One more flight for Jon Eagle

The last time Jon Eagle stood on a sideline opposite the Camas Papermakers was Oct. 29, 1988. It was the eighth game as a high school football head coach, his first year at Evergreen. He was 29. The Papermakers won that night 28-21. Eagle will get his second chance to beat the Papermakers on Friday when his West Linn (Ore.) Lions host Camas. It will be his 343rd game as a high school head coach. And it will come in his final season as a head coach. “I’ve heard people say, you just know,” Eagle, now 66, said about retiring. “When you know, you know.” Between those two meetings as an opponent of Camas, there have been 262 victories, four state championships (two with Camas, two with West Linn) and countless memories. Eagle sat down in his home in Camas, where he and his wife Debbie have called home for 32 of the past 35 years, to talk about his life in football. The early years Eagle’s start in high school football came as a starting quarterback for Columbia River as a sophomore in 1975. He was part of state-playoff teams at River in 1975 and 1977. From there, he played three seasons at Central Washington. But then he caught the itch to coach. So he transferred to Linfield to play and learn under legendary coach Ad Rutschman. After one season as an assistant at Linfield, he got a teaching job and was an assistant football and track and field coach at Bend (Ore.) High School. In 1985, he attended the University of Oregon to earn a master’s degree and spent two seasons as a graduate assistant for the Ducks under Rich Brooks. Coming to Evergreen In 1987, he got a job at Evergreen High School and served as an assistant football coach under Gene Moore with a good chance of replacing Moore, who was battling health issues. That chance came in 1988, when he started the first of 13 seasons as the Plainsmen’s head coach. Eagle led a veteran staff of coaches. “We had, I think, four coaches on that staff that were former head coaches with me just 28,” Eagle said. “So I listened a lot. ‘What do you guys think about this? What do you think about that?’ ” With a great run of talent and support from the school district, Eagle had a run of success at Evergreen. The first league title and state-playoff berth came in 1992. The Plainsmen reached the state semifinals in 1995. But after the 2000 season, Eagle moved his family to Redmond. But after three years, the health of his father drew Eagle back to Clark County. Still, Eagle wanted to return to Camas where his family lived from 1990 to 2000. “I got a job teaching at Camas (High),” he said. “I told Bob Holman I would be his assistant and that I wanted to replace him when he was ready to retire. “Bob said ‘Oh, I’m only going to be here one or two more years.’ It ended up being four, which was fine.” Holman took over a long-struggling football program at Camas in 1997 and built the Papermakers into a consistent winner in the early 2000s. It was the perfect setup for Eagle to take over as head coach in 2008. The Camas years The foundation for Camas’ run under Eagle traces back to his first year back in Camas in 2004. That year he coached his son’s Clark County Youth Football team. Those years with his son’s team taught Eagle the importance of aligning the youth program with the high school program. When Camas went on a run — reaching the 3A state semifinals in 2011, the 4A state semis in 2012 and the 2013 4A title game — those teams were made up with players Eagle had coached with his son’s team. “What a great time as a father to be able to coach your son and his friends in a state championship game,” Eagle said. “That was really cool, you know, to see where it started.” Eagle would coach Camas to its first state championship in 2016, beating Richland, then again in 2019, beating Bothell. From PSU to West Linn But his 13-year run as head coach at Camas ended the spring of 2021, after the COVID spring season, when Eagle was hired to join Bruce Barnum’s staff at Portland State. “Bruce and I had been talking about that for a long time, like when the situation and timing was right,” Eagle said. “And I told our coaches that if Portland State offers me a position, I’m probably going to take it.” But after one season with the Vikings, Eagle moved onto West Linn. “You know, it wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be,” Eagle said of the PSU job. Eagle was hired at West Linn at the behest of former NFL defensive back Anthony Newman. Newman and Eagle first met in the 1980s when Newman played at Oregon and Eagle was a graduate assistant. “I’ve always felt a little twinge of regret of not seeing it through at Portland State,” Eagle said. “But I feel at West Linn, the people are so good, the league is so good, and the quality of kids coming through there is just great. It reminds a lot of what we had at Camas.” West Linn won the Oregon 6A state title in 2022 and again in 2024. Family over football But coming into 2025, he announced that this would be his final year as a head coach. He makes the daily trek from his home in Camas to West Linn. Also, Jon and Debbie have welcomed two new grandsons in the past month. One is in San Diego, and the other is in Spokane. And they have two other daughters who live in Colorado. “You know, life’s short,” Eagle said. “A lot of time I feel like ‘What am I doing?’ … Somebody recently said to me ‘Oh, so you’re the travelling grandparents?’ I’ve never heard that before.” Current Camas head coach Adam Mathieson said the original hope was that Friday’s game would be played at Doc Harris Stadium, which would allow Camas High School to celebrate Eagle. But circumstances weren’t right. So the game will take place at West Linn. “If we had done that, it would have meant three straight road games for us,” Eagle said. “And the only reason for doing that was for me. It didn’t feel right.” The football family Coaching has never been about him, Eagle said. Although that took some time to learn. When he was at Redmond, he had a University of Washington recruit playing for him. But then the player was diagnosed with a life-threatening disorder. Doctors told him he had to quit playing football. One hit could kill him. A few years later, Eagle returned to Redmond for the player’s funeral. “That just stuck with me, you know,” Eagle said. “Like, start building better relationships with the kids. You go through stages as a young coach when winning can be more important than developing players and building relationships. But then as you get older, you go ‘Wait a minute. What are we really doing here?’ ” Eagle says he’s always built his teams on the premise of relationships. “I’ve always held that it’s our job as coaches to know if our defensive tackle’s mom has cancer, or if somebody’s grandfather passed away, or if their parents are getting divorced,” he said. “It our job to notice the things that are going on in our players lives and be a support for them. “Everybody says a football team is a family. But that’s what it really means.”

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