Path back to football for South Eugene High starts with ‘rebuilding the culture’

Editor’s note: This is the first story in a continuing series about the effort to revive the football program at South Eugene High School.

From the stoop by the South Eugene High School weight room, Eric Scott could barely see the scoreboard framed against the Friday night sky. 

He sat on the concrete stairs and glanced up occasionally as the game clock ticked down, but mostly kept his gaze lowered. He didn’t need to see the score.

Scott, the second-year head football coach at South Eugene, knew his team’s progress might not necessarily be reflected on the scoreboard. He said so before the first week of practice — before he and Jim Moore, South Eugene’s athletic director, made the call to back out of the Axe’s 5A Special District 5 schedule and become quasi-independent, in order to ensure they could still have a season.

Scott was sitting on the stoop because, in the second half of South Eugene’s season opener on Sept. 4, against 4A Phoenix High School, he drew a second personal foul and was ejected for arguing with a referee.

He walked the length of the field, past his team and the pylon, then around the back of the end zone, through the gate where, hours earlier, he’d entered with his 24-man team.

With Scott still on the sideline in the first quarter, the Pirates ran back the opening kickoff for a touchdown. Scott flip-flopped between quarterbacks — junior Colby Yeager got his first start at the position before senior Michael Shields took snaps midway through the first half — to no avail. Senior Daniel Jetty, the Axe’s bell-cow running back, went backward just as often as he found a hole to dash through: back 5 yards, then forward 34, then stuffed, then back 3. Phoenix led 43-0 in the first half.

The defense got better in the second half and held the Pirates scoreless. Phoenix stuttered. South hesitated. Scott departed.

Culture is rebuilt in strange ways. And it emerges in moments when a team applies its tenets, even with its leader absent.

In the game’s final half-minute, the scoreboard hadn’t changed. The Axe made it to midfield. Defensive coordinator Raul Gil-Azamar, now acting as head coach, called a timeout with one second left. In the last play of the game, Yeager handed off to Jetty.

Later, sitting still half-wrapped in pads on a chair outside the locker room, Jetty talked about what pushed him the next 50 yards into the end zone.

“The school can’t walk away with zero,” he said. “We had to get at least something.”

That’s culture.

“People spend what — five, 10 bucks to come watch us?’” he said. “Like, they took their evening off. We owe it to them. We’ve got family in the crowd.”

That’s culture, too.

“(That touchdown) means that they don’t need me there for them to keep fighting for this team,” Scott said. “I want them to play for me, but more importantly, I want them to play for the school, for their teammates, for each other, for that purple helmet that says ‘South’ on the side of it. That’s what I want them to play for.”

A week before South Eugene’s 2026 varsity season was supposed to start, Scott sat on a metal bench on the side of the turf field at the high school. His players — all 19 of them — filtered past as he started talking history.

Scott’s history with South started last summer. There wasn’t much time to meet players before they left for break. That’s part of why South struggled for players in 2025 — and why it was facing the same struggle as the 2026 season loomed.

But Scott knew what his most important job was. 

“The thing around here, it’s rebuilding the culture,” he said.

Game week

South doesn’t win often in this era of Oregon high school football, and not since Sept. 14, 2023. Before that, the Axe went two years without a team for lack of numbers.

When he arrived last summer, Scott said, the kids who wanted to play were used to showing up when they wanted. He had to change that. Culture, for him, was the thing that made him feel wanted when he grew up playing in Virginia, when he played at Montgomery College, when he went to Germany to play and when he moved back to his wife’s home in Eugene and eventually took the job at South Eugene after stints at The Dalles Wahtonka High School and Willamette High School.

He started by talking about effort, by telling a group of students with experience that ranged from none to varsity that effort was the only thing in the sport they could control.

The decision to cancel South’s 2026 varsity season was carefully made, Scott said, but that didn’t make it easy. Instead of Putnam, the Axe would open their season against Phoenix. The numbers they did have, they decided, would put the players in jeopardy of injury for sheer volume of playing time against 5A rosters with nearly double their player base.

Once that decision was made, the players began to repeat Scott’s refrain on effort.

“We don’t have the numbers to afford being lazy,” Jetty said the Tuesday before South would face Phoenix in its revamped 2026 season.

That Tuesday, the Axe practiced on a grass field with no lines. They were beleaguered by penalties. The next day, rain arrived and, while they practiced in a downpour on South’s turf football field with Scott lined up at wide receiver to make up the numbers, progress was slow.

Thursday night, the day before the game, they gathered for a team dinner in the South Eugene cafeteria with an understanding of the bar they still needed to clear for that culture to manifest itself.

“To some level, it’s a little disappointing just because a lot of our players don’t really know what it means to be in game week and what it takes to be ready and get locked in,” senior Theo Unruh said, sitting at a table with Jetty and several skill-position starters during the dinner. “Like, there’s still a lot of messing around during practices when there really shouldn’t be.”

As Unruh finished talking, Scott stepped up in front of the pushed-together lunch tables in the cafeteria.

“It’s been a long two weeks, with a lot going on, but we made it,” Scott said. “We’re here.”

“I know it’s not what we wanted,” he said, as the team, parents and the cheer squad listened. “But it might be exactly what we needed. Sometimes you’ve got to go through a little trials and tribulations to enjoy the other side.”

The rest of the coaches came up, to talk about words like “family” and “opportunity” and “pride.” Scott sat on a gym mat in the back and watched until they finished. Then, he stood again.

“We’re going to prove everybody wrong,” he said. “Y’all know that … just get that in your head, all right? You’re going to make mistakes tomorrow. It’s how you respond on the next play. Don’t get down on each other. Don’t start turning on each other. We’ve got to stick together. Y’all feel me on that?”

Game day

Four hours before his first-ever start at quarterback, Colby Yeager’s chair in the team meeting room was empty. Being part of a small team means it’s obvious when someone is missing.

The 16-year-old, wearing Nike flats and wired headphones, ducked through the door and planted himself in the only open chair near the back. He had an excuse.

“It was really bad traffic, I swear,” he said.

Yeager isn’t a quarterback because it’s his favorite position — his football experience mostly came in the trenches and at linebacker.

Yet his dad, Jason Yeager, has been telling his son for years that he should play quarterback. He remembers Colby always having a good arm, and even though it’s not his “most desired position,” in Jason’s words, he fits, in part, because tenacity is a tenet of this program’s desired identity.

“I think he would play on a JV, podunk team on a field of dirt,” Jason said. “He just loves to play.”

After two weeks of practice and a walkthrough in the South Eugene gym, Colby got hit — really hit — for the first time in the first half against Phoenix.

Mostly, he remembers being on the run. That first half was filled with South Eugene players getting hit, with an offense designed to get the ball out quicker than Phoenix’s front seven could dissect the new offensive line. Yeager and Shields jumped in and out of the game as the South Eugene defensive front shattered in the first half under the weight of the Pirates’ rushing attack.

That night, after the deluge, the shored-up second half and a long touchdown of his own, Jetty stepped through a wedged-open door and dragged a chair onto the concrete stoop outside the locker room. He was still wrapped in gear, still coated in sweat.

“I think it was just like, in practice, bro, we just weren’t going hard enough,” he said. “We should be repping it like it’s a game. And there was like our alignment too. It was so obvious people weren’t in that playbook. They weren’t doing what they’re supposed to.”

He understands that he has to help teach this part.

“The hard part is you can give us the resources, but at the end of the day, it’s us that have to put the effort in,” he said.

Then he saw something else: “But honestly, I think next week, if we fix our alignment, we play through the whistle, we hustle, I don’t see why we can’t win,” Jetty said. “I think we just came out and we were just flat, man. But we’re going to pick up the energy for next week. I think we’ve got something, bro.”

South Eugene plays at Lebanon JV on Monday, Sept. 14, at 6 p.m.