Rogue River Junior Senior High will have a new boys’ basketball coach this fall, and, in a development almost as surprising, it will keep its girls’ basketball coach from its partial season a year ago.
RRJSHS Athletic Coordinator Kyle Garrison confirmed that Max Javernick, who served as boys’ basketball coach for four seasons, starting with the 2022-23 campaign, will not be returning next year.
Javernick became coach in the wake of a winless 0-17 season in 2021-22, the first full winter season after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Describing why he took the coaching job as coming from a love for the Rogue River community and stating his goal of changing Rogue River’s basketball “culture,” Javernick, along with assistant Josh Gorman, began in what was the school’s first year in a four-year stint in Class 3A.
With a team of five seniors who played, including Sam Haag, a starter since his freshman season, the team started the season 2-1 with wins against Glendale and Camas Valley, but did not win the rest of the season.
The following season was the freshman season for Mason Scott, Logan Snow, and Javernick. Looking to develop them as team leaders early, they started all three.
The Chieftains won only one of their first 21 games of the 2024-25 season, but a win at St. Mary’s, a team headed for the state playoffs that had beaten the Chieftains by 35 points in Rogue River, sparked optimism for a 2025-26 season in which 11 players, including seven seniors, would return.
The team was more competitive, at least at the outset last season, lapsing for a quarter or at a critical moment, losing its first three games by an average of nine points before beating Prospect to reach the championship of the Chieftains’ own three-year-old December tournament for the first time.
The Chieftains had four wins through their Jan. 21 23-point win against Camas Valley, but each of those wins was against Class 1A programs. In the 3A Southern Oregon Conference opener, the team had its most competitive game against a league opponent since the St. Mary’s win a year before, but fell in the final moments in a 48-46 loss at home.
All told, the Chieftains, playing in a 3A league through Javernick’s four years, won just one of those games. The team won four times in 2025-26, almost as many as in the previous three years, but finished with nine total wins over four seasons of at least 20 losses.
The position was first advertised on the Rogue River School District’s Website on Aug. 5. Javernick, a former district employee, could not be reached for comment.
When the school worked to field a team and schedule a girls’ basketball season weeks after the official start of the 2024-25 season, the man Garrison hired as coach, former South Medford boys’ basketball coach Brian Pannell, did so intending only to coach through the 14-game schedule that started on Jan. 6 and included the full 3A SOC schedule. Pannell kept to his resolve not to return for next season, through the end of the season, but has agreed to come back for the upcoming season “after some further conversations with me,” Garrison said.
Starting a month into last year’s basketball season, the Chieftains went 0-14 but could return as many as eight players this season, as Rogue River returns to Class 2A to play in the East Cascade League.
Reach reporter Brian Mortensen at [email protected] or 541-582-1707.