On Viking hoops, Golliver, Bjaranson, Warren and Callan, and Winterhawk legends
Jaylin Henderson dunks for two of his 20 points in Portland State’s 84-60 blowout of Weber State Monday night as the Vikings clinched the Big Sky Conference regular-season championship (courtesy Jack Lewy)
With less than two minutes left on the clock, as Jase Coburn emptied his Portland State bench with the Big Sky Conference regular-season championship safely tucked away, partisans among the season-high crowd of 1,649 at Viking Pavilion stood, cheered and waved white flags in celebration.
Weber State had raised the proverbial white flag sometime earlier.
Portland State emphatically seized its third Big Sky title in 30 years of play — and its first since 2007-08 — with a rousing 84-60 victory over the underwhelming Wildcats.
With Weber alum and basketball general manager Damian Lillard watching courtside along with Ken Bone, PSU’s head coach during the last championship season, the Vikings (19-10 overall, 13-5 in WCC play) dominated from start to finish in the regular-season finale.
In his fourth season at the PSU helm following eight seasons as an assistant in the Park Blocks, Coburn secured his first conference title. As fans and players celebrated on-court, confetti fell from the rafters and Queen’s “We are the Champions” played on the PA, Coburn knelt to the floor, closed his eyes and appeared to thank someone special.
“I am proud of our guys for how hard they played tonight,” Coburn told me. “Couldn’t be more proud of our senior group. It was a perfect way to send them out.”
The Vikings had dropped their previous three games to the teams directly behind them in the WCC standings. The Wildcats (16-15, 10-8) were next on the list, but they were no match for a PSU team that played as if it were possessed.
“It is a very resilient bunch,” Coburn said. “Look how we came back from losing three in a row. Yesterday, when we walked in the building off the bus, I had a really good feeling about it.”
Portland State led 25-14 midway through the first quarter and increased the margin to 43-26 at halftime. With star forward Terry Miller sitting out the first eight minutes of the second half after taking stitches for a gash on the chin, the Vikings kept the turbines going, jacking the difference to 65-39.
Miller, a 6-8, 250-pound senior in his second season at PSU after a transfer from Louisiana Tech, scored 16 of his 18 points in the first half and finished with five rebounds, six assists, three blocked shots and three steals in 27 minutes. He can score with either hand around the basket and has a deft passing touch. Senior guard Jaylin Henderson was electric, motoring for a game-high 20 points to go with 10 assists, seven rebounds and four steals.
The Vikings ran the backdoor play to perfection three or four times. I am not sure how many dunks they had, but there had to be seven or eight. Some came off lobs, but several came in transition as PSU won the fast-break points battle 16-0.
“We ran. Credit to our defense, though,” Coburn said. “Our defense starts our offense. We have been a good defensive team all year long.”
Portland State had 11 steals and five blocks and held Weber to .387 shooting from the field, including 5 for 21 from 3-point range. The local quintet controlled the tempo and never let up on the gas pedal.
The Vikings advance as the No. 1 seed to the WCC Tournament in Boise. They have a bye in the first round, then begin action Sunday against the winner of the Idaho State-Northern Arizona first-round contest. One victory would given PSU its fourth 20-win season in the Big Sky era. A tournament title would send the Viks into the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2009.
Former Portland sportswriter Ben Golliver (right), shown with Trail Blazer rookie Yang Hansen during the 2025 Las Vegas Summer League, was a victim of the Washington Post’s layoff of its entire sports staff (courtesy Ben Golliver)
I don’t think Ben Golliver will be out of a full-time job for long.
The Beaverton High grad — valedictorian, class of 2001 — was part of the massive layoff of the sports department at the Washington Post a month ago. Golliver, 42, had been the Post’s respected NBA writer for seven years.
“I wrote more than 1,500 stories at the Post,” Golliver tells me. “Collectively, they got more than 50 million page views, and that was behind a paywall.
“But I have no bitterness, no regrets. It was my dream job. I covered seven NBA Finals and two Olympics. The Post had a Dream Team of writers and editors. It was shocking and disappointing when they pulled the plug, but there’s no negativity on my end. The Post changed my life.”
Golliver never wrote for the student newspapers at either Beaverton High or Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he graduated with a degree in creative writing.
“Growing up, my two favorite things in life were basketball and writing, but I never put two and two together,” he says with a laugh.
He was working a marketing job in Tigard when the Trail Blazers won the lottery for the No. 1 pick in the 2007 draft.
“I came rushing home from work and started up a free blog that was called ‘Draft Kevin Durant,’ ” Golliver says. “The idea was to try to convince (Portland GM) Kevin Pritchard not to draft Greg Oden. That was my start of writing about basketball. It took me til my mid-20s to figure it out.”
Later that year, Golliver started work with Blazers Edge, for whom he continued to write until 2014. He went from there to CBS Sports and to Sports Illustrated before landing a job at the Post in 2018.
Golliver, who lives in Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California, remains under contract with the Post through the end of April. He has continued with a subscription podcast he began in 2020 and began a Substack column a couple of weeks ago that Golliver says debuted as the No. 2 new best-seller site for the online service.
“I am hoping to stay in the mix with a national writing role covering the NBA,” he says. “With the timing in the middle of the season, that’s a bit of a challenge for now.”
The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.
Adam Bjaranson, here with wife Lindsay (left) and their three children during his final telecast at KOIN, is enjoying retirement from the sportscasting profession (courtesy Adam Bjaranson)
Adam Bjaranson retired in December from KOIN after 24 years in Portland television. How is he doing away from his sportscasting job?
“It has been fan-frickin’-tastic,” Bjaranson says. “I’m not kidding. I haven’t missed it for a second.”
Bjaranson amends that comment slightly: “There are certain aspects of it that I miss, like the story-telling. But it came to a point where we had to come up with the story idea, had to pitch it to the producer, then had to shoot most of our own stories. It started to become a one-man band, which is stuff I did when I started in the business back in 1997 (in Coos Bay).”
And, he says, “balancing two careers was the most difficult part.”
In recent years, Bjaranson had been juggling two semi-full-time jobs, also working in title insurance. He will continue with the latter employ.
“That is going well,” he says. “I have taken over a new office. It has been a lot of work there, but I love the banking hours. I am in bed usually by 9:30. I am up by about 5:30. Get to get a little workout in before I start my day.”
After a short stint to start his broadcast career in Coos Bay, the Warrenton native and Portland State grad spent 3 1/2 years in Tri-Cities, Wash. He came to Portland in 2001 to work for KPTV. Bjaranson moved to KGW in 2005 and stayed for five years, then spent six years (2010-16) as TV studio host for the Trail Blazers. He began at KOIN as sports director in 2017.
Bjaranson, who turns 56 this month, says the primary reason he left KOIN was to spend more time at home with wife Lindsay and their three children aged 12, 10 and seven.
“That was the genesis behind it,” he says. “Lindsay works at Nike and needed help with the kids at home. I had to get the kids ready for school at 6:30 (a.m.) and then not return home until 12:15, 12:30 at night. Then wash, rinse and repeat.
“(Sportscasting) was such a great career for me, but the industry in general has become a much younger crowd. It is a younger kids’ game now on TV”.
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Jon Warren, for 24 years Mike Parker’s sidekick on their Corvallis radio sports talk show, is going solo with a talk show on an online radio station in the Mid-Valley (courtesy Jon Warren)
Another popular local sportscaster, Jon Warren, is also on the move.
Mike Parker’s long-time partnership with Warren as co-hosts of the daily “Joe Beaver” sports talk show on KEJO radio in Corvallis ended last week.
“We worked 24 years together,” says Warren, 60. “That’s a pretty good run.”
But the versatile Warren, 60, calls it a “soft retirement,” and from terrestrial radio only. He will work part-time until September at KEJO as he transitions into a gig at midvalleyradio.com, an online radio station he built.
Warren’s new project will include a general morning show — “light on music, heavy on talk, kind of like Craig Walker back in the day,” he says. “It will be focused on the mid-Valley, Corvallis and Albany, with texts and phone calls with listeners. And we’ll carry Corvallis and Crescent Valley football games, which I’ve been doing (at KEJO) for the past 20 years.”
Warren also plans to do tailgate and post-game shows for Beaver football in the fall.
“And I will cover sports like a reporter would so I can use it during updates on the new station,” he says.
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Ron Callan, radio play-by-play voice of Oregon State women’s basketball, sang the national anthems of three countries on Senior Day last Saturday (courtesy Ron Callan)
Ron Callan one-upped himself before Saturday’s regular-season finale for Oregon State women’s basketball team. The Beavers’ play-by-play announcer sang the national anthems of Australia, Belgium and Colombia — all in their native languages — in addition to the Star Spangled Banner before the Beavers’ 71-69 overtime loss to Loyola Marymount at Gill Coliseum. Callan had sung two international anthems prior to games before, but this was the first time he belted out three of them.
It is a continuation of the tradition Callan started a year ago of paying tribute to OSU players on Senior Day by singing their country’s anthems. I wrote about it here last year.
Those who got Callan’s senior treatment last Saturday were center Lizzy Williamson of Australia, center Nene Sow of Belgium and forward Susana Yepes of Colombia. Callan sang the Australian anthem in English, the Belgium anthem in French and the Colombian anthem in Spanish. That is in addition to singing the U.S. anthem in, you guessed it, Americanese.
“I took four years of French in high school, so that was pretty easy,” he says. “With Spanish, I just practiced the words, over and over.”
That is a lot of work, even for a guy with a musical background and a nice singing voice.
“I was pretty exhausted when I got home that night,” Callan says.
OSU coach Scott Rueck was appreciative of Callan’s work.
“Ron Callan spoiled us once again with three unique national anthems,” Rueck said. “It was the classiest thing ever. It was so neat to see smiles on the faces of Lizzy, Nene and Susana as their anthems were being played. It was a celebration of the effort so many people have put in this program over the years.”
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Five of the players selected among the top 10 in the Winterhawks’ 50-year history will be on hand Saturday for a special ceremony prior to Portland’s WHL home date with Everett at Memorial Coliseum.
And two of them — Perry Turnbull and Wayne Babych — will represent the very first season of the franchise. Both of them were Winterhawks in 1976-77 before embarking on successful NHL careers.
Also appearing Saturday at the MC will be Ken Yaremchuk (1980-83), Glen Wesley (1984-87) and Dennis Holland (1985-89).
The other five players chosen among the top 10 all-time Hawks will not be there. They are Cam Neely (1982-83), Adam Deadmarsh (1991-95), Brenden Morrow (1995-99), Marian Hossa (1997-98) and Ty Rattie (2009-13).
Who was chosen as No. 1? That won’t be announced until Saturday.
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