Sports have always been a family affair for Brian Stenberg. Growing up in Hood River with seven brothers and a sister, Stenberg was often playing games with family members, and jokes that he has enough siblings to field a baseball team.
“We were rarely not doing something, which I think my mom (Helen Stenberg) was very thankful of, unless that was happening in the kitchen or the living room — constantly hearing, ‘No roughhousing inside,’ or ‘Take that outside!’ And outside we went,” he remembers.
Now, Stenberg is gearing up for Horizon Christian’s fall sports season as the school’s new athletic director, following in the footsteps of his father, Oscar Stenberg, who previously served in the same capacity for 11 years (Superintendent Ken Block was interim athletic director for the 2014-15 school year). In addition to managing the K-12 school’s sports programs, Brian Stenberg will also serve as a health and P.E. teacher.
“Athletics have been a huge part of our life and our family’s life, so, it’s a lot of fun, which is why I’m really excited to be continuing to be involved in athletics,” Stenberg says. “It’s going to be fun.”
Outside of playing with his siblings, Stenberg got introduced to sports at a very young age, with his earliest memories playing Community Ed soccer when he was five or six years old, he recalls. Like so many other kids, Stenberg played in Little League and from there on out “every year it was just sports, sports, sports, sports.”
Stenberg would go on to attend high school at Horizon, where he was a three-sport athlete throughout his four years there, playing soccer, basketball, and baseball (he played his senior year of baseball at Hood River Valley High School as HCS was unable to offer the sport that season). After graduating HCS in 2005, Stenberg attended Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash., where he dual-majored in athletic training and kinesiology. After Whitworth, Stenberg worked for a year and then headed to Western Oregon University in Monmouth where he received his masters in teaching.
“Athletics have been a huge part of our life and our family’s life...it’s going to be fun.” BRIAN STENBERG
Most recently, Stenberg lived in the Madras area with his wife, Elise (who now teaches fourth grade at May Street Elementary) and their two daughters, Ella (age “four-and-a-half,” Stenberg specifically tells us), and Tinley (11 months). There, Stenberg worked for three years as a P.E. and health teacher at Jefferson County Middle School and two years as an athletic trainer for Madras High School, as well as coached volleyball, basketball, and track. Eventually, though, he felt compelled to try something different.
“I had been pursuing a change and I had been talking to Horizon — I always wanted to come back to this area, just for the school, to get our kids in a private school, feeling really comfortable with Horizon growing up and feeling really good about the direction it’s been moving in the years since I’ve been gone, as well as the time I was here,” he said. “Again, sports being a passion, this was a position that felt good as well.”
Stenberg moved back to Madras this summer and began “figuring out” what responsibilities will go with the half-time position, which Stenberg says will most definitely include lots of scheduling, making sure policies and protocols are up to date, making sure kids have the proper forms turned into the office, and serving on the board for the Big Sky League (1A), which includes HCS. He’ll also be able to keep an eye on his father and his brother Andrew, who are coaching this year’s co-ed high school soccer team.
In his tenure as athletic director, Stenberg says he would like to see the sports offerings expand at HCS, but a lot of that depends on the school’s enrollment numbers as well as student interest. Last year, HCS was unable to field a baseball team, as not enough players showed interest. Stenberg says he wants to establish consistent program and that “we don’t want to do the up-and-down,” having a sport offered one year and then not the next.
“Eventually would it be great to have more sports? To offer a cross country team? Yes. Would it be great to bring back baseball? Of course, but we have to be smart about it as far as what are our growing numbers,” he explained.
In addition to offering additional sports if enrollment and student interest allows, Stenberg says he would like to expand programs that are already in existence, offering them at the younger levels so as to create feeder programs that will help sustain and strengthen sports at the high school level.
“You need to build to create excellence, so that’s our goal there,” he notes.
Whatever specific sport a student decides to play isn’t so important to Stenberg; he just wants to see students involved, having fun, and learning lessons that will help serve them later in life, which he says is one of the things he’s most looking forward to being a part of in his new job.
“Just being involved… with what I see is a quality program, with quality people and building quality kids and supporting the growth of quality kids. That’s our goal,” he says. “Yeah, we’d love to win, we’d love to see higher numbers in the win column than the loss column, but realistically, if we have kids that graduate high school and played four years of sports, three sports, that’d be my goal — trying to give every kid the ability to have 12 seasons of sports would be ideal.”
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