As South Eugene football scales back, one senior finds a new home at Churchill

By the time South Eugene High School announced Tuesday, Aug. 25, that it would not play its Class 5A football schedule in 2026, at least one player gearing up for the season welcomed the news.

Jackson Ingram is a 6-foot-6, 225-pound senior tight end with college football aspirations who, for the last month, practiced with a South Eugene team that ended the 2025 season with 15 active players on its roster and was set to enter 2026 with similarly thin numbers.

Ingram has South Eugene pride. He’s been with the program for three years. But when the news finally dropped, it allowed him to transfer to Churchill High School and put himself in a better position to make the most of his final year of high school football.

“Churchill was really welcoming,” Ingram said. “They made it a seamless transition. It wasn’t too hard to change because I have that type of mindset that I want to be a good player on a good team, and I was trying to make that happen at South, but it just wasn’t in the cards for South.”

The writing had seemingly been on the wall well before Tuesday’s announcement. 

Second-year head coach Eric Scott told Lookout Eugene-Springfield Aug. 19 that he was focused on “rebuilding the culture” of a program he says was hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. In a follow-up interview Aug. 26, he said they waited as long as they could before making changes to the team’s schedule, but practice on Aug. 21 drew just 13 players out of the 20 or so expected student-athletes.

The numbers just weren’t there to safely compete at the 5A level.

“A lot of people think we’re canceling football altogether [or] canceling varsity. It’s not that,” Scott said. “We’re still going to play against other varsity teams. It’s just a schedule that we’re putting together that’s going to give us a chance to compete against teams with similar numbers to us.”

When Ingram joined the program as a freshman, he estimated there were 40 to 50 players on the roster, allowing him to benefit from playing on junior varsity as his body developed. But as numbers shrank over the years, younger players were forced into bigger roles against much larger opponents.

“We were so lucky to come in when we did,” said Anna Ingram, Jackson’s mother. “I mean, they’re these tiny kids and they have to play on the varsity because we didn’t have a JV team. And those of us who went through last season and saw how many injuries we had, how many kids were nursing injuries because they played so much, this is what needed to happen.

“I just wish that maybe they had made the decision a couple of weeks earlier. It is what it is, and I’m glad that we were able to make a relatively quick transition.”

Not everyone is leaving South Eugene. Elijah Gabriel — sidelined during preseason practice with an ankle injury, Scott said — slot receiver Dash Fortner and running back Daniel Jetty are among those who remain.

But Ingram didn’t want to take a step back this year. He wanted to grow. And while it wasn’t easy to leave South Eugene — he’s going to miss playing basketball with the Axe, too — he could be in a much worse spot.

“Now that I’m at a prestigious football school (compared to) the last couple of years,” Ingram said, “I kind of see it as like the sky’s the limit now for recruitment.”