May 2025 ~
Kent Dorsey (Jackson 1978) thought he was going to be a baseball player, and why wouldn’t he?
He’d played Little League and was in middle of his Babe Ruth years, following the well-worn path most kids who think they’re going to play baseball in high school take. He’d done what most kids who think they’re going to play football and wrestle in high school do, too, playing Pop Warner and hitting the mats in a park bureau youth program. Then, right on cue, Dorsey played football and wrestled in his first fall and winter at Jackson.
So now that it was spring, why wouldn’t he be thinking it was time to play baseball?
It’s not like he wasn’t well equipped for the sport. Dorsey’s parents had just spent a decent chunk of their hard-earned cash on a new Wilson A2000 for their son, and he was proudly sporting the glove of his—and so many other 70s kids’—dreams one spring day when he bumped into Vic Carlson in a Jackson corridor.
That’s when he learned he and the Raiders’ track coach weren’t having the same thoughts when it came to Dorsey’s sports future.
“When he saw me with that mitt, he jerked it off my hand, threw it down the hallway and said, ‘Dorsey, you’re coming out for track. You’re gonna throw the javelin for me.’ And I just said, ‘OK’,” Dorsey recalls, laughing at the memory of his instant acquiescence. “That mitt was a spendy purchase for my folks, and for me not to use it was kind of a big deal.”
That wasn’t the only deal Dorsey would make his parents deal with while he was growing up. He may not have foreseen a future in track, but even before he took up organized football, wrestling and baseball, Dorsey was unwittingly laying the groundwork to compete in the track specialty in which he would excel at in high school. And it wasn’t the one that years later coach Carlson would “encourage” him to pursue.
While Dorsey did throw the javelin and, at times, compete in the shot put, discus and hurdles for Jackson (not to mention two decathlons), he won his PIL championship as a pole vaulter. And it was his poor mother who inadvertently inspired him to think that using a long stick to catapult ones’ body high in the air might be kind of a cool to do.
“So, I got started in pole vaulting when I was 6,” Dorsey begins in a tone that leaves it unclear if what’s to follow is truly an origin story or something a bit more…creative. “At the time, we lived in southeast Portland next to what was then a Seven Dees nursery. I was playing with another kid in the nursery area where there was a big pile of sand underneath a telephone pole. The kid dared me to climb up the pole and jump off into the sand. I said, ‘Show me how.’ So he did, and I thought, Well, he survived, so I climbed up the pole. My mom happens to look out her window just in time to see her kid jumping, but she can’t see that I land in the sand because there’s a fence blocking her view.
“She runs out there and, after seeing I’m safe, she’s screaming, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know pole vaulters get killed every year jumping from heights less than what you just did?’ And I’m thinking, Really? Pole vaulting sounds fun!”
A few years later, Dorsey’s folks might have appreciated their son remembering that moment before they bought his A2000. But at least he wound up enjoying, and doing well in, the sport he gave up baseball for. Not that he makes much of a deal these days about any of his past athletic successes.
Those include, in addition to his pole-vaulting championship senior year, earning 1st Team All-PIL as an offensive lineman and being named to the North-South Shrine Game, also as a senior, and winning two PIL wrestling championships.
But ask Dorsey to share his high school highlights and his immediate response is, “Oh, I don’t know.” Then he remembers one particular incident that sounds a lot like the sort of thing that made him think the event sounded so fun back in his telephone-pole vaulting days.
“The day of the PIL championship meet my sophomore year, Vic Carlson got me out on the track at noon so I could do some practicing,” he starts. “On one vault I wind up breaking my pole into three pieces. One piece hits me across the chest and thigh and raises a huge welt that stung like the dickens. Carlson hands me another pole that’s rated 10 pounds lighter, and I wind up setting a personal record that afternoon in the PILs. With a pole I’d never used before.”
It should be noted here that Dorsey’s memory of personal highlights does clear up some when he remembers, with tongue in cheek, that he is, and will forever be, Jackson’s pole-vault record holder.
“I graduated in ’78 and they closed the school in ’82. Now it’s a middle school and there aren’t any middle schoolers who are going to clear 14 feet or whatever my best was,” he quips.
Oh, and Dorsey definitely remembers one more highlight, which was the time he pole vaulted against his brother without knowing it. But more on that later.
For now, Dorsey sums up his high school career by saying, “Our class of ’78 had some amazing athletes, but I was just a good soldier. I was the kind of guy that if you just told me what to do, I’d do it. I knew my responsibilities and what I needed to do and did them to the best of my abilities.”
That approach was enough to earn Dorsey scholarship offers from Lewis and Clark, which wanted him for football, and Portland State, which wanted him as a wrestler. He was prepared to sign a letter of intent to PSU when the cold, hard facts of wrestling for an outstanding college program hit home, delivered by Viking wrestling coach and fellow PIL Hall of Famer Marlin Grahn.
“He made it clear that wrestling was going to be a year-round commitment, and I just didn’t want to give up my track and football,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey turned to Plan B when Linfield reached out and told him he could pursue all three of his sports while pursuing an engineering degree. He wound up earning three letters as a Wildcat, but it should be clear by now what to expect from him in the way of college highlights.
“There aren’t any, really,” he says. “I was on some really good teams, but didn’t get a lot of playing time.”
OK, solid excuse this time.
After spending three years at Linfield, Dorsey transferred to Oregon State for another two as part of the schools’ cooperative engineering degree program. However, he’d wind up getting his degree in education in 1984 and later, over the course of a few summers, he would earn a master’s in advanced math and computer science
With his bachelor’s in hand, Dorsey made a visit to Wilson High School hoping to secure references from some of his former teachers and coaches who had relocated there after Jackson closed. In his first meeting, Dorsey learned Wilson was looking for a math teacher and coach for fall term. A couple days and some paperwork later, he had a job that he held until officially retiring in 2017. He subbed and coach for another three years until calling it quits for good.
Over the years he was Wilson’s head track and assistant football coach for an indeterminant duration. “It was five to 10 years for both. I should probably know this stuff. You have to understand,” Dorsey adds laughing, “I didn’t always hit the pole vault pad the way I was supposed to.”
That sounds like it might explain how Dorsey could have competed against his brother in high school without knowing it, but that’s not actually the case. While he grew up with a brother and sister, it wasn’t until fairly recently that they all learned they had another sibling.
“About 10 years ago, my parents got a knock on their door one day and when they answer it this guy says ‘Hey, I’m your long-lost boy’,” Dorsey says. “That was Todd Hess, and he had waited until his adoptive parents had passed away to track down my mom. It turned out we’d been going to the same church for years and he went to Wilson where was a pole vaulter too. When I was a sophomore and he was a senior, my mom got to watch her sons compete against each other in the PIL meet—without knowing it. Todd’s a great guy, and it has been a huge blessing having him in our family.”
Dorsey’s family includes his 34-year-old son, Nick, from a previous marriage, and his wife of three years, Jane. He says the couple are “traveling fools,” who’ve already been on safaris in South Africa, traveled to Guatemala three times, spent a month in Hawaii, skied in Canada and much more.
He bow hunts, golfs and volunteers rating golf courses for the Oregon Golf Association. At present, he and Jane are currently building a house in Eagle Crest.
In other words, never a dull moment for Kent Dorsey. But that’s probably obvious by now.
Do you know Kent Dorsey? If you’d like to reconnect, he can be reached at [email protected]
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
CyberMuseum bio:
