Coach sets sights on another glory.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

BLUE RIVER - Twenty-six years ago, Galen Scrivner showed up for work at this town's tiny high school thinking he'd teach some math and coach a few years of double-A basketball before moving up to a bigger school and greater athletic glory.

So much for making plans.

Scrivner did coach a lot of basketball over the next two decades. He taught a lot of math. He became athletic director. Meanwhile, he fell in love with this riverside community and gave up his notion of moving on to a bigger school. At the same time, the timber economy bottomed out, enrollment shrank, and Scrivner has found himself, to his amusement, working at a single-A school.

But Scrivner, 53, is still on his way to greater glory. At the end of this school year at McKenzie High School, he's planning to retire from teaching. He and his wife, Caren, will pack up their home in Vida and move with their four children to Yuba City, Calif., where the couple plan to become lay pastors at a charismatic Christian church.

Last week he took some time to reflect on a quarter-century of teaching, coaching and living along the McKenzie River. Scrivner - his kids call him "Scriv," though not to his face at a school where kids call teachers "Mr." and "Ms." - grew up in Baker. He started on the basketball team there, studied wildlife biology and math at Oregon State University and Eastern Oregon State College, and taught high school for four years near Baker before landing his job in Blue River in 1977.

He found himself in a small logging town, wetter than he was used to but otherwise not unfamiliar. "The culture in Baker is a little more conservative than it is in Eugene-Springfield," he said. "But when you get upriver here, there are a lot of similarities to Eastern Oregon. When I first got here, it was a logging community - and I came from a logging community."

His students, in those years, were often transient, moving from one community to another every couple months as their fathers followed timber jobs. Log trucks rumbled down the highway in those days and money filled school coffers.

As years slipped by, Scrivner realized he didn't want to leave - at least not for basketball. "You get comfortable with the people. You enjoy the staff. You enjoy the kids. To stay at a small school means you're able to walk down the hall and greet every kid by name. Those things you give up if you move on."

This year McKenzie will send its boys basketball team to state finals - a nice high note for his last year at the school - but Scrivner won't be leading the squad.

Four years ago Scrivner quit coaching and became the school's athletic director after his son, then 5, said he thought daddy lived in "the basketball house." He realized right then he needed to spend more time with his wife, his children - Corinna, 14, Cliff, 11, Caleb, 9, and Elizabeth, 4 - and his church. It was a wrenching decision to quit coaching, but he hasn't looked back.

"The first year I didn't coach it was like having a steady girlfriend for 22 years and watching someone else take her to the prom," he said. "And it was the best move I ever made."

Scrivner admits that there still isn't a lot of fame or glory to be found at a tiny school - McKenzie has fewer than 90 students in grades 9-12 - either in basketball or in math. His favorite basketball season was his first. One of his players that year, Mike Wiley, is now head basketball coach at McKenzie, taking Scrivner's old job. "That gives me a lot of pleasure," the former coach said. Other team members that year had longtime McKenzie Valley names such as Harbick and Helfrich.

In his last year of teaching, he's facing one final challenge: His teenage daughter is taking math - from him. It's his first experience with his own children in class.

"Getting her to do her homework is always a challenge," Scrivner said. `Getting her to ask her dad a question is even more of a challenge. And I am completely taken aback when I hear this voice from the back of the room say, `Daddy!' '

CAPTION(S):

Galen Scrivner's quarter-century of teaching, coaching and living along the McKenzie River has included many math classes, basketball games and athletic director duties at McKenzie High School.