When most coaches talk about rebuilding a high school sports program, they’re talking about a superficial process.
Many think that moving a couple all-league players into different positions and filling out the roster with varsity reserves and JV starters who have years of competitive experience constitutes rebuilding.
Most rebuilding projects are like remodeling a kitchen once you move in.
Former McKay and Oregon State basketball player Anna Marchbanks leads the North Salem High School girl’s basketball practice as head coach on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
What Anna Marchbanks – best known as an all-star basketball player at McKay High and Oregon State – has undertaken as coach of North Salem High School’s girls basketball program is akin to a total teardown of a house to the foundation.
“Pretty big, pretty big for sure,” said assistant coach Jonathan Abrams, who played in college at Morehouse and Berry and professionally overseas. “It’s a big deal. There’s no way around it.
“I think getting the right group of girls to buy in to a system, to just change their mentality, I think that’s the biggest thing.”
As part of Marchbanks’ rebuilding plan is North Salem won’t field a varsity team next season.
It seems like a drastic step – it’s something a Salem-Keizer Public School hasn’t done in a team sport in decades – but it’s one that can’t hurt in the case of a team that went 0-24 last season and has been through five coaches in the past 10 years.
“Them losing every single game, I feel like we were drowning them,” said Marchbanks, who played for North Salem as a freshman in the 2004-05 school year. “Taking the freshman and moving them to varsity, I feel like it was drowning all the girls.
“When you’re winning you were a lot happier person. You want to come to practice. You want to play harder, and I just knew making them play varsity, especially bringing all the freshman up. For me to even coach here, I had to have the varsity cut.”
Marchbanks has been part of the rebuilding process of basketball programs at different levels.
When she transferred to McKay for her sophomore year that program was pretty much in the same place North Salem is now, but as a player she helped that team to two league championships.
When she transferred to Oregon State – after leading Yakima Valley Community College to the 2010 NWAACC Championship – that program was in dire shape.
Marchbanks transformed herself into a first-team all-Pac-12 Conference selection as a senior by leading the Beavers in points (12.5 per game), rebounds (7.6), assists (3.7) and steals (2.3) and helped elevate Oregon State to a 20-13 record and a place in the WNIT.
She went on to play professionally for teams in Finland, Luxembourg, Germany and France before a nagging knee injury forced her to retire as a player.
“I think from her going from North Salem to college ball and overseas, it helps us think that we can do it and succeed through North Salem when everybody tells we can’t,” said sophomore-to-be Emmalee Haburn. “She knows. She’s been there and she did it.”
When Marchbanks first told the players that there won’t be a varsity team next season, some were fine with it and committed themselves to the process – such as rising junior Janel Urbina, an honorable mention all-league player last season.
Not all of them did.
Former McKay and Oregon State basketball player Anna Marchbanks, left, leads the North Salem High School girl’s basketball practice as head coach on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
“We had like four girls quit because they played varsity last year,” Marchbanks said. “They were like, oh, I need to play varsity. I’m like, you averaged .9, not even one point. You can go to any other school in our league and you will not start because they were sophomores on varsity.
“This is the part when we ran stuff in practice and then go to a game and varsity team would shut it down. We couldn’t even get the first pass. The girl couldn’t even get open. We couldn’t run stuff. They couldn’t get shots off.”
By North Salem dropping its varsity girls basketball team, it will have unintended positive consequences for other teams in the league.
South Salem has won the past two OSAA Class 6A state championships, but each year was dragged down in the power rankings by playing low-ranking teams such as North Salem and got lower seeds for the state playoffs, No. 4 each of the past two years.
Add in that South Salem has blown out North Salem by scores including 92-5 and 74-8 among their games the past two years, and no one had fun in those games.
“No, we don’t look forward to those kind of games because we’re trying to get better,” South Salem coach Nick McWilliams said. “We also don’t want to embarrass another team or whatever. Some people thought that we’ve done that. We never purposely do that.
“It’s probably more disrespectful if you go out there and don’t try. We’re not going to do that. On the other hand, we played a lot of people off our JV’s and didn’t press very much. We would rather go into a game thinking that we’ve really got to play our best in order to win, and when we do that we’re more successful, but you’re not able to do that in that kind of game. I don’t think it helps them at all when they get beat up.”
The hope is that in a few years that North Salem’s program can grow to the level of being a state playoff team.
Former McKay and Oregon State basketball player Anna Marchbanks, left, leads the North Salem High School girl’s basketball practice as head coach on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
Marchbanks has four cousins who are in the seventh or eighth grades, and she plans to coach competitive travel teams of fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth graders at The Hoop next season.
She is in this rebuilding for the long term.
“I think it’s a good thing that we’re going to have a JV team because that’s going to give us more experience dealing with upper people who know what they’re doing,” said sophomore-to-be Rosemaline Watley. “It’s like a ladder, going up every time.”
In the first years of high school girls basketball being sanctioned by the OSAA, North Salem was competitive.
The Vikings were in the state playoffs seven times between 1981 and 1992 – including state tournament appearances in 1981 and 1989.
But 1992 was a long time ago.
In the past 12 seasons – dating back to Marchbanks’ 2004-2005 season as a player at North Salem – the program has gone 36-215, including a 15-141 league record.
North Salem has been in the bottom three of the OSAA’s power rankings each of the past two seasons in the 6A classification.
“We have a lot of work in front of us right now, but I think if we just stay committed to the process and have the girls committed to the same process, we’ll be okay,” said assistant coach Rodney Nelson, who played Chemeketa and Adams State.
After Marchbanks’ overseas professional career ended, she moved back to Salem and became depressed. She stopped working out and gained a lot of weight.
But then she got a job at North Salem and took a position as an assistant basketball coach. She coached the JV team two years ago and the freshman team last season.
“Right after that happened, they changed everything for me,” said Marchbanks, who graduated from Oregon State earlier this month with a bachelor’s degree in communications and a minor in Spanish. “They made me look forward to coming to work and practice and enjoying it and working out again.
Former McKay and Oregon State basketball player Anna Marchbanks, center, leads the North Salem High School girl’s basketball practice as head coach on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
“Coming in here, working with them and coaching, it changed everything for me. It made me want to play again. It made me miss the game. It made me want to help them out and just be a better person so that they could be better people.”
The players relate to Marchbanks on a different level than they do with most coaches.
She’ll dance with her players during practice and play 3-point shooting games with them, but when they consistently mess up plays, she’ll yell at them and the players will be running the same sorts of sprints she hated running when she was a player.
But the players demonstrate their commitment to the process every time they run, something they do frequently at this point.
“They want to play basketball, they want to be good, I need the time and the effort and they need …I can’t put in more than you,” Marchbanks said. “I’ve already done everything I had to do.
“I need you guys to come out here to sweat and cry and bleed and dive on the floor and sell out and believe in this program because at the end of the day, no matter how good of a coach or how good of a player I was, it’s all up to you putting that ball in the hoop.”
bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com, 503-399-6701 or Twitter.com/bpoehler