In the Media: Brack is back in town for Huskies

AURORA — For weeks now, rumors have been swirling about the coaching situation with the North Marion High School baseball program.

At its Aug. 11 meeting, the North Marion School Board confirmed what many people in the community already suspected: after a six-year hiatus, Randy Brack is back at the helm of the Huskies baseball team.

While the players have all changed in his third go-around as North Marion’s head coach, Brack’s coaching philosophy remains the same: he plans to build more than baseball skills; he plans to build a program with integrity.

“He does have a great history with the school,” said Athletic Director Heidi Hermansen, “not only the winning side, but the character of his athletes.”

“A big thing for me is that if a kid is going to be a good student, and do good in the classroom, he’s going to do a good job on the athletic field,” said Brack, who played on North Marion’s only state title baseball team in 1971. “We want to do things the right way … We don’t want to go out there and try to be a whole bunch of individuals, we want to represent ourselves and our parents and our schools and our communities the right way. How we carry ourselves is going to make a big difference.”

Brack first took the reigns of the program in 1979 and spent 22 of the next 24 years as the head coach, a span which included three semifinal appearances in four years, starting in 1997. During the 1982 and 1983 seasons that Brack didn’t coach the team, North Marion went through two coaches in two years.

He was replaced in 2003 by Wade Lockett. After a last-place finish in the Capital Conference in 2003, Craig Lambert took over the program and coached the Huskies to back-to-back appearances in the state semifinals in 2004 and 2005, but the team hasn’t made it past the second round since.

Brack now replaces Lambert, whose contract was not renewed by the school district, despite leading the team to the state playoffs in each of his five years as head coach. In May, North Marion fell 2-1 to Phoenix in the first round of the Class 4A state playoffs.

“We just wanted to go a different direction with baseball,” said Hermansen. She said one goal is to get more kids into the various sports programs, while she also hopes to rebuild a closer connection between the high school program and the North Marion PRYDE and youth baseball programs.

Brack said he’s been following the team pretty close since leaving in 2002 and after talking to Hermansen and North Marion Principal Glenn Elliott, felt all three were on the same page regarding the future of the program.

“They were very supportive on doing a bunch of things that I was saying we needed to do to kind of get the program really spiced up again and get some excitement going,” said Brack.

He wasted no time in putting some of his plans into motion. Brack was officially hired on Monday. By Tuesday morning, with the help of a number of kids, parents and community members, the entire North Marion baseball field was torn up, fences had been removed and a complete renovation was underway.

“To have a bunch of kids and people helping out there (Tuesday) and doing stuff was kind of exciting to see,” he said. “They were working hard and they’re kind of taking ownership in what we’re doing.”

He added that he couldn’t say enough about the efforts of Oregon Turf and Tree Farms.

“They’ve got guys and their equipment out there and they’re just going overboard to help us out.”

By project’s end, the center field fence will be moved back about 40 feet, the field will be leveled and graded with new grass, an irrigation system with underground sprinklers installed, and Brack hopes to be able to install a new backstop.

He expects the work to be completed sometime this fall and fully ready for play in the spring, but acknowledged that the program still needs plenty of help from the community, ranging anywhere from manpower to donations.

“Luckily, I’ve been around long enough and I’ve either gone to school with a lot of these guys … or there are other guys that either I’ve coached or I’ve coached their kid. Guys seem to be bending over backwards ready to help us out.”

Although Brack hasn’t been coaching a team for the past six years since he left North Marion, he has been conducting private baseball lessons through Grand Slam USA for the past 16 years, which moved its facility from Woodburn to Wilsonville about three years ago.

“So it wasn’t like I was away from the sport,” he said. “I was still involved, I just wasn’t coaching a team. I was just coaching individual kids every day. That part of it never made me miss the coaching side of it.”

That was, until this past spring, when he joined up with his oldest son, Tucker, who coached at Chemeketa Community College for four years.

Brack said he remembers thinking, “This is kind of fun. I remember doing this,” while he was working as an assistant coach for Chemeketa, and that old familiar feeling, along with the support of his family, pushed him back into the coaching position at North Marion.

When Brack left the program in 2002 after 19 straight years as North Marion’s head coach, he said he just felt the time was right to step aside, and let somebody else lead the team.

Now he feels the time is right to return to the North Marion dugout, resuming the hunt for another state title that has eluded the Huskies for 37 years.

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