West Linn 8/29/25

I can’t remember what I was doing last December that took up all of my time.  I don’t remember it taking me all month to put up the Christmas lights, but maybe it did.  All I know now is that for the first time I didn’t write a wrap-up story for last season.  Anyway, I can’t start a new season without a short recap of the last one, so here is your nutshell wrap-up for 2024. 

In the 6-man championship, Powers overpowered Harper Charter for their 4^th state championship. Then it was Adrian over North Douglas in the 8-man championship game.  It was also their 4^th time winning the title game.  St. Paul won the 2A game over Oakland for their 7^th championship.  All three of those teams finished their seasons undefeated.

The Burns Highlanders won their second state championship with a win over Vale in the 3A game.  Vale had beaten them in a close game during the regular season, but Burns won when it counted to finish the season at 11-2.  Marist beat Henley in the 4A game, also avenging a loss early in the season, for their 6^th championship.  In the 5A game, Wilsonville also got some revenge, beating Silverton in the semis after having lost to them earlier, and then beating Mountain View for the title.  It was their second, and have now won back-to-back titles.

In the 6A division, West Linn continued the theme by beating a Lake Oswego team for the championship that had narrowly beaten them in the regular season to give them their only loss.  It was the Lions’ third title, all in the past eight years. Which brings us to our first game of the new season, where we decided to go check out that team that had won two of the last three championships for the state’s largest schools.

Since West Linn has an interstate freeway running right through it, it’s pretty easy to get to.  The original plan for I-205 had it running through Lake Oswego but, not surprisingly, the folks there were not going to let that happen.  They convinced cousin Glenn to run his little project along the Tualatin River and across the Willamette between West Linn and Oregon City, and well away from their lake.  It’s hard to imagine now that it could ever have been otherwise. 

We took the exit just before that bridge, followed the signs into West Linn, and drove around to get a sense of the place.  Situated, as it is, between  Lake Oswego to the northwest and Oregon City and Gladstone across the river to the east, with the freeway running along its edge, you’d think I’d have been there at least once in my life, but I had never once been off that freeway to see what there was to see in West Linn, and now I know why.

Unless you live there or are going to watch high school sports, there is really no reason to ever go to West Linn.  There is no visible sign of any industry or big business.  There aren’t any big shiny office buildings like you’ll find in most of Portland's other suburbs.  As far as we could tell, there is no downtown district at all, and nothing you can point to and say “There it is.  We must be in West Linn”.  Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with the town.  It’s beautiful, with some really nice parks and spectacular views from the middle of town on top of the hill.  It’s clean and relatively quiet and gives an overall impression of just being a really nice place. But, as a bedroom community, it’s one giant residential zone without any gravitational pull one way or another. There’s just no “there” there. 

We stopped in the little mini mall on top of the hill looking for a place for our pregame snack, and found a Killer Burger that looked like it would do nicely, and it did.  We sat out back, I drinking my Cowboys and Poets IPA from Breakside Brewery, and enjoyed the warm last-Friday-evening-before-the-unofficial-end-of-summer atmosphere.  I’ve been both a cowboy and a poet at different times in my life so I felt like I was probably the target audience for that particular brew, but Breakside Brewery is in Lake Oswego so I don’t know how authentic it can really be.

As we sat enjoying our refreshments, we noticed the West Linn City Hall building right across the street.  So, maybe this was the middle of town:  Next to the mini mall surrounded by fancy housing developments in every direction.  But again, not bad, just different.  I also noted that it was not the Robins Nest City Hall, which was the original name of the settlement in 1843.  The Territorial Legislature voted to rename it Linn City a few years later as a memorial to Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri, who was a big proponent of occupation of the Oregon Territory.  He’s the same guy that Linn County is named for.  In 1854 the name was changed once again, to West Linn, for some reason.  Since there is no East Linn, or South Linn, or North Linn, it seems unnecessary, but I guess it made sense to someone.  Oregon City had been incorporated for almost 70 years by the time West Linn was incorporated in 1913, and the town of Willamette, at the confluence of the Willamette and Tualatin rivers, merged with West Linn 3 years later.   

West Linn High School opened in 1916 and had to wait 100 years to win their first state football championship in 2016.  That team was coached by former U of O and Atlanta Falcons quarterback Chris Miller.  Jon Eagle took over in 2022 and the Lions have added two more championships since then, losing only three games in the last 3 years.  They also won state baseball championships in ’22, ’23, and ’24, so the past few years have been pretty good for West Linn Athletics.

The Lions were also led to the 1982 state baseball championship by “Wild Thing” Mitch Williams, who went on to have a long career as a relief pitcher with several major league teams.  Cole Gillespie was also a Lion.  He won a national championship at Oregon State before his MLB career.  Cade McNown quarterbacked the Lion football team before playing well enough at UCLA to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2020, and Payton Pritchard won four state championships as a basketball player for the Lions before playing for the Oregon Ducks and then winning a world championship with the Boston Celtics in 2024.

Three years after the town was incorporated, West Linn High School opened, and their mascots were the Lions, because… Well, why not?  Five years after that they played against Oregon City for the first time.  Now, along with their rivals from across the river, West Linn plays in the longest continuously-played high school football rivalry west of the Mississippi  River, the "Battle of the Bridge".  Interestingly, that first “Battle” was played when there was only a small pedestrian bridge linking the two towns.  The new Oregon City Bridge wasn’t opened until the following year, 1922.  Both teams compete in the 6A Three Rivers League, along with the two Lake Oswego schools, Tualatin, and Tigard, so there aren’t many easy games throughout the season.

We made our way down the hill to the campus not far from that bridge, and were early enough to be confident of getting a pretty decent parking spot.  After pulling up outside the school, that confidence began to wane.  Everyone else seemed to know that you had to arrive early for a game at West Linn, and also that parking near the school is extremely limited.  The school has definitely been added onto and renovated over the years.  It’s a nice compact campus with the football field on a terrace on the hillside behind the several school buildings, but it doesn’t leave much room for parking close to the field.  There is a small lot on the hillside behind the school, but it was full by the time we got there.  So we went back down and grabbed one of the last spots in a lot along “A” Street, the main street in front of the school.  I’m sure there were many later arrivals who ended up walking quite a ways.

The south side home grandstand

The Lions’ opponents for this game would be the Warriors from Honolulu’s Kamehameha High School, and their fans apparently travel very well when they have the chance.  The small aluminum visitors' bleachers on the north side of the field weren’t nearly large enough to hold them all, and many had to sit in the home grandstand on the opposite side.  The grandstand itself is large, except when you consider that it’s at a 6A school with some serious fan support.  Luckily, most of the rubberized track surrounding the field was available for people to stand on to watch the game, and I don’t think anyone was turned away.

We did arrive early enough to find a seat on the aluminum bleachers in the covered grandstand, but otherwise the viewing experience left a lot to be desired.  The students were seated in the bottom 10 or 12 rows, and they spent the entire game standing on their bleachers.  It was nice to see the passion, but it meant that everyone else also had to stand, or spend the entire game looking at the back of a Farmer Ted wannabe in a Duck t-shirt.  So I stood.  Which meant the people behind me had to stand, and the people behind them.  For four quarters.  There must be a better way to configure those seating arrangements.

The north side visitors' bleachers

As it was, most of the people around us were Hawaiians who had brought all of their aloha with them, watching their team get pushed around by the defending Oregon champions, and I felt bad cheering too hard for the home team.  To add to the misery, both the small concession stand on the east end of the field and the one inside at the top of the grandstand had huge lines that never seemed to get any shorter.  It just wasn’t a lot of fun, and the more lopsided the game became, the less fun it was.

One may well wonder how a high school team can afford to transport their entire football operation more than 2,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean for a game against the Lions.  Actually these trips aren’t all that rare these days for the biggest teams from the islands.  The defending champions from Kahuku are playing a game against Mater Dei in California this season, and other schools have made similar trips in recent years as high school sports have  grown in popularity.  I would imagine Kahuku, as a public school, has been doing some serious fund raising.  That would be one heck of a bake sale. 

But Kamehameha is no ordinary school with ordinary school finances.  The Kamehameha Schools (there are smaller versions on Maui and Hawaii) were the idea of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, a member of the Hawaiian Royal Family,  who had watched the struggle and decline of the native Hawaiian people in the late 1800’s, and decided to do something about it.  Upon her death in 1884 a trust was set up, according to her will, to fund a school that would ensure the Hawaiian people and their culture survived.  She left behind lots of money and land to get the project started, and today the estate controls 365,000 acres of Hawaiian land.  By 2021 the endowment was approaching $15,000,000,000. 

That’s billions, with a B, far exceeding all but the richest universities in the country.  Imagine having a larger endowment than 5 of the Ivy League universities!  Of course, along with all that wealth has come greed, scandals, and lawsuits by and against administrators and trustees.  People with access to that kind of money can’t ever seem to do the right thing.  But the school continues to thrive and it’s been a few years since they’ve won a football championship, and I guess one way to get better is to fly to the mainland and take on the champs from a different state. 

The weather was very Hawaiianesque as the two teams took the field, with a gametime temp in the mid-70’s with a significant dose of what passes for humidity in western Oregon.  The Lions entered from the top of the grandstands and walked through the aisle in the middle of their fans before congregating behind the inflatable lion in the southeast corner of the field.  On cue, the non-starters burst forth to much noise from the crowd, then the starters were introduced individually.  It was a little elaborate for my personal taste, but that’s only because I’m a crusty old man.  The truth is the whole thing was pretty cool.

As you would expect from a school of West Linn’s size, there was no shortage of cheerleaders or band members.  The crowd didn’t need much encouragement to make a lot of noise, but they got it anyway, and there was rarely a quiet moment for the duration of the game.  The pep band was good and they had appropriated my old school’s fight song, which I hadn’t heard quite as much in a (very) long time.  It was nice to hear that tune again, but it seems like half the schools in the state have just copied that song from us.  A little originality would go a long way.

When the game began, it didn’t take the Lions long to show their stuff.  They went right down and scored, then scored again, and again.  It was 21-0 by the end of the first quarter, and the writing was on the wall.  The Warriors from Kamehameha had some big boys, and some good ones, but not enough of either to put up much of a consistent fight.  Their secondary, especially, had a hard time stopping the Lions’ passing attack, and what I’d hoped would be a close contest never really was.  The Warriors’ offense showed signs of life in the second quarter, but they never figured out how to stop the home team’s offense, and the halftime score was 38-14.

That meant it was time for a couple of dance routines from a couple of groups from West Linn out in the middle of the artificial turf field.  We could never hear the announcer through all of the other noise going on around us, so I’m not sure if they were the cheerleaders in different outfits or some entirely separate groups of girls, but they did their thing and did it well as far as I could tell, which is not far, to be totally honest.

It was more of the same in the second half, with the home team’s players always just a step ahead of their opponents, and the Lions extended their lead to 48-14 after 3 quarters.  By then the lines at the concession stand were thinning out a little and I was able to grab a long-awaited corn dog and a pop.  It was just too muggy for popcorn and coffee.  I don’t think I even took time to taste them, but they allowed me to stave off starvation, so I was happy.  The Warriors scored in the fourth to make the final 48-21, but it was never that close.  The fans around us were disappointed, but not enough to let it ruin their evening, or their vacation on the mainland.  The Warriors dropped to 1-2 for the season, but they get to go home and prepare for another mainland team, southern California’s Serra High School, next week.

Despite their recent success, one thing the West Linn Lions have never done is repeat as champions, and from what we saw this just might be the team to do it. They're big, they're fast, they have a quarterback who can throw, and obviously have a very good coach. And there's something else that had never happened: As we left West Linn, The Bucket mentioned that it had never had a chance to cross that old bridge into Oregon City, and was hoping that this might be the night.  I thought for a moment and realized that the prospect of ever needing to cross that bridge back into West Linn was pretty remote.  I looked as Mrs. Ednold, who nodded her head, and we crossed that bridge that we will likely never cross again, found our way back to the freeway, and headed for home.