<p>A Wallowa School District employee for 33 years, Warren Wilson (right) concluded his teaching, activities director, and athletic director duties at the school Monday, March 31, but hopes to stay on as a coach. Superintendant Bret Uptmor (left) will relieve Wilson in activities and athletic director posts. Seated is high school secretary Linda Lewis.</p>

As of Monday, March 31, 33-year Wallowa School District employee Warren Wilson retired as a teacher.

Wilson, who cites family issues as the reason prompting him to step away from his teaching duties, says the same is not true in regard to coaching. If the school district is willing, says Wilson, he will continue working at the Wallowa school in a coaching capacity.

In 1981, Wilson came to Wallowa to become the high school baseball coach and two years later began a lengthy stint of teaching fourth and fifth graders in Wallowa Grade School.

During the past 33 years, Wilson has coached baseball, boys and girls basketball, and volleyball at the high school level, and even football and other sports to junior high school students and those in lower levels of education. He says his involvement in junior high sports programs has spanned the entire 33 years he has been at Wallowa.

Like most tenured secondary coaches, Wilson speaks highly of the value of sports for individual players.

Sports teach a work ethic, the value of dedication, and the ability to depend on and support others, Wilson says.

Following about 20 years of teaching grade school, with some teaching at higher levels of education interspersed and/or concurrent with his grade school duties, Wilsons primary teaching duties gradually shifted to Wallowa High School where, until Monday, his primary focus was the teaching of computer classes.

For the past 31 years, Wilson has been Activities Director for the Wallowa School District. His duties in the district expanded even further in 1997 when he became Athletic Director as well. Wilson says that as of March 31 those two duties no longer are his and Wallowa High School Superintendent Bret Uptmor will assume them.

Working for a fantastic group of kids and with great teachers, is Wilsons response to a question seeking his most cherished memories during the course of his years teaching and coaching in Wallowa. And his accolades for kids extend beyond the Wallowa school system, describing as awesome his time spent in summers working with youth throughout the county involved with Babe Ruth, Little League, and American Legion baseball teams, and with basketball teams.

Wilson attended Scottsdale College in Arizona for two years before, lured by a desire to live by trees and rivers, he moved on to attend whats now Eastern Oregon University, in La Grande. At both schools, says Wilson, he played collegiate baseball. Primarily a second baseman and backup catcher, Wilson says he spent his final year of college baseball playing third base.

Piecing together Wilsons years of coaching at Wallowa High School in both head and assistant coaching roles for both boys and girls sporting programs is not an easy task. And since that portion of his career with the school district is ongoing, only the major segments will be outlined in this article. Following three years of work as an assistant baseball coach at whats now EOU, Wilson coached that sport at WHS from 1981 to 1987, when the baseball program was cut. When baseball returned to Wallowa High School in 2002, Wilson again coached the team through 2010.

His roles with boys and girls basketball programs at the high school are even more piecemeal. Wilson says he was the head boys basketball coach at Wallowa from 1983 until 1986, assisted in that program from 2000 to 2008, and since 2008 has been serving as head boys basketball coach. Wilson says he headed the girls basketball program from 1991 until 1995 and for the past 19 years has served in the capacity as assistant girls basketball coach.

In the years of 1985 and 2011, says Wilson, the lack of a coach threatened the survival of the schools volleyball program, forcing him to step out and take on that head coaching role as well.