A plan to upgrade Philomath High School’s baseball and softball fields with the installation of artificial turf along with various other improvements has progressed slower than anticipated with organizers unable to secure needed grant money.
Levi Webber, the veteran Warriors baseball coach who is leading the charge, said the group has re-examined its fundraising strategy and remains confident that the money is out there to make the project a reality.
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“Obviously we knew it wasn’t going to be an easy project but I think it’s become a lot more difficult than we thought it was going to be and the biggest reason for that is in searching out a lot of the grant opportunities that we thought were going to be there,” Webber said Wednesday morning. “It’s really, really hard to get grant money for this type of project.”
The project was originally estimated to carry a price tag of around $600,000. Revised numbers come in at $525,000 to $550,000 with the elimination of plans for new outfield and perimeter fencing on the baseball field.
Webber pointed to two primary factors that make it tough for the Philomath Baseball Association to be considered for a grant — the location of the fields on school property and the community’s demographics. He said if the project was located at a city park, for example, the prospects of being awarded a grant would be greater “just by the way some of the grants are worded.” And on the demographics issue, communities with more challenging economic conditions go to the top of the list for such opportunities.
“So we don’t hit a lot of those qualifiers and it means that there’s less money for these types of projects that we’re trying to do here,” Webber said. “But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do the project. We’re just in the process of going through how this is going to look for funding.”
Webber said he was hoping that 35% to 50% of the total funds needed for the project would be coming through grants.
“That just means that we’re trying to hit the community a little bit harder than we’d hoped or planned but I think it’s out there,” he said. “It’s just finding the right people with a passion to help youth baseball and softball and the community.”
Another challenge involves people getting hit up for money from all directions. Other organizations need cash for their causes more than ever and local households and businesses may have less expendable income in what could be considered to be difficult economic times.
“It’s unfortunate but again, I don’t see it as an impossibility for the project, it just makes it a little bit more challenging with what we were initially anticipating,” Webber said.
Last summer, Webber hoped that the project would be getting underway following the 2024 baseball and softball seasons.
“We’re definitely not on schedule with where we hoped to be at this point,” Webber said. “We were hopeful that we were going to be further along in the process and would be breaking ground … but we’re obviously not there yet.”
In fact, Webber estimated that the project is probably between a third to halfway to where it needs to be financially. He said the Philomath Baseball Association has in the neighborhood of $210,000 in cash and in-kind donations.
“We’re still working on that piece,” Webber said. “We have a big stack of letters that are going to be going out to local businesses that we either initially contacted or said they were interested … so we’re going to continue to push to get out there and hopefully start to get some more support from the community and the surrounding community.”
In the meantime, costs continue to rise.
“The biggest number that will go up with that is just the cost of the turf,” Webber said. “I haven’t reached out to our turf supplier who’s going to help us out with this to kind of see where that was at … it’s definitely going up, nothing’s getting cheaper, that’s for sure.”
Webber has outlined in the past how turf fields would improve the baseball and softball programs with fewer game rainouts, more on-field workouts and additional player development opportunities despite this region’s wet spring weather.
On the baseball field, turf would be installed from the back of the infields to the back of the backstops, including foul territory. Other baseball field upgrades include reworking the bullpens while creating a spectator berm for fans and solving an outfield drainage issue.
As mentioned, the original proposal included new fencing for the whole ballfield but Webber decided to hold back on that part of the project.
“So now the only fencing that we’re going to add is where we move the bullpens,” he said, referencing the plan to relocate the bullpens down the foul lines to create better spectator viewing closer to the field.
Softball improvements beyond turf include the addition of bullpens, building a new visitor team’s dugout and a storage shed, installing a new scoreboard and adding drainage to the junior varsity field.
