February 2025 ~
Not that long ago, at least in the grand scheme of things, the notion of girls participating in competitive sports was treated by many almost as a novelty, the quaint fantasies of kids playing make-believe and tom boys.
Title IX, the landmark civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, was just getting its legs under it in the early 70s when Julie Hilsenteger (Marshall, 1980) and her friends were running and kicking and throwing balls around the parks and playgrounds of southeast Portland. Most of the sports she and other girls in the Marshall neighborhood were playing would not even be sanctioned as “official” by the Oregon Schools Athletic Association (OSAA) until Hilsenteger entered high school in 1976.
And she could not have cared less.
Hilsenteger had always been around sports, often with her father, John, a statistician for the OSAA and a fixture at high school state championships who also kept stats for the Trail Blazers, Portland Buckaroos hockey team and Portland State sports. (John was one of the driving forces behind the reestablishment of the PIL Hall of Fame in 2004 and served as the organization’s secretary until his passing in 2012.)
“I went to a lot of games and always knew I wanted to play sports,” Hilsenteger remembers. “I didn’t even realize that was kind of unusual for girls. None of us cared about that, even when we first got to Marshall. We just knew we were athletes and we could learn sports and play them and that our teams were good.”
As evidence of this, Hilsenteger points to the first sport she played once she got to Marshall -- soccer. “Going into my freshman year, I was deciding between playing soccer and volleyball and I chose soccer because it was outside,” she remembers. “It was the first year that high school soccer was sanctioned and, while kids at some other schools had been playing club soccer, no one at Marshall had. But, again, we were athletes.”
Marshall’s soccer coach was learning on the fly right alongside Hilsenteger and her teammates, so growing pains were inevitable. “Our first-year coach was Marshall’s German teacher. He was chosen because, since he was from Germany, somebody figured he must know soccer. He didn’t, really,” Hilsenteger says with a laugh.
However, the next year, a Marshall coaching legend-in-the-making and future PIL Hall of Famer, Ken Trapp, took over the team, and its fortunes quickly changed. So did Hilsenteger’s, who would wind up earning four letters and making 1st Team All-PIL as a senior.
“I loved it, she says. “I was one of the fastest players in the state, so I used my speed a lot and loved playing defense. Because we had some really good athletes, we would play defense way up and dare the team to kick the ball over our heads knowing that, if they did, I would run it down before anyone on the other team could get to it.”
Hilsenteger had always loved to run and demonstrated her aptitude for it during a grade-school field day that she wasn’t really even supposed to be participating in. “It was an event for fifth graders, but the P.E. teacher picked a few of us fourth graders that he knew were pretty good runners participate.”
The young speedster competed in four events, won them all and was, well, off to the races. At Marshall she would earn four letters in track and field competing in the 400 meters, 4x100 relay, mile relay and long jump. Hilsenteger and her sprint-relay teammates won PIL championships her first two years at Marshall and took second at state her freshman year. She ran on the mile-relay team that took the PIL title her sophomore year.
Individually, Hilsenteger won 400m PIL championships as a junior and senior, a long-jump title as a junior and took second at state in the 400m her junior season. “That year I was racing against Leanne Warren (a future Oregon Sports Hall of Famer) and I was, like, Nope, not gonna beat her,” Hilsenteger cracks. Two years later, she and Warren would be college teammates.
In addition to the events Hilsenteger won titles or placed in, she competed in the other sprint races as well as the hurdles. After her freshman year she (and all American track and field competitors) had the added challenge of having to negotiate the sport’s transition from yards to meters
“A lot of us had issues that first year,” she remembers. “In the high hurdles, they went from 100 yards to 100 meters, but they didn’t change the number of hurdles. They just moved them farther apart, which took some getting used to. I distinctly remember running the high hurdles in a dual meet and hooking a hurdle and flopping to the ground. I was picking cinders out of my knees the whole summer.”
When it was time to pick a college, Hilsenteger didn’t waste any time fussing over her decision. Not when she had already made her choice back in grade school.
“I always got to go to the Olympic Trials at Hayward Field, and I remember one time when I was in fourth grade watching Pre (University of Oregon track icon Steve Prefontaine) run and turning to my mother (Judy) and saying, ‘I want to go to college here.’”
Hilsenteger’s running skills made her dream come true, even if they didn’t pay her way. Though progress had been made, women’s sports were still lightyears from where they are now, or even a few years after Hilsenteger started running at UO. In fact, when she enrolled, women’s track wasn’t even an NCAA sport. Instead, the Ducks and others competed in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, which advanced women’s college sport significantly in parallel with the enactment of Title IX, but still lacked the financial influence of the NCAA.
That meant that while Hilsenteger had been recruited to UO, it was as a walk-on, not a scholarship athlete. Women’s sports would be incorporated into the NCAA between 1981 and 1983, making more scholarships dollars available, but by that time Hilsenteger was doing fine on her own.
“I was living independently, so I got financial aid,” she says. “So, by the time I could have gotten a scholarship I told them to give it to someone else.”
With the guidance of UO coaching, Hilsenteger’s performances improved dramatically, in more ways than one. “I didn’t have a lot of coaching or training in high school; I was just running on talent. I remember after every 400-meter race, I’d wind up dry heaving. I’d lock up with cramps after running relays. But I never got sick at UO, and I improved my 400 time by three seconds. The coaching made a big difference.”
The Ducks won the Pacific 8 Conference championship all four years Hilsenteger competed and claimed the national title her senior year. While her relay team failed to make it to nationals that year, she wound up with a memorable consolation prize that same weekend.
Back in Eugene, Hayward Field was hosting the annual Prefontaine Classic which featured, among other track-and-field royalty, Czech runner Jarmila Kratochilova, who had set a world record in the 800 meters two years earlier. (Her time of 1:53.28 is still the longest-standing world record in track and field.)
“They had asked another UO runner to serve as Jarmila’s rabbit (a non-competing runner who sets a specified lead pace for the first lap of the race, then drops out), but that runner was competing at nationals,” Hilsenteger remembers. “So, somebody said, ‘Julie can do that. She can easily run a 58-second split.’ So, I got paid to be a rabbit. I’ll forever be kicking myself because I didn’t just keep running to see what I could do against the world champion.”
A pre-med student and chemistry major at UO, Hilsenteger’s post-college plans had been to attend medical school. But after applying to one school and landing on its waiting list, she was approached with another opportunity.
“I ran into Greg Cotton, whose dad, Mark, was the longtime track coach at Grant (and another PIL Hall of Famer),” Hilsenteger remembers. “Greg was coaching at Marshall and suggested I help. I tried it and loved it. So I started thinking, Do I want to reapply to medical school and go to school for another eight years?”
Her short answer was “No.” Hilsenteger coached at Marshall for four years, got her teaching master’s degree and put it to use at Centennial High School, where she taught and coached cross country and track for 34 years before retiring from classroom work. She’s still coaching and about to enter her 37th year.
Hilsenteger hasn’t retired from running. In addition to running half-marathons for fun, she’s participated in 36 Hood-to-Coast Relays.
She and her husband, Jay Wallace, a Madison alum whom she met at a track meet when both were high school juniors, will celebrate 40 years of marriage this summer.
Back when she was that young girl thinking if boys could play sports, she sure as heck could. People assumed, if she never did come to her senses, she’d eventually be a softball player — for the simple (or over simple) reason that her dad was an avid fast-pitch player. She chose a different path when it came to playing sports but wound up following her dad’s footsteps in another way — playing with numbers.
“I went to a lot of Dad’s softball games and tournaments and Mom was the team’s scorekeeper, so I learned how to keep score when I was 6,” Hilsenteger recalls. “Players were always yelling at Mom about something like, ‘That wasn’t an error, that was a base hit.’ So, she had enough and quit. So they had me keep score because they knew no one would yell at a 6-year-old.”
Years later in college, Hilsenteger would earn walking-around money by keeping stats at Ducks football and basketball games. Then after college, her Dad connection earned her the chance to fill in at a Blazer game when a member of the team’s stat crew called in sick. The next year, when another member of the team left for good, Hilsenteger got a permanent job and wound up working alongside her Dad for several years. She’s been the team’s lead statistician since 1989.
Getting inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame in 2018 was both an honor and a bittersweet moment, Hilsenteger says. “I was really excited, especially since Dad was one of the driving forces behind resurrecting the Hall of Fame. But I also regretted that I got inducted after Dad passed away because he would have loved to have experienced that.”
Do you know Julie Hilsenteger? If you’d like to reconnect, she can be reached at [email protected]
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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