West Field High

Jantzen Smith Ryan has been waiting to be a high school volleyball head coach and will get her shot next year in a gymnasium that’s not even built yet.

Smith Ryan was announced as West Field High School’s volleyball head coach last week, and she has the distinction of being the school’s first sports head coach. Hiring processes are ongoing for the football and girls soccer head coaching spots.

Smith Ryan has been an assistant volleyball coach at Fremont High for the last five seasons and was briefly the interim head coach at Fremont near the end of the 2021 season. She called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and feels lucky to be able to do it.

“I’m feeling super honored and just really really excited. I was thrilled when they called me,” she said. “They announced it that Friday, they called me earlier, but thrilled and just ready to go … I’m so excited that they’d give me the opportunity and I can’t wait to get going.”

The new high school, located in Taylor, is still under construction and it’s expected to open to students next year. Until then, there’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to building a high school sports program from scratch.

Weber School District

“I mean, you’re creating a whole volleyball program, right, so we’re looking into ordering all the equipment and gear necessary. I’ve made like a plan for where to start as far as, we’re working on summer schedules, we’re working on offseason schedules,” she said.

Smith Ryan recently got her teaching degree from Weber State, is in her second year teaching PE and health at Wahlquist Junior High in Farr West and coaches club volleyball on the side.

She’s hopeful to teach at West Field but those positions won’t open until officials know exactly how many teachers the school will need.

“I’m just super passionate about, obviously volleyball, but the community, and I’m thrilled to get to coach where I’ve grown up, you know,” she said.

Smith Ryan grew up in West Haven, graduated from Fremont High and still lives in western Weber County. Her grandfather is Ted Smith, the former, longtime basketball coach and athletic director at Roy High, the school where the gymnasium bears his name.

A large part of creating a sports program from the ground up is the material items such as uniforms, equipment and whatnot. Another big part is scheduling games for the 2024 season, and that’s the part that no one’s really sure about right now.

West Field High, whose school boundary will take students who currently go to both Fremont and Roy high schools, applied for the 5A classification for athletics with the UHSAA.

Weber School District enrollment projections in April placed West Field’s enrollment around 1,368 students for the 2024-25 school year. The allure of attending a new high school is expected to fuel a ton of enrollment interest and as such, the 1,368 number is expected to reach at least 1,400 and could possibly go as high as 1,900.

In 5A, West Field would have two feasible options for athletics in the 2024-25 school year: join the Weber, Davis, and Box Elder county schools in Region 5 and make an eight-team region into a nine-team region, or go independent for one year before the next realignment and still qualify for state tournaments based on RPI.

Both options have tangible pros and cons related to scheduling.

Another option floated in the Region 5 principals’ meeting earlier this month is that West Field could join 4A Region 11 (Cache Valley and Bear River) for one year — though the UHSAA has lately gone away from multi-classification regions, so it’s unclear how serious the Region 11 possibility really is.

West Field High is part of an initial $279 million bond issue (that price tag has since dramatically risen) that voters passed in 2021 to fund a new high school, junior high and elementary school in the high-growth, western part of Weber County, as well as a rebuild of the aging Roosevelt Elementary in Washington Terrace.

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.

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