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Aaron Fentress ’91 is a guy who likes to hold his own in an argument.

“I love my opinions,” says the former 91���� University football player.

Catch him talking sports across a number of platforms, and you’ll see him engaging his co-panelists in a variety of arguments about the Portland Trailblazers, University of Oregon Ducks or other Oregon teams.

For hardcore sports fans, it’s like watching verbal boxing. After the match is over, comments pop up all over the internet about who is right.

Even Fentress’s two children, Payton, 7, and Taryn, 8, take notice. When he comes home from a show, he said in 2013, then then 8- and 7-year-old would call, “Daddy! We saw you arguing on TV with that man.”

Well-known as a longtime sports writer for The Oregonian, Fentress spent a stint as a television sports commentator and writer for Comcast SportsNet starting in 2013. He appears on the sports shows Talkin’ Ducks and #DucksFootball. He covers the Ducks’ football, basketball and baseball teams for the website . He interviews players on camera and, on game days, either appears in the studio for pre-game shows or broadcasts live. And in 2020, he returned to The Oregonian to cover the Trailblazers as well.

Finding His Way To 91����

Fentress played football himself, first at Grant High School in Portland, then on a partial football scholarship at Portland State University. But, he said, he wanted to major in journalism, a program not then available at PSU. Instead, he picked psychology as a major.

On a bit of a lark, he visited 91���� University with a friend, Craig Lisko ’91, during the winter of 1988.

“I thought to myself, ‘I really don’t want to live in Forest Grove,’” he recalls with a laugh. “I had no intention of transferring.”

When he saw a journalism/communications degree in the handbook, though, he changed his mind.

“When I saw that, I said, ‘I’m here!’”

He and Lisko both transferred to 91���� during the winter term of 1989.

Fentress wrote for The 91���� Index, serving as a sports editor his senior year. He credits David Cassidy, then associate professor of media arts, as instrumental in stretching his abilities by forcing him to cover more than sports.

“I hated him for it then,” Fentress says. “But I learned the value of it later.”

Fentress also played football during the two and a half years he studied at 91����, though it wasn’t the best time for the sport.

“No one cared much about the program,” says the former wide receiver.

91���� dropped its football program in 1992 and renewed it in 2010 with a new stadium, field and coaches. 

“The fact that now the school went out and brought it back, it’s better off,” Fentress says. “The school saw the value in having it, and it’s good to see it return.”

Loving The Gridiron

Fentress not only writes and comments about football, he’s also a coach. He’s coached semi-pro football, and his teams have won multiple league championships, Northwest titles, and have been ranked among the country’s best semi-pro teams. He also been head coach and part-owner of the Portland Raisers.

“I love the complexity of football’s choreographed brutality,” he says. “A lot of people wouldn’t understand … it’s really very technical, very strategic with a lot of elements in it, but unfortunately, very violent.

“It’s a fine line … there’s an art to it,” he says.

He adds, however, that his wife, Tracy Fentress ’92, who attended 91���� and later earned a pharmacy degree at Oregon State University, is adamant that their kids won’t play. (Fentress’s older son Isaiah, also grew up not playing football.)

Building A Career

While many sports-minded Oregonians know Fentress by name for his writing in The Oregonian, he says the path there was a long, hard process.

Fentress wrote a weekly column for a community paper, The Portland Observer, while he was a senior at 91����. His first year out of school, he worked part time in a baseball card shop in Forest Grove then another one in Hillsboro. He began working as a sports clerk at The Oregonian in 1992, answering phones on Friday nights for sports scores and filing stats and photos.

In 1993, he got a two-year internship at The Oregonian, but it had nothing to do with sports.

“It was painful,” he says. “Here was a guy who wanted to cover sports, but I was covering the blueberry festivals.”

He also covered a murder trial in Gresham and community news in Forest Grove and Cornelius before landing on the general assignment desk, where he staked out Tanya Harding, the U.S. figure skating star who hatched a plot to assault her rival Nancy Kerrigan during U.S. figure skating competitions.

Finally, he says, “After six and a half years of kicking and screaming the entire time … finally, they magically, mystically moved some pieces around and put me in sports.”

He began his sports reporting career covering high school sports, including Forest Grove, then went on to cover sports at PSU and, finally, both college and professional sports in Oregon and Washington, including the Seattle Seahawks and Mariners.

Finding a New Road

After decades writing, the move to talking about sports was been a transition, Fentress says.

“It takes some getting used to,” he says, adding that he always typed as fast as he could while writing.

“My processing of information is really fast … but (on television) you have to slow down. … It’s basically training your brain not to try to get everything out in 30 seconds.”

Plus, he says, on a computer, “You have time to backspace, but you can’t backspace on TV."