Marty Lees Promoted

it seems to be a way to choose a successor.

According to O-Live, assistant baseball coach Marty Lees has just been promoted to associate head coach. I’m not really sure what that means, whether its like a ‘head coach in waiting’ situation, or whether it makes him more likely to get a head coaching job elsewhere. But I like it when good things happen to good people. So I’m very happy that good things are happening to Coach Lees.

A bit of background, if you will. Coach Lees was my gym teacher and baseball coach at Oakridge High School (This would be ‘97-’98, when I was a frosh). What I always appreciated about Coach Lees was that he was someone who was in it for the kids. Of course he wanted to win, but he took the time to develop a rapport and improve each player not only as a player, but a person. This held true whether it was the all-league varisty pitcher, or the JV backup right fielder who couldn’t hit the ball and threw like a girl (hey, that was me). As a kid (and high school players are still very much kids), it means a lot when the least valuable player on the team has the same relationship with the head coach as the most valuable. It speaks a lot to Coach Lees’ character. As I’ve developed a career of my own coaching high school basketball, I’ve seen a lot of coaches who are not in it for the right reasons, and players who maybe aren’t as talented are held to a different standard or treated like a lesser part of the team. Coach Lees was certainly never like that.

I will say that my favorite Coach Lees story came not from baseball season, but from basketball season (he also coached the JV girls basketball team). Coach Lees was always a Beaver fan, and me, being a Duck honk, had a lot of banter back and forth. This was before either team was really great, and we were just excited to go to the Las Vegas Bowl to play Air Force that year. Oregon was 6-5, Air Force 10-2. We were on a road trip (boys and girls traveled together), and Lees was just giving me all kinds of crap about how this great Air Force team was going to kill us. We bet a Mountain Dew on the game, and, of course, Oregon killed Air Force 42-14. Getting to rub it in the face of a Beaver fan, who at that time were still in their streak of eleventy billion losing seasons, was great fun, and it took a few months for Lees to work up the muster to talk more crap after that. And he still owes me that Mountain Dew. I also remember him working to get every JV player a varsity at bat at some point in the season (we only had JV and varsity, no cuts). I struck out on three pitches, which made it pretty much like my JV at bats. And even after he left Oakridge and moved on to Harrisburg (who was in our league, but actually near civilization in the valley), I appreciated how every time we met up with them for basketball (I stopped playing baseball at that point, because I sucked), he always made an effort to seek out his former players and chat with us a bit.

Again, I don’t know what this promotion means, but I know that having him in your program is a very good thing. And if Casey does decide to move on at some point, Lees would make a fantastic head coach. I’m the biggest Duck honk there is, but if Lees was recruiting my kid, I’d be hard pressed to tell him to go anywhere else.