Drive past Stephenson Field these days and you’ll notice something missing — the infield.
Two months after high school baseball coach Levi Webber went before the Philomath School Board for a final round of funding, the “Rolling Out the Carpet” project has moved from fundraising to dump trucks.
The old infield has been dug out, drainage has gone in and a fresh base of rock has been graded and rolled. Nearly all of it was done with donated equipment and volunteer help.
“Honestly, it’s gone a lot smoother than I anticipated up to this point,” Webber told me Friday morning.
Stokes Construction and Timber Supply got the ball rolling. Handy Hands helped with drainage, and Dennis Gibson brought in trucks to haul rock, plus graders and rollers to finish the base. PHS graduate Ryan Starwalt of Northwest Sports Turf Solutions has guided the work throughout and will install the turf.
The one hiccup has been the turf itself. Ordering it took longer than expected, partly because Starwalt’s contact at the supplier was out for a week and partly because of layout issues on the company’s end. The order is now in, and Webber expects delivery within a week or two. Installation should take five or six days after that. He had hoped to finish by the end of October, but mid-November now looks more realistic.
More is coming after the turf. Oregon State’s concrete lab, which tests experimental mixes, is donating concrete for a stem wall on a new home-side berm, curbs for the relocated bullpens and a sidewalk from the dugout to the parking lot. The big wall of dirt currently along the left-field line will become spectator berms on both sides. That includes the visitors’ side, next to the high school’s forestry area.
The extra dirt has already done some good elsewhere. Crews hauled 20 to 30 loads to the fields by the middle school, including the JV baseball field. Gibson leveled them out for spring.
On the financial end, Webber said the outpouring so far has mostly been labor and materials, and he admits fundraising has taken a back seat to getting the field done. Still, the baseball side needed far less rock than planned. That savings should carry over to the softball field, where crews plan to use the same approach.
Once the baseball bills are settled, Webber will have a firm number for finishing the softball field. The Booster Club may contribute and he has other potential donors in mind.
“Once we say, ‘Hey, this is where we’re at,’ it’ll be nice for people to know that’s the target we’ve got to hit,” he said.
Softball work probably won’t start until next fall. That’s the gap School Board Chair Tom Klipfel worried about in August, and it’s the next test of the community’s support. If the baseball field is any indication, that support should be there.
For now, everyone’s watching the forecast. After one of the mildest falls anyone can remember, a couple more dry weeks would let the turf go down without a hitch.
2. Fight song
On a wall in the Philomath High gym, just below the American flag, hangs a white-and-gold banner with the words to the “Warrior Fight Song.”
“PHS, our hats are off to you! Warriors, Warriors, fighters through and through.”
If that sounds familiar, it should, at least to anyone who’s been to Reser Stadium. The Warriors’ fight song is borrowed from “Hail to Old OSU,” which Oregon Agricultural College grad Harold Wilkins published in 1914.
Now a PHS student wants something original. He submitted a proposal for a new fight song directly to the Philomath School Board, backed by a petition with signatures collected across multiple schools. The board discussed it at Tuesday’s meeting, and Board Chair Tom Klipfel was careful to say the board wasn’t deciding anything or weighing the merits.
Klipfel did point out that thousands of living alumni probably have an opinion on the subject. He also recalled the debate when state rules threatened the Warrior mascot. Still, he said he personally tends to agree with the student, since it’s OSU’s song with “Warrior” swapped in for “Beaver.”
Then came the twist. Wyatt Coen, a PHS senior and Associated Student Body co-president, told the board he isn’t sure anyone at the school knows the song exists.
“The only reason I even know we have a fight song is because there’s a banner in the gym that says ‘Warrior Fight Song’ on it,” said Coen, who is a student representative on the School Board. He added that students hear a song played at games without knowing what it is: “We all just stand there and clap.”
That surprised Klipfel, whose kids sang the fight song at football and basketball games when they went through PHS. “Granted, my youngest is 27 now,” he said.
Board member Sandi Hering had heard the music for the proposed song and liked it, though she said it sounded more like a beautiful instrumental than a fight song. Nobody on the board had seen the words yet.
In the end, the board pointed the idea back to the high school. Coen said the ASB council has already been working on a new school motto and could take up the fight song too. Superintendent Susan Halliday said she wants to talk with students, performing arts instructor Erica Hall and others.
One more wrinkle: The banner’s lyrics aren’t quite OSU’s. The first half follows the Beavers’ chorus closely, but the second half — “Watch us as we rise up to the top … we will never stop” — has been rewritten.
Not everyone got that memo. This season, the PHS junior varsity girls soccer team has been singing the fight song, and coach Anton Grube taught it to them ahead of the varsity’s match against Cascade. He used the version he learned years ago, which closely follows OSU’s: “Watch our team go tearing down the field, Warriors, Warriors, never, ever, yield.”
“Maybe I need to teach them the ‘correct’ lyrics,” Grube said.
Whatever students decide, the old song isn’t quite as forgotten as some might think. At least one JV soccer team knows the words — give or take a verse.
3. Timberlab panels
Timberlab has hit a milestone at its new plant in Millersburg — and it matters in Philomath too.
The company has made its first production run of cross-laminated timber panels at the plant, according to a report Tuesday from the trade publication Lesprom Network. The report cited a LinkedIn post by Jared Revay, who heads Timberlab’s mass timber operations.
Samples cut from those first panels are now at the Tacoma, Wash., testing lab of APA – The Engineered Wood Association, where both Douglas fir V-grade and E-grade panels are being tested. Certification is the last major hurdle. CLT has to meet a national industry standard before it can go into buildings under U.S. building codes.
CLT is made by gluing layers of lumber together, with each layer running crosswise to the one below it. The result is large, strong panels that can be used for floors, walls and roofs in place of concrete and steel.
The Millersburg plant got going fast. Crews broke ground in February 2025. Lesprom reported that the building was finished by November 2025. At that point, Timberlab President Chris Evans predicted the plant would be certified and shipping product within about a year, so the company appears to be close to that timeline. At full capacity, the plant is designed to turn out 7 million to 9 million square feet of CLT a year, and the company has projected about 100 jobs.
The Philomath connection is the former Interfor sawmill and planing mill, which Timberlab bought in the summer of 2024 after Interfor closed it. Evans has described the local operation as an integral support facility for the Millersburg plant, handling sorting and planing.
(Brad Fuqua is publisher/editor of the Philomath News. He can be reached at News@PhilomathNews.com).
