a game that was still in the balance with only two quarters to go, knowing that one of the best 16 teams in the state would have their season come to an end by the end of the night. That team looked like it just might be the Sherwood Bowmen after Grants Pass scored again in the third quarter to take an 8-point lead into the final 12 minutes, but the excitement was just beginning.

The Bowmen didn’t have much of a passing game but their running game was hard to stop, and they opened the 4^th quarter scoring with a long drive ending in a touchdown.  Their attempted 2-point conversion to tie the game was stopped and they remained behind, but only by 2 points.  When the Cavemen scored in the middle of the quarter to take a 35-26 lead it looked like that would be enough to secure the win, but Sherwood had other ideas.  They drove all the way down to the Grants Pass 7-yard line before being stopped on a fourth down play with just over a minute left, and nobody would have predicted a comeback after that.  All the Cavemen had to do is kneel down three or four times and the game would be over.

So, on first down at their own 7 the Grants Pass quarterback, who’d been almost flawless the whole game, took the snap from his center and managed to drop it before he could kneel down.  The Bowmen recovered the fumble, scored a touchdown a few plays later, and with just under a minute left they were back within 3 points.  The home crowd went wild, and I was wondering if I was about to witness the most improbable comeback I’d ever seen.

Sherwood’s onside kick was easily recovered by a Caveman receiver, and this time when the quarterback knelt down he was surrounded by running backs just in case he decided to drop the ball again.   He didn’t, and the clock ran out with Grants Pass still clinging to their 3-point lead, which felt like a pretty fair result to me.  Sherwood was definitely good, and deserved a place in the playoffs after an undefeated league season, but the second place team from that league, Glencoe, also lost to a higher seeded team, and I think the whole league was probably a little weaker than people thought they were.  The Cavemen, on the other hand, have a good throwing quarterback, and though their weaknesses might be exposed next week against Lake Oswego, I think maybe those teams from down south could all be a little better than they’ve been given credit for.  We shall see.

I was bummed at not being able to cheer our team on to victory, and as we left the campus things got even more gloomy. The fog was thick around us, and I didn’t trust the Herbert Hoover Highway to get us safely through the pea soup that had descended on the valley by the time the game was over.  Even the gibbous moon (I’ll be using that term quite a bit from now on) couldn’t be seen, and something about that former president just doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence during tough times, so I pointed The Bucket toward Tualatin and the interstate for the drive home.