The year was 1992, and first-year Lake Oswego football coach Steve Coury hopped on the bus taking the Lakers to their season opener.
Coury and newly hired assistant coaches Karl Halberg, Brian Newcomer and Bill Hewes thought they had their team ready for battle, until, about halfway to their destination, they discovered one glaring oversight:
Halberg to Coury: Hey, did you get the balls?
Coury: What balls?
Halberg: The footballs.
Coury: I didn’t know I was supposed to get the footballs.
The bus pulled over. Coury found a pay phone and dialed athletic director Dick Curtis, asking him to swing by the high school and pick up the footballs.
“We were in a mad scramble,” Coury recalled. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. It was crazy.”
The season started, and balls began to disappear.
“By the end of the year, I think we lost about 30 balls,” Newcomer said. “Dick Curtis was wanting to know what happened to all the balls. We were like, ‘I don’t know.’”
Nearly three decades later – as Lake Oswego (11-2) prepares to play in its seventh state championship game Saturday against Central Catholic (11-2) in the 6A final at Hillsboro Stadium – no one cares about lost footballs.
Coury, Halberg, Newcomer and Hewes remain as the bedrock of one of the state’s all-time most successful programs. Under Coury and his staff, the Lakers are 246-82 with two state titles in 28 seasons.
To them, though, it’s about much more than football. The coaches and their families have developed a deep bond throughout the years. They still meet on Thursday nights for dinner and on Fridays after games, just like they did in those early years.
“It’s a bunch of great friends,” Coury said. “It’s really an unbelievable situation and blessing. We’re all just one big family. I know it sounds cliché. We babysat each other’s kids, raised our kids together, and they’re still around together.”
It all started in the summer of 1992. Coury had left his coaching job on the staff at the University of Pittsburgh in 1988 and returned to the Portland area, where he was working with Halberg and Newcomer – his former Oregon State teammates – at Columbia Body, a dump truck manufacturing company.
Lake Oswego was in a pinch when Gery Weber resigned as coach that summer after leading the Lakers to the semifinals the previous year.
“They were really in a mess,” Coury said. “They didn’t have a teaching position, guys were transferring, the whole deal.”
Curtis reached out to Coury, a former star at crosstown rival Lakeridge, to gauge his interest. Coury ran it by Halberg, his boss at Columbia Body. Halberg encouraged him to take the job, but Coury would only do it if Halberg joined him. Halberg agreed, and Newcomer came aboard, too.
“We were sure it was a one-year deal for all of us,” Halberg said. “Lake Oswego was in a bind. They were talking about cancelling the season. To hire a guy from outside the building was kind of unheard of, especially a head coach. We all thought we would get him through that one season, and they would hire a teacher/coach, and that would be the end of it.”
That summer, as Coury sat in Lake Oswego’s weight room, he was approached by Hewes, a recent graduate of Oregon Tech who was answering a newspaper ad for an assistant coaching position.
“I didn’t even know Bill,” Coury said. “I just said, ‘You’re hired.’”
The Lakers went 5-4 in that first season, with a signature overtime win over Lakeridge that ended a 13-game losing streak to their rival. The chemistry between the coaches was apparent.
“We had so much fun doing it,” Halberg said. “That first group of kids was not the most talented group, but I don’t know if we’ve had a group since that bought into what we were trying to teach and coach and sell like that first group. They were awesome. We were hooked. By the time the season was over, we were trying to figure out if there was a way we could stick together.”
The school kept the staff together, and Lake Oswego football hasn’t looked back.
“I really had no expectations on how long we would do it, it just seems to have worked out,” said Newcomer, who had previously assisted at Philomath and Clackamas. “It’s kind of like football season is a holiday now for everybody. Like Thanksgiving and Christmas, it just happens. Here comes another season, and here we go again. It just seems like we haven’t been able to stop it.”
After two seasons, Coury added Frank Everhart, who was the defensive coordinator at Lakeridge, to the staff. In the early 2000s, Brian Bartsch and Chris Hubley joined up. All remain with the team.
“It’s really the consistency of the group that makes it go,” said Coury, who eventually left Columbia Body for other jobs, settling in as a commissioned salesman for FieldTurf for the past 21 years.
Halberg and Everhart are the longtime coordinators for the offense and defense, respectively. Newcomer assists on defense, and Hewes and Hubley coach linemen. Bartsch is the head JV coach and assists on varsity with defensive backs and running backs.
One of the keys to the staff’s longevity, according to Coury, is the coaches don’t overdo it. The Lakers don’t have spring ball and their summer workouts are voluntary.
“We get the kids and the program away from it,” Coury said. “It’s a little different than some do. We’ve done it the same way, really, for 28 years.”
It’s hard to argue with the results.
In those 28 seasons, the Lakers have made the playoffs 25 times, including the last 21 seasons. They have won at least one playoff game 22 times. They have made the semifinals 12 times and appeared in six state finals, winning in 2011 and 2018 and losing in 2002, 2004, 2008 and 2012.
As high school football has changed over the years, Lake Oswego’s coaches have adjusted without compromising on their philosophy.
“We ‘re all getting old, and we’ll have to carry a chair out there every once in a while to sit in,” said Coury, 62. “But I think we’ve tried to keep up with it.
“One thing that never changes is how you treat kids and how you motivate them. A lot of dynamics have changed – attention spans, and the social media world, those kind of issues – but I think we’re able to adapt and keep the principles the same. If they ever had to change, then that’s the time when we’d all depart.”
Halberg said the coaches know they can’t go on forever, “but we all look at each other and say, ‘What are we going to do when we’re not doing this?’”
If they weren’t still having fun, they wouldn’t keep coming back.
“Every year has been just so much fun,” Newcomer said. “What could be better than hanging out with your best friends for three or four months out of the year and being able to coach football?”
jerryu@osaa.org
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