By BEN MCCARTY
News staff writer
Longtime Hood River Valley High School educator, coach
and athletic director Ed Vannet died Monday morning. He was 82.
Vannet coached for 20 years at the school and served as
its head athletic director for 13 more, along with nine years as the
district athletic director.
During that time he coached basketball, golf and
baseball and was an assistant coach for the school’s golf team.
He got the basketball team as far as a fourth-place
finish in 1962, and today the basketball court at HRVHS bears his name. He
and his wife, Cherie, were longtime scorekeepers at the school, and the
court was named Vannet Court in their honor in 2006.
For his efforts he was elected to the second
Hall-of-Fame class at Hood River Valley High School, to be enshrined this
fall.
“I put my whole life here and I loved it,” Vannet told
the News in 2006. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do any other profession.”
According to current HRVHS Athletic Director Keith
Bassham, who had Vannet as his first boss when he began teaching at the
school, Vannet’s death leaves a big hole in the Hood River Valley athletic
family.
“It’s a huge loss to the Hood River athletic
community,” Bassham said, “with all the things he did at the school as a
coach, athletic director and educator.”
Bassham said he was proud to have Vannet as a friend
over the years and remembers most Vannet’s willingness to support and help
athletics at the school however he could.
“He was my first boss here and he was not as big a
wrestling fan then as he is now but he was very supportive of a young
rookie coach that didn’t have a clue,” Bassham said.
In the past year Vannet continued to helping out with
HRV athletics by running the scoreboard at Eagle baseball games, just as
he had at basketball games for years before that.
When the school’s second Hall of Fame Class is honored
Sept. 12-13, Bassham said it will largely be due to Vannet that the group
is there to begin with.
“Every athlete that we have honored has been touched by him,” he said.
