University of Portland athletic director for 34 years
Thirteen-year-old Joe Etzel and his St. Patrick’s Grade School baseball teammates faced disaster.
Several of their players for the Northwest Portland school hadn’t shown up for a pivotal game that was about to start, leaving them with only eight players. The umpire was itching to forfeit the contest.
The St. Patrick’s coach and players were flummoxed and frustrated, but Joe devised a solution: convince his 8-year-old brother Mike to dress up in a 13-year-old’s uniform. Joe cajoled his initially skeptical kid brother of the plan, then dashed into the school supply room and rifled through the clothing racks until he found the uniform that came closest to fitting Mike. Perhaps fortunately, before Mike could take the field, the required ninth teammate arrived, enabling Joe to shelve the scheme.
Seventy years later, Mike recounts that story as showing that “Joe wasn’t your typical ‘let’s just have fun’ kid.” Even before he could shave, “Joe thought like an athletic director,” said his brother, a future University of Notre Dame business marketing professor.
In the 167-year history of sports in Oregon, the most remarkable collection of prep baseball talent ever assembled in one area, at one time, was almost certainly NW and North Portland in the mid-1950s.
And Joe grew up in it. He would bicycle from his family’s working-class home on NW St. Helens Road across the street from the Shell Oil storage tanks to Wallace Park where he played endless summer hours of baseball. He knew local neighborhood legends including Boston Red Sox shortstop Johnny (Paveskovich) Pesky and future Detroit Tigers World Series pitching hero Mickey Lolich.
After the Etzel family moved to N Castle Ave. in the Overlook neighborhood, Joe played for now-closed Columbia Prep on the University of Portland campus and became friends with his Jefferson High School neighbors including future Chicago White Sox star Pete Ward, and football Heisman Trophy winner Terry Baker who also received pro baseball offers.
In the meantime, Lolich joined Joe at tiny Columbia Prep, one of the smallest schools in the state, and the two combined forces to lead Columbia to a string of wins over the Goliath schools of Oregon, including a stunning victory over Grant in the state playoffs.
Joe went on to become the University of Portland’s 1956-1960 pitching ace, setting records that still stand. He graduated in May 1960 and faced one of the most difficult choices of his life. Several professional baseball scouts dangled opportunities to start in the minor league and aim for a long major league career. Part of him wanted to try pro baseball, but his head understood the risks. A pitcher’s arm is an instrument of power and delicacy. It’s the Stradivarius of the baseball craft, and the soreness in Joe’s shoulder gave him pause about seeking a pro baseball career.
More significantly, he became engaged to UP nursing major Judy Kehoe, a carpenter’s daughter and St. Mary’s Academy graduate. Fans tend to forgot that players have families and that many who are cheered in the stadium are booed at home. The life of a pro baseball player is harder on wives and families than almost any other sport with husbands away for more than 80 road game a year. More players get divorces than pennant banners. Joe instead chose Judy, and a teaching and coaching job at Central Catholic High School. The life of an educator appealed to him and he took evening classes to earn a master’s degree in education.
Joe returned to the bluff when UP hired him as head baseball coach in 1966. The Pilot program needed to catch up to the times. Joe soon got to know his rival coaches at Oregon and Oregon State and would chuckle at hearing them moan about their anemic $150,000 annual budgets. Joe’s budget was $6,000.
And UP’s baseball field was a veritable cow pasture with the direct sun blinding the eyes of outfielders attemping to catch fly balls. UP had no money to build a new a baseball field, but the former St. Patrick’s grade school student was a relentlessly creative problem-solver. Joe conceived of a new field and built it on “donations of materials, equipment, expertise and old-fashioned elbow grease” UP’s PORTLAND Magazine reported.
“My dad could make a dollar go further than anyone,” said his son, Jim. His father became a self-taught landscaper, carpenter, cement mixer, electrician and equipment operator. He enlisted Jim as a high school freshman to dig sprinkler trenches by hand and recruited scores of his college players to raise the stadium.
“Dad learned that Ross Island Sand & Gravel drivers often had leftover concrete and were just taking it to a concrete dump,” Jim remembered. “He got to know their dispatcher who directed drivers to take the concrete to UP where Dad would drop whatever he was doing at that time, to spread the concrete before it dried.”
Joe was so frugal that when his players repaired the rickety wooden bleachers, he instructed them to…slowly…pull…out…the nails and save them for future projects.
And he understood this difference. A pro coach only deals with players’ problems as it relates to the business of baseball, but a college manager to closer to all facts of their lives, school work and growing up. The greatest reward is years later, when they see what their players have become, and Joe’s former players were devoted to him.
In addition to coaching baseball for 21 years, Joe would become athletic director in 1970. His name would become synonymous with University of Portland athletics for the next 40 years. His baseball teams would earn 378 victories and several NCAA tournament appearances. As athletic director he shepherded construction of the 5,000-seat Chiles Center and hired coaches including Clive Charles who put UP on the American soccer map, and Rob Conner and Jim Sollars, in track and field and women’s basketball, respectively, who consistently produced stellar students and winning teams.
“Dad was a ‘character first guy,’” Jim explained. “If a player had talent but had an attitude or wasn’t going to study in class, he didn’t want them.” As for the players and coaches he did recruit, he was forever loyal to them.
That loyalty was shown in the last years of his life. Joe was the caregiver for Judy who died in 2023 after a long period with Alzheimer’s Disease. Many former players and coaches paid bereavement calls to him at his Beaverton retirement community. After he died in January at age 87, more than 250 people loyally returned to UP for his memorial service on campus.
Being a college athletic director had become more complicated, sometimes unfairly so, before Joe retired in 2004. Some who came to his funeral were former coaches who had not forgotten Joe’s loyalty to them years before. When it became apparent that a new incoming athletic director might not keep key long-time coaches and staff, Joe, in one of his last acts as athletic director, protected their jobs with long-term contract extensions.