When Casey Baker walked into freshman orientation at Philomath High School four years ago, a table set up for the school’s robotics program caught his eye. He stopped. He signed up. Now a senior wrapping up his final season as a mechanical co-lead for PHRED — the Philomath High Robotics and Engineering Division — Baker is considering a future in software engineering.
Baker’s story is the program’s story in miniature — kids walking past a table, getting curious and finding a place where they can build something real.
This weekend, the community has a chance to help keep that pipeline open. PHRED’s biggest annual fundraiser — a combined mattress sale and rummage sale — kicks off Saturday at Philomath High School, with the rummage sale continuing into Sunday.
The mattress sale, hosted in partnership with Mattress World NW, runs from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday only. The rummage sale runs alongside it Saturday and then reopens Sunday from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. The team has a sizable haul of donations already but can take more — drop-offs are welcome Friday from 4-7 p.m. or Saturday morning from 9-10 a.m.
“We get a lot of people that come in and just pick some little thing and pay excessive amounts of money,” Thompson said about rummage sale shoppers. “But it’s really their opportunity to donate to the team.”
Last year, the combined sale brought in more than $5,000 in a single weekend. Mentor Tom Thompson, who has been with PHRED since the program’s beginning, is hoping to push that number to $6,000 this year.
He has reason to. Competing in robotics is not cheap.
“It cost $13,000 just to register for the FRC season,” Thompson said. “That gets us two competitions. That doesn’t give us transportation, so we have to do that, and we have to build a robot. … If we go on to the district championships, it’s another $4,000, and then we have all of those added expenses on top of that. So it’s probably at least $20,000 for the FRC.”
FRC — the FIRST Robotics Competition — is the high school arm of PHRED, but the program stretches all the way down to elementary school. Three FIRST Tech Challenge teams operate at the middle school, one each for sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Two FIRST Lego League teams have started up again at the elementary level.
Philomath High senior Owen Wood, the team’s captain and electrical lead, first heard about PHRED at a summer camp at Oregon State University, where someone encouraged him to check it out. He has been with the program all four years of high school, and he has done a lot of design work on this season’s robot. In the fall, he heads back to OSU as a student — pursuing electrical engineering, a path he credits in large part to his time with the robotics program.
Ask Wood to describe the program to a prospective member, and he leads with what isn’t required.
“It’s a lot of learning. We say that there’s no experience required because there isn’t,” he said. “A lot of the stuff is pretty easy to jump into. A lot of the build stuff is pretty intuitive — nuts go on bolts. I can’t speak on software, and electrical is mostly just following diagrams. It’s not really super difficult, and we have a lot of things that you can just jump right into. We have things that are a little bit more advanced, but we have stuff for all skill levels.”
What is required is time. During build season, Wood said, team members put in around 17 hours a week on the robot at minimum, with many students pouring in extra hours on top of that.
“In all, probably 20 or so hours per week,” he said.
The 2026 FRC game, called REBUILT, challenged teams to launch foam “fuel” balls into a scoring hub. PHRED’s robot handles the task with a sliding hopper that extends out front on rails to roughly double its storage capacity, plus a drop-down intake mechanism.
“So this year, the regulations had a maximum of 110 inches frame perimeter,” Wood said. “Each side of this robot is 27 inches in length, and then you’re allowed to extend one foot out in one direction at a time. That’s why we have the hopper on a slider, instead of just constantly being held out, because we’re not allowed to have it constantly held out.”
The robot weighs 112 pounds — three under the maximum allowed.
Underneath, it runs swerve drive, a system that lets each wheel rotate and drive independently. “We’re going to be able to spin, strafe, forward, backward, spin while moving — all that fun stuff,” Wood said.
The sophistication is a long way from where the program started. Thompson remembers the early years.
“In Year 1, the equipment that was available was like drill motors for driving the robot, and you pretty much had to make everything,” he said. “There was nothing that you could get off the shelf. The early game didn’t even have autonomous — it was just students driving. It used some really primitive electronics, very little in terms of sensors.”
These days, PHRED is cutting custom parts in polycarbonate, learning to do the same in aluminum, and running a 3D printer that handles increasingly complex jobs. This year’s robot used vision controls — a camera system that helped it line up shots automatically and calculate distance to the target.
“That was never possible in 2002,” Thompson said. “But you know, kids are still the same kids. They’re just working with much more sophisticated stuff.”
Freshman Colton Ash had wanted to join PHRED as far back as sixth grade, but sports always got in the way. He finally found his window in eighth grade, joining the middle school team on the mechanical side. This year, with electrical newly available to him at the high school level, he decided to switch.
It led to one of the season’s more memorable moments.
“Supposedly, I put a red connector on a black cable, and so when our electrical team lead had me take a color-blind test, apparently I’m color blind — which everyone thought was hilarious and kept bothering me about it for the rest of the build season,” Ash said. “Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot of big issues with the robot, but that was one of the funniest things that happened.”
He plans to stick with the program through high school.
“It’s really enjoyable,” he said. “It’s really fun to go to competitions and see all of the other teams.”
For Wood, the high-stakes problem-solving is part of what made him fall in love with engineering in the first place.
“What I said at our second competition is, I stayed up all night thinking about everything that could go wrong, and I didn’t think hard enough,” he said. “We had a couple matches where nothing went wrong, but there were a lot of times where we had stuff going wrong, and drive team had to mitigate those issues through their own driving. And then we get the robot back in the pits, and we have to fix it as fast as we can. There isn’t much time to fix stuff up, so it is a little bit high stress, but we made it through every time.”
PHRED did not qualify for districts this year, but the work continues. The team is in offseason mode now, running outreach events — for example, a recent STEAM night at the elementary school and upcoming participation in the farmers’ market.
“We’re just going to be doing a lot of stuff to get our name out there and try to get recruitment, try to get sponsorships,” Wood said.
In addition to Thompson, mentor Steve King has been with PHRED since 2017. Brad McCarthy, Dave Novak and Logan Todd round out the core mentor group, with additional volunteers helping out throughout the year.
For Thompson, who has watched the program evolve a quarter century ago from drill motors and hand-built parts to vision systems and CNC-cut polycarbonate, the through-line is the kids.
“We encourage people to come and see what we have,” he said.
