Wayne Van Burger was an all-state football player for Coquille High School, a renowned wrestling coach for decades at Marshfield High School and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

After graduating from Coquille in 1967, Van Burger attended Southwestern Oregon Community College for a year before finishing his college education at Oregon College of Education (now Western Oregon University), where he played football for three years and wrestled for one.

Van Burger helped start the wrestling program at Seaside High School in 1971 before moving to Marshfield High School in 1974. He taught at Seaside High School for three years, but will always be remembered for his time after returning to the South Coast. Van Burger taught a variety of subjects at Marshfield over a 31-year stretch from 1974 to 2005.

He helped coach the freshman football team for his entire tenure at Marshfield and was head wrestling coach for 21 years after nine years as assistant, a stretch that watched the Pirates win nine league titles (and 10 dual meet crowns).

Van Burger did a great job selling the sport of wrestling to the student athletes at a time when it wasn’t as popular an option as football, basketball or some other sports.

Coaching freshman football also fed into the success of the wrestling program.

That was a time when Marshfield almost always fielded a full lineup and it wasn’t uncommon for wrestlers to not be able to compete at the district tournament because there were more than two Pirates at most weight classes.

Coaching was a phase of Van Burger’s life, but he went on to have success as a film maker with friend Travis Cooper in Beaver Hill Productions, which they founded a year after he retired from coaching.

Beaver Hill Productions won multiple Emmys for the program ‘The Joy of Fishing’ from the Northwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

The production team traveled to several different countries filming documentaries for the show, but also did projects in Oregon, including a 50-year anniversary video for SWOCC, as well as videos for Travel Oregon and Coos County.

And when film-making ended, Van Burger took a greater interest in photography.