Progress comes with a costly price for Oregon.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

IF PROGRESS MEANS doing what just about everybody else seems to be doing, then Oregon made progress this week.

With veteran women's track and field and cross country coach Tom Heinonen retiring in June, the Ducks took those programs and merged them with the UO men's programs, under the direction of coach Martin Smith.

No surprise there. This is the trend - in the Pac-10 Conference, at least - and yet sometimes progress has a price. At Oregon, the cost of progress will be measured in two veteran Oregon coaches looking for work, uncertain whether they'll be working at Oregon a year from now.

Officially, Mark Stream, who has coached women's jumpers, hurdlers and sprinters since 1977, and Sally Harmon, who has coached the women's throwers since 1986, are out of jobs on June 30. That's 42 combined years of love, loyalty and laurels for Oregon women's track and field.

Harmon is an Oregon grad, as much a Duck as Ernie Kent and Bev Smith, former Oregon athletes who came home as head coaches in feel-good stories. She's worked at Oregon 17 years, twice as long as Kent and Smith combined, and she won a national championship for the Ducks in the javelin and she's coached three national champions in that event, and Oregon's javelin throwers remain national contenders.

Stream's athletes were the backbone of Oregon's two Pac-10 track and field championships and six second-place finishes in the Heinonen era.

Both Harmon and Stream have been invited to re-apply for their jobs, but while Oregon conducts national searches, which looks a lot like writing on the wall.

Certainly, it will be Smith's prerogative, as Oregon's new track and field czar, to reconfigure the program as he deems best, to put together his own coaching team. Heck, when there's a head coaching change at Oregon, the job of the team secretary isn't always safe.

On a personal level, the fact that two people could be out of jobs tempers the volume of your immediate applause for the new direction. Philosophically, though, it's hard to argue with Oregon's decision to merge the programs.

Oregon women's track and field, and women's cross country, have had their own distinct identity. They're among the few programs at Oregon that have won NCAA team championships, and Oregon can never forget Heinonen for that, or for those two Pac-10 track titles and seven Pac-10 cross country titles. Or for all those years in which Heinonen has been a tireless and articulate ambassador for his sport.

And yet in all those years, it was also clear that the men's program was the dominant force, taking the lead in scheduling and in drawing fans. The women were their own realm, regal and classy, but they were Luxembourg, dwarfed by a larger power.

So the decision to merge the programs makes sense. The model - and Smith is big on "models" for programs - should work, because it's working elsewhere.

And in Smith, the Ducks have someone well-qualified to play the new role required for Oregon track.

While he hasn't endeared himself to all of the Old Guard of the sport here, and perhaps never will, even if he wins an NCAA championship and discovers another Pre, the things Smith is best at - beyond getting a team ready for the season-ending meets - are the things most required by this new role:

Being highly organized, with a tremendous work ethic. Being a tireless recruiter. Being a highly intelligent, thoroughly modern track coach, bent on winning the big meets. (It remains to be seen what impact the new system of regional qualifying for the NCAA track and field championships will have, but figure that Smith is going to figure that out before a lot of his colleagues do.)

Most important, Martin Smith has vision; he sees big pictures and thinks in bold concepts. The struggles of the Oregon's women's track and field program in recent seasons - in light of history, resources and expectations - invite a new vision and revived recruiting.

The thing that Smith still needs to accomplish is marketing Oregon track and field to fans, beyond the win-and-they-will-come approach, especially now that he represents all of it. He'd get a tremendous boost if the NCAA meet came here every year, but he can't bank on that, or wait.

The most important decision that Smith will make this year will be the hiring of the new women's distance coach, who will lead the women's cross country team as well.

She - and that word is used advisedly - will bring an identity to the redesigned women's program; she could be the face of it, for high school coaches and fans, and Smith needs to be comfortable with that.

She'll need to have great credibility in the sport, be able to match Smith's incredible energy in recruiting as she restores Oregon's depleted stable of national-class distance runners, and have the strength to work for Smith without being intimidated by him.

That's only one of the hiring decisions that Smith must make. They won't be easy, and probably not painless.