The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WAITSBURG - It may be another week or so before the Waitsburg-Prescott sports community will see him on the sidelines, but the two school districts have made their choice for their new joint athletics director.

JP Thew, a former assistant coach for the Cardinals and the Tigers, who has just wrapped a second tour of Iraq with his National Guard unit from Oregon, will become the new sports programs coordinator for WP.

Thew is expected to start his new job when he returns to southeast Washington by mid-September, school officials said. He arrived back in Maine earlier this week and transfers to Fort Lewis before returning home.

With Thew's appointment, the districts are reverting to a single position for the sports combine AD, after its management was shared on a temporary basis for two years by Waitsburg High School/Preston Hall principal Stephanie Wooderchak and Prescott High School Athletic Director Jack Smiley.

Smiley resigned from his position several weeks ago to become the athletic director for Dayton, but the districts were already on track to go to a joint athletic director arrangement.

Thew, who is married to Prescott High School Principal Jody Thew, said he is looking forward to heading the combine, a job that fulfills a lifelong pursuit and dream of coordinating high school sports programs.

"I'm very excited about the opportunity to serve our communities as athletics director," he wrote in an email from Iraq. "Never before have we been able to offer so many diverse and competitive sports for our athletes to compete in."

Last year, WP added soccer as a fall sport. This year it will begin offering wrestling as a winter sport. Both sports make participation in high school athletics more inclusive, particularly for Prescott students. In several cases, it has also improved their academic performance as a minimal GPA is one of the requirements to compete on the Cardinals or Tigers teams.

"Having a combine provides so many more sports opportunities for our kids than the schools could offer independently," he said in a telephone interview from Maine.

Thew, who has had a career-long focus on sports and physical education, said he has long wanted to serve in the capacity of athletic director. "This is an occupation that has been my goal since college."

Thew grew up on a farm near Cove in eastern Oregon. In high school, he played every sport available as a Leopard: football, basketball, track and summer soccer.

His high school football team went to the state playoffs three years in a row and he played on the Cove basketball team that made it to the state championship game before he graduated in 1994. As a younger high school track athlete, he set a school record for the two-mile run that was broken only this spring, some 20 years later.

In 1999, he received a Bachelor's degree in Education from Eastern Oregon University in La Grande with minors in physical education, health and coaching.

Since college, Thew has coached 23 different teams in a number of different communities, helping take teams to state playoffs in football, basketball and track. This tenure includes Waitsburg and Prescott, where he served as assistant coach for Cardinals or Tigers in fall, winter and springs sports from 2005 to 2008.

"He did a great job for me," said Jeff Bartlow, for whom Thew worked as an assistant coach. "I'm very happy for him. He'll do a great job."

Bartlow said that although it's a big step to go from being mostly an assistant coach to athletic director, Thew seems to have what it takes to do well in this higher-level position.

"He's got a lot of leadership in him," Bartlow said, pointing to Thew's military service and his personality. "He's easy going and doesn't sweat the little stuff."

Thew joined a National Guard battalion based in La Grande in 2000 and served as an S6 communications specialist based in Balad, Iraq, during the past year - his second tour -- with the rank of captain.

In that job, he had to coordinate the efforts of far-flung units hundreds of miles apart, not unlike the scheduling and management of a diverse sports program for two districts that bring athletes from as far as Vista Hermosa and the Jubilee Youth Ranch.

He views his new position as an overall manager who "lines everything up for the (program) coaches' success."

During his time at WP, Thew did raise some eyebrows when he transported a group of football players Prescott to a football practice in Waitsburg in the back a pickup truck because they had missed the bus. It reportedly amounted to a violation of school safety policies and he was called on the carpet for it.

He now chalks up the incident as a lesson.

"That was an unfortunate deal, but it's a learning point," he said in the telephone interview. "It was discussed. It was dealt with and resolved. I will make sure I will not be putting coaches in that situation."