Hall of Fame Spotlight: Jack Riley
October 15, 2015 | Baseball
Jack Riley won 613 games, captured five Northern Division championships, led the Beavers to three NCAA regional berths and was a five-time Coach of the Year in his 22-year career (1973-94) as Oregon State baseball coach.
However, his biggest accomplishment may have been simply saving the program in the lean years of the 1970s and 1980s, when OSU's men's swimming, tennis and track & field teams, and its arch-rival baseball program at Oregon, were eliminated for budgetary reasons.
Riley's hard work, fiscal wizardry, fund-raising and just plain stubbornness kept the Beavers above water. He spent countless hours painting, mowing, replacing rotted wooden seating, raking and leveling the infield and doing anything else necessary to make old Coleman Field the best ballpark possible despite his meager resources.
His dedication is a big reason why the Beavers still play on the same site they did when the program began in 1907, making modern-day Coleman Field the oldest continuous ballpark in college baseball. He had no way of knowing it then, but his selfless sacrifices helped set the table for their ascension from regional to national prominence under successor Pat Casey.
Now second-winningest coach in program history behind Casey, Riley will be inducted into the Oregon State Athletics Hall of Fame during Homecoming weekend, Oct. 23-24.
“His record and his longevity here speaks for itself,” Casey said of Riley, a former Linfield baseball and basketball star who is also in that university's Hall of Fame. “If you look at what Jack did to keep the program at Oregon State, it took almost all of his energy to make sure baseball was maintained, and at a high level.
“What he did here allowed me to take the program to the next step if we could get into a reunified Pac-10,” which finally happened in 1999.
“Jack was one of the most competitive human beings I have ever been around. His teams were extremely disciplined, extremely fundamental, and overachieved in every area of the game.
“I can't begin to tell you how important it was to come into a place that already had tradition, an attitude and a high expectation level that was set forth by Jack Riley.”
For many years, Riley didn't have a full-time assistant. Yet he still recruited seven future major-leaguers, five All-Americans and 38 MLB draftees in an era when the Northwest was an afterthought in the college baseball world.
He coached 72 Northern Division all-stars and five Northern Division MVPs. He coached a Rhodes Scholar and three Academic All-Americans. The Pac-10 began its all-academic teams in 1991; nine of his players were honored from 1991-94, when he retired after directing the Beavers to a Northern Division crown.
The entire 2015 OSU Hall of Fame class will be inducted on Friday, Oct. 23. A reception for the honorees will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Club level of Reser Stadium; dinner and the induction ceremony will follow at 7 p.m.
Riley and the other inductees – gymnast Heidi Anderson, former football standout Ken Simonton, former basketball student-athlete and coach Jimmy Anderson, longtime coach, athletic administrator and faculty member Pat Ingram, and the 2005 College World Series baseball team – will also be honored during the Oct. 24 football game against Colorado.
The OSU Athletics Hall of Fame was established to honor and preserve the memory of those student-athletes, teams, coaches, and members of the athletic staff who have contributed in an outstanding and positive way to the promotion of OSU's athletic and academic programs.
