November 2024 ~
There are glory days and then there are glorious days, and Lisa Owen (Madison, 1983) has plenty of experience with both. But these days it’s a lot easier for her to see the latter, which she enjoys routinely, than the former, which she lived through four decades ago as a decorated high school and college athlete.
That’s especially true considering Owens’ vantage point today is her new home with a glorious view of Newberg’s wine country. Moving from bustling Portland to its more bucolic, wine-centric neighbor brought to life a dream Owens has had almost since she discovered wine and the environments and culture that help define it.
“I loved wine ever since college,” she says. “I’ve gone wine tasting all over, and every time I visit a place, I don’t want to leave. I’ve said for a long time that someday I would have a place that overlooked wine country, and I finally decided that ‘one day’ was now.”
Lisa Owens (Madison, 1983) current photo
It's not that Owens’ glorious todays make her glory days gone by any less important. She just doesn’t get many reminders of them. Not until, say, she gets inducted into the PIL Hall of Fame (2017) for them. Or on the rare occasion when someone asks her to recount them.
Then she’s happy to take a trip back down memory lane or, in Owens’ case, Portland’s N.E. Sacramento Street, where she enjoyed the kind of All-America childhood that a revered American painter once found so inspiring.
“I definitely had a Norman Rockwell kind of upbringing,” she says. “I had two older brothers, Eric and John, and we’d walk to school at Gregory Heights and then Madison until each of us started driving. Mom had lots of friends who lived up and down Sacramento Street, so I always felt like I had eyes on me – in a good way.”
Owens spent much of her childhood in parks and gyms, whether just being a kid or watching her brothers play or, when she was old enough, playing Little League softball herself or, eventually, working summers for her father, Bill.
“Dad worked for the Portland Parks Bureau for 30 years and retired as superintendent,” she says. “But in his younger years he was the sports director and was pretty instrumental in starting recreational softball in Portland (instrumental enough that the Owens Softball Sports Complex at Delta Park bears his name). So, I kind of grew up at Erv Lind Stadium, and my brothers and I all had summer jobs in parks at some point.”
When Owens got to Madison, she was a good enough athlete to make the varsity in both basketball and softball, playing the latter with most of her Little League teammates.
“We had pretty competitive teams for that era,” she says. “I watch women’s games now and am blown away by how good they are, but for that day we were pretty good, too. That was another great part of my upbringing in that neighborhood. We all forged so many friendships and had such a great social construct and it all melded together so well in high school and helped us do well both in sports and school.”
There’s no better example of that than Owens herself. She was named a Multnomah Athletic Club Scholar Athlete when she was only a sophomore. That same year, the Madison softball won the first of three straight PIL championships and Owens, the team’s centerfielder, earned the first of her three 1st Team All-PIL honors. She also lettered in basketball all four years and was named 2nd Team All-PIL as a junior and senior.
After high school, Owens was pragmatic about choosing a college. “I wanted to go to a smaller college where I could play sports, but they wouldn’t dominate my life,” she says.
She found the balance she was looking for at Pacific Lutheran University, where she lettered in softball all four years and made the All-Northwest Conference team as a junior and senior while playing on two regional championship and national playoff teams.
After earning her degree, Owens applied for teaching/coaching jobs at several Oregon and Washington schools until, serendipitously, a positioned opened at her alma mater. Barely four years after graduating, the 22-year-old found herself back at Madison, now teaching while coaching softball and freshman and JV volleyball.
“The timing was just so fortunate, and I wound up loving the job,” says Owens, who credits former Madison coach and athletic director Bill Wiitala for making it possible. “I knew him because he was there when I was a student, and now I had to interview with him. I just think he had faith in me, and I’ll never forget that he vouched for me and supported me. It was such a coup to be able to coach alongside people like Dave Gasser, who had been a teacher of mine, and Jeff Erdman. They were so supportive of Madison’s women’s sports programs, and I know it wasn’t that way at all schools.”
While Owens was at Madison, from 1988 to 1997, her softball teams won the 1992 PIL championship and claimed co-championships in 1988, 1993 and 1997. She was PIL Coach of the Year in 1992 and 1997.
“When I coached I found myself being more competitive than I was even as a player,” she remembers. “As an athlete, I just loved to play, and I loved to work hard. But I was probably more competitive with myself than other people. But as a coach, I was representing not just a school, but an entire roster of young female athletes. And I was building a program that was trying to bring out the best in them as student athletes and as young women. I wanted them to strive to be their best but to also have the whole team in mind. As an athlete, you’re right in the middle of the experience, but as a coach you are kind of outside, guiding that experience. And I think that brought out the competitive side of me. It was a really rewarding time.”
Owens says the PIL co-championship her Madison team won in 1997 served as a fitting end to her coaching and teaching career. She left education for a real estate career and, while those glory days may be behind her, the glorious days she’s enjoying today are pretty hard to beat.
“My world is so different now; it’s a completely different chapter of life and it’s beautiful and I am so grateful for it,” she says. “I love being in real estate. I took up painting several years ago. My mom is 91 and doing well. My brothers and sisters-in-law and I are all very close, and I have four nephews, with another on the way, and two great nephews. They, and my rescue dog Tez, are the kids in my world. Most people around me have no clue I was ever an athlete.”
Apparently, they didn’t get the memo in 2017 about Owens earning a spot in the PIL Hall of Fame in 2017.
“I was really taken aback by that,” she says. “My time as an athlete was such a pivotal time in my life. I gained so much from the experience of being surrounded by great coaches at such a supportive school, and then to be able to go back and have another experience as a coach and to be surrounded again by amazing people. So, to then be inducted into the Hall of Fame for experiences I felt I was blessed to have, and to be highlighted for whatever I contributed, was huge honor.”
Do you know Lisa Owens? If you’d like to reconnect, she can be reached at [email protected]
