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Gil Hulin — a fixture at South Eugene High School sports events, a member of the Axe Hall of Fame, and a Kidsports coach for decades — died alone. Friends want to make sure his legacy isn't lost.
A small notice in the July 20 edition of The Register-Guard, from Sunset Hills Funeral Home, asked for any information about Gilbert M. Hulin.
Hulin, or “Gil” as he was known in the community, was found dead in his apartment, July 14. The notice might have seemed out of place for someone who was a fixture in south Eugene.
He was a coach. A statistician. A sports reporter. A model train collector. A stamp collector. A regular church-goer. A lifelong bachelor. An only child. A member of the Axe Hall of Fame at South Eugene High School.
He was a great-grandson of one of Lane County’s earliest settlers, and the son of a Princeton University psychology professor.
Gilbert Marshall Hulin was many things, but when his life ended a few weeks ago at the age of 79, on the sixth floor of a Eugene apartment complex, no one knew.
Not until a fellow resident at the Olive Plaza Apartments at West 11th Avenue and Olive Street noticed something was wrong and alerted management.
Police were called to perform a welfare check and made the discovery, said Tonya Thomason, housing administrator at the 12-story complex.
Hulin’s remains would eventually end up at Sunset Hills in south Eugene.
“There was no obituary or story about his life,” Mary Smith, 77, wrote to Lookout Eugene-Springfield after seeing the Sunset Hills notice. “If you don’t know him, he was a huge supporter of young girls’ sports. There are probably hundreds of women in Eugene who were on a team that Gil coached, my daughter and many of her friends being some of them.”
When the story tip came to me, Hulin’s name seemed familiar.
Where did I know him from?
An online search turned up his bio from his 2017 induction into the Axe Hall of Fame for “meritorious service.”
He graduated from South Eugene High in 1964, kept statistics for the Axe girls’ basketball program for 31 years and coached youth soccer and other sports for decades. The bio also said he worked part-time in The Register-Guard sports department, mostly at night from 1999-2008, taking high school scores over the phone.
I was a full-time reporter at the R-G from 2002 to 2016, but I still couldn’t picture him.
My memory was finally jogged when Smith texted me a group photograph from the 2025 Axe Hall of Fame event Feb. 22 at Venue 252 in Eugene, which Hulin attended.
We walked right by each other on occasion at the R-G, but I’m not sure if we ever spoke.
“He was a man of very few words, but so many people speak so highly of him, and he obviously spoke loudly without saying anything,” said former South Eugene girls basketball coach Jim Denker, who led the Axe to state titles in 1987 and 1999 and considered Hulin and his innovative stat-keeping invaluable.
‘In his name’
Smith’s daughter, Erin Smith Shaw, of Missoula, Montana, was a member of that 1999 championship team. She started playing on Hulin-coached Kidsports soccer teams in the third grade and was apoplectic when she heard Hulin died with no family, no obituary and no one to claim his remains.
“This is crazy,” Shaw thought. “The Eugene community was Gil’s family.”
Thomason said her staff has been in touch with a cousin of Hulin’s who would like to go through his apartment, but Sunset Hills staff said as of July 23, no family member had been in touch.
Denker and the Smiths, along with others, are planning to make a $350 deposit July 28 to hold Hulin’s cremated remains for another 180 days to provide for a proper burial and memorial, Shaw said. Oregon law requires 10 business days to pass without any family making a claim.
But they all want to do more than that, said Denker, who also coached football at South, from 1982 to 2007. Denker was inducted into the same 2017 Axe Hall of Fame class as Hulin.
“We want to form a scholarship — both at the high school and at Kidsports — in his name, to help kids that don’t have an opportunity,” said Denker, 77. “It fits (Hulin) perfectly, and it’s something that he would really appreciate.”
Hulin’s record at Kidsports, the Eugene-based youth athletics nonprofit that started in 1954 as the Eugene Boys Athletic Association, is mind-boggling.
He started volunteering as a coach in various sports in 1979 and didn’t stop until COVID shut everything down in 2020, said Bev Smith, Kidsports’ executive director.
“He wanted to break the record,” she said, referring to most seasons coached in the organization’s history.
There isn’t an official record, Bev Smith said, “but he’s up there.”
Hulin thought the record was 40 years, “and he wanted 40-plus,” she said.
Hulin coached soccer, volleyball, basketball and softball, almost exclusively girls’ teams over the years, and he sometimes coached two teams at once, Bev Smith said.
He coached around seven or eight different teams a year, she said, and always wanted to take teams that had no coach or merge kids from two areas that didn’t have enough kids in one area to form a team.
“He cared so much and just wanted the kids to have a chance to play and improve,” Bev Smith said.
Stat man
Hulin first coached youth sports in 1975 when he led the only South Eugene area team for fourth- through seventh-graders, 14 boys and one girl, for the American Youth Soccer Organization, or AYSO, according to his Axe Hall of Fame bio.
Hulin was more of an organizer than an expert soccer coach, recalled Shaw, who in addition to basketball, played soccer at South and went on to earn a soccer scholarship at the University of Montana. She played for four years at the Division 1 program, then stayed in Missoula, where she met her husband, Adam, and is now the academic program manager for the university’s Missoula College.
“He would help organize us and just let us play,” she said. “He was just kind of a quiet, patient guy who dealt with a lot of sass from us ladies.”
Hulin’s days as a statistician began in high school when he kept stats for the boys’ basketball team and legendary coach Hank Kuchera.
More than 20 years later, he found himself doing the same for the girls’ program, when Denker spotted him in the crowd at a game and asked if he’d be willing to keep stats.
Hulin kept doing it, game after game, for three decades. He even did stats and scorekeeping for the Axe softball team for about 10 years.
“He was fantastic,” Denker said. “And over the years, we developed a stat sheet to keep a shot chart for both teams.”
It showed where each player took every shot from, and there were columns for both teams’ offensive and defensive rebounds, as well as a column for turnovers.
“It was extremely educational for the kids, because they could identify with stuff, and they trusted him,” Denker said. “He just had the respect of the kids for the job that he did and how he did it.”
When longtime boys basketball coach Dean Stepp invested in a computer system for both his program and the girls’ program, Hulin tried it during the first half of a game.
Hulin said, “This isn’t for me,” Denker recalled with a laugh. “And he went back to doing it manually the rest of the game.”
Hulin’s stats proved more accurate than any computer, Denker said.
Hobby man
Hulin had many hobbies. They included stamp collecting, in which he won awards, and he was the president of the Greater Eugene Stamp Club, according to newspaper articles. He wrote about the history of Eugene’s trolley car system. And he loved his model trains.
He was constantly ordering models and books about model trains, said Thomason, the administrator at Olive Plaza. “He was a fanatic,” she said.
He also attended model train conventions all over the country and, of course, traveled by train to get there, recalled Dr. Mark Litchman, Hulin’s Eugene physician. Litchman is a 1967 South Eugene High graduate whose daughter, Katie Litchman Kammer, played soccer on Kidsports teams coached by Hulin.
In high school, Hulin was associate editor of The Axe, the South Eugene High School student newspaper; a photographer for the school yearbook; and a member of the Camera Club and school orchestra.
The Hulins lived at 370 W. 18th Ave., just a few blocks from the old Woodrow Wilson Junior High School (formerly Eugene High School) where Gil attended from 1958 to 1961.
A 1961 Eugene Register-Guard story listed him among 12 junior high school students from Eugene to receive annual citizenship awards for honor, courage, scholarship and leadership.
Gil Hulin graduated from the UO in 1969 with a journalism degree.
His father, Wilbur Hulin, who died in 1959 when Gil was 14, also graduated from the UO in 1921 before earning a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University and then a doctorate from Princeton University. The elder Hulin taught psychology for several years before leaving for Occidental College in Los Angeles and then Pacific University in Forest Grove.
‘A fixture in my life’
Gil Hulin’s mother, Daye Marshall Hulin, a 1925 Eugene High School graduate, became Wilbur Hulin’s second wife when they married in 1940, according to a notice in the R-G. She was a great-granddaughter of Lane County pioneer Mahlon Harlow, who arrived in the area in 1851.
She was a member of the First Congregational Church in Eugene, a congregation that also became an important and beloved part of her son’s life.
She died in Eugene in 1995 at age 88, according to her R-G obituary.
Gil Hulin’s great-grandfather, Lester Hulin, had arrived in Eugene in 1847 after traveling the Oregon Trail with such other notable pioneers as Charnel Mulligan (Charnelton Street), the Briggs brothers (Isaac, Elias, Elijah) who founded Springfield, and Prior Blair (Blair Boulevard), according to a 1947 R-G story.
Lester and his wife, Abby Craig Hulin, are buried in Eugene’s Pioneer Cemetery.
The last time any of his south Eugene community saw Gil Hulin, the last of 178 years of Hulins in Lane County, was on Feb. 22 at the Hall of Fame event, where that 1999 championship team was inducted.
“It was really great to see him, and he just looked the same,” Shaw said. She hadn’t seen him in at least a decade, probably closer to 15 years, she said, and she would never see him again. “He was such a fixture in my life.”
Remembering Gil Hulin
Interested in remembering Hulin? You can make donations in his honor to the following organization:
Kidsports, attention to Bev Smith
2054 Amazon Parkway
Eugene, OR 97405
Friends of South Eugene, attention to Morgan Stein
400 E 19th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401
