With a proud historical past of championing sports activities, COCC gives teaching, competitors and train sources for college kids and the neighborhood
Mud-plastered legs are a badge of honor for rivals of the “Jungle Run,” the annual enjoyable run at Central Oregon Community College that follows 4 miles of hilly Bend campus terrain, navigating obstacles and sloshing via a shin-deep gulch. Snakes are on the course, too — however they’re rubber (often), redeemable for prizes. Yes, it is perhaps a jungle on the market, however a minimum of the snakes are innocent.
This yr’s race is being run on May 7, and shortly after, runners can “Storm the Stairs” on May 19, which begins with a flat monitor part after which unravels up and over 465 heart-pounding steps, tracing the campus’s steep contours. Both annual races — now crossing their thirtieth anniversaries — double as scholarship fundraisers. They routinely draw a various area: highschool monitor athletes, weekend warriors, racing diehards, energetic households.
“These are long-standing, high-energy races,” says James DiRosa, assistant director of COCC’s membership and intramural sports activities and a former private coach. “They’re a great way to engage with the community while supporting students.” Runners can register at cocc.edu/sports.
Athletic endeavors have a deeply ingrained historical past at COCC, courting again to its early years. The faculty, based in 1949, rapidly noticed the significance of sporting choices for college kids.
“In ‘55, it was just basketball,” recalls Jim Crowell of Bend, who set the school’s file — stamping 34 factors on the board — in a 96-67 rout of Oregon Tech. “We played maybe 18 games,” Crowell remembers of the season, which took on JV squads from locations like Willamette University and Portland State, and hosted dwelling campaigns within the outdated Kenwood brick fitness center on Newport Ave.
Back then, the school — sharing quarters with Bend High School — was solely an evening college. Its mascot, the nighthawk, was a nod to the varsity’s night hours. But when the campus moved to its present dwelling on Awbrey Butte in 1964, and with the school now not restricted to nighttime research, the chook obtained nudged into retirement. The college students voted for a brand new mascot, the bobcat, partially impressed by a presentation from a former circus coach who’d introduced a number of of the tamed cats alongside to indicate. Clever, sturdy and adaptable, the animal made an impression.
COCC Bobcats would make an impression of their very own — particularly on snow. In March of 1976, carrying cowboy hats and hauling ski baggage, COCC’s 18-person ski workforce should have reduce fairly the picture shifting via Vermont’s Burlington airport. They had been heading to the National Junior College Athletic Association Ski Championships at Smuggler’s Notch, and of the 15 faculty groups converging on the three-day ski-off that yr, they had been the one Westerners.
The workforce received all alpine and Nordic occasions, in each males’s and ladies’s classes. In its first-ever nationwide sporting competitors, a small neighborhood faculty from Central Oregon had, in spectacular style — and with a Nordic workforce member unexpectedly filling in for an injured downhiller — claimed the nationwide title.
COCC intercollegiate play would develop to area groups in golf, wrestling, monitor, even rodeo, amongst different sports activities. And from cross-country groups successful the Nike Cup in 1988, to track-and-field athletes filling the top-two podium spots on the 1994 nationwide championships in Odessa, Texas, COCC proved formidable. Bobcat membership baseball, presently not fielding a workforce, ranked twenty fifth within the nation again in 2015. Impressive for a faculty that doesn’t recruit or have a baseball diamond.
Today’s choices at COCC are various, together with a coed intramural basketball league — thought of the best degree of aggressive hoops in Bend — plus volleyball, pickleball and tennis intramural choices.
Outdoor tennis on the COCC Bend Campus
“We’re hosting intramural leagues every week,” says DiRosa, referencing the basketball and volleyball contests which might be open to each college students and dues-paying neighborhood members. “We’re trying to make the sports program more robust. Golf participated in a tournament in Hood River a few weeks ago, the running club has some momentum.”
Intercollegiate golf equipment, akin to working, are designed with out full eligibility circumstances. But they provide or facilitate outdoors competitors. Clubs additionally embrace tennis, soccer and — filling the pitch with extra teammates every year — rugby. Having fashioned in 2012, rugby rostered 33 gamers this previous season.
Connor Huet, a first-year engineering pupil, performs alongside his similar twin, Tristan. “I decided to try out for the team once I met coach Max — his personality and friendliness instantly made me sign up,” says Huet. The brothers realized rugby at Summit High, so COCC was an excellent match. “I think it is such an amazing part of what COCC offers…something fun and meaningful to be a part of.”
Their workforce goes toe-to-toe with Division III packages and just lately made it to the championship match of the Northwest Collegiate Rugby Conference in Ellensburg, Washington, shedding a hard-fought ultimate to the University of Idaho.
COCC can also be continually listening to what college students may prefer to strive. Current conversations embrace ladies’s rugby, final Frisbee, inline hockey and flag soccer. This fall, in reality, the Bend campus is for the primary time internet hosting an NFL-affiliated youth flag soccer camp, run by Next Athlete, that’s anticipated to construct some native curiosity and engagement. For the rising Madras campus, basketball and bowling are being thought of as that website’s first-ever sports activities choices.
Crossing over into educations, Bobcats can earn faculty credit score and get a exercise on the similar time. A broad catalog of exercise-based programs covers common focuses like weight coaching and Pilates, with specialty research in issues like Brazilian jujitsu, masters swimming and hip-hop cardio dance.
It’s an energetic place. For college students and neighborhood athletes alike, the physiology lab offers entry to V02 max and physique composition testing, performed by an on-staff health knowledgeable. The fitness center and weight room are additionally open to members of the general public (presently for $124 per time period). And neighborhood runners often loop the school’s Smurf-blue monitor, establishing beginning blocks or working intervals.
“There are so many opportunities,” says DiRosa, whose aim is to incorporate extra Central Oregonians in athletics at COCC and domesticate the sporting tradition. To see what’s within the playbook, go to cocc.edu/sports.