Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
“You know those dragsters that use high-octane for short bursts to go 300 miles-per-hour? That’s Thomas.”
PORTLAND — Andrew Theen didn’t think much of it when he volunteered his Friday night.
He was still relatively new at The Oregonian in 2012 and the newspaper’s Hillsboro sports staff was thin that weekend. Theen grew up in Medford and loved sports, and while hoops is his passion, he could appreciate the pull of a football Friday night.
And he certainly knew the name of Thomas Tyner.
So yeah, the then-Hillsboro City Hall reporter said, he’d love to write a few hundred words on Lakeridge at Aloha on deadline.
How hard could it be?
By then, Aloha was two games into the 2012 season and Tyner, a 6-foot, 207-pound senior was flirting with superstardom. A 5-star prospect in a state that doesn’t produce 5-stars, Tyner started playing on varsity as a freshman, set the state record in the 100-meters as a sophomore and rushed for 513 yards and four touchdowns in just three games before injuries ended his junior season.
He was the No. 1 player in the state. He was the No. 2 running back in the country. He was so popular that, one time when he decommitted from Oregon for a period of days, it caused national headlines and pandemonium across the Aloha cell towers.
“Thomas said he might still visit UCLA to prove that Oregon was the right fit, and I ended up spending an hour on the phone that day with Chip Kelly on a Ducks game day,” then-Aloha coach Chris Casey said. “Thomas had so many people calling him he had to change his phone number by lunch.”
Tyner and Aloha versus Lakeridge and the Syracuse-bound quarterback Eric Dungey was about as good as it gets for September sports around here. Theen was stoked and consulted with a few sports writers he knew about how to take stats.
That’s the challenge with high school sports — unlike college press boxes where stats and quotes and fun facts are printed out and sent to inboxes — it’s everyone for themselves. If you’re lucky, you’ve made friends with the team statistician or an assistant coach who can quickly pass along numbers. But old-faithful is a notebook filled with chicken scratch marks for downs, distances, numbers and what happened on every play of the game. Reporters pray for low scoring games not just for deadline, but so the stats have a chance of being accurate.
Theen made the trip west out to Aloha and pulled up to the sideline ready to give the game an honest effort. It was Tyner’s 18th birthday, and on Aloha’s first drive he broke free for a 20-yard touchdown and the home crowd serenaded him with “Happy Birthday.”
Seven points down and Theen felt like he had his footing. Unfortunately, he had a state-record 140 more points to go — highlighted by a second quarter where the teams combined for 55 points, with Tyner ripping off touchdown runs of 62 yards, 60 yards and 65 yards in successive drives in Aloha’s eventual 84-63 win.
“Within minutes I was overwhelmed,” Theen said. “I must have burned through an entire notebook. And it wasn’t just Tyner, there was another guy on the other side of the field who I didn’t know was as good as he was.”
That was Dungey, then a sophomore who would go on to become one of the best Syracuse quarterbacks of all-time. After starting a few games as a freshman, Dungey went toe-to-toe with Aloha, passing for 363 yards, rushing for 63 yards and totaling six touchdowns — numbers that weren’t available in the next day’s story because, well, Theen had his hands full with Tyner.
The birthday boy finished the game with an Oregon record 643 yards — the third most in national high school history — and 10 touchdowns running behind one of the state’s best offensive lines.
“I’ve said this many times: When Thomas Tyner did not get blocking, he got tackled in the same place our other running backs did,” Casey said. “When he did get blocking, that’s what activated his gifts.”
He got blocking that night and Theen got a story.
“I had a deadline and at some point that was just a wash. The story was initially only supposed to be a few inches, but I had to do it justice because it was just this thrilling game to be at,” he said. “At one point, it’s just one of those things where you have to lean into the absurdity of the whole thing.”
It was the first sporting event Theen covered as a professional journalist. To this date, it’s also his last.
It was also Casey’s final season coaching Aloha, and absurdity is probably the right word to use to describe the level of attention his program received after Tyner’s record. Coaches and fans from across the country would flood the high school’s mailboxes with letters. The day after the record, Tyner and Casey were fielding calls from local reporters, Fox News and Pete Carroll. Casey always admired how well Tyner handled the attention for an introverted kid. And while the 28-year-old has now found his solace in the outdoors of central Oregon, a decade ago there may not have been a more popular high school athlete in the country.
“I think inside it was tough,” Casey said. “He was getting all of this attention — most of it positive — but it was just constant. He’s so well-mannered and well-spoken that it just made him a magnet for it.”
Tyner finished his senior year with a state record 3,415 rushing yards, reaching 300 or more yards in six of Aloha’s 11 games. He went on to play three years at Oregon, medically retire and then return for a final run with the Oregon State Beavers. He rushed for 1,581 yards and 17 touchdowns in his career, never quite capturing that same magic that filled the fall air in Aloha on Friday nights.
But there were moments. Casey, now in his 10th season as George Fox’s head coach, remembers a New Year’s Eve call from Tyner the night before the Ducks played Florida State in the Rose Bowl. Tyner told his old coach two things: He was healthy and he was rested.
Casey knew what that meant. And on the next day, Tyner took his 13 carries against Florida State for a season-high 124 yards and a pair of touchdowns.
“You know those dragsters that use high-octane for short bursts to go 300 miles-per-hour?” Casey said. “That’s Thomas. He was just so powerful. So ballistic. So when he said he was rested and healthy, I said, man, he’s going to take off and fly like an eagle.”
— Tyson Alger
@tysonalger
