Watching from the home team’s dugout Wednesday evening in a D1 baseball game against Corvallis, longtime Philomath High coach Levi Webber shouts out encouraging words to Henry Bennett, one of the youngest pitchers competing with the Les and Bob’s summer program.
It’s a small moment, but one that captures how Webber runs his summer program. D1 baseball isn’t built around chasing wins. It’s built around reps, patience and figuring out what each player — from the youngest prospects to those furthering their varsity skills — needs to get better.
“I don’t pay attention to the wins and losses, I pay more attention to how we’re playing the game,” Webber said.
That mindset shapes everything about D1, where a rotating roster of 10 to 17 players shows up on any given night to build the fundamentals and flexibility Webber says separate varsity-ready players from everyone else.
Practices lean heavily on cage work and fundamentals before games, he said, while the games themselves double as auditions. Pitchers get looks at new hitters and innings for players expected to contribute in the spring. Defensively, players are rotated through multiple positions — infielders into the outfield, outfielders into the infield — to see how they adapt on the fly.
“Like we tell these young kids, you might be the shortstop on the JV team, but if you get called up to the varsity, you’re probably going to be playing maybe second base, maybe right field, maybe left field, maybe first,” Webber said. “The more positions they know, obviously the better off they’re going to be.”
That message gets repeated often, he said, because roster spots at the varsity level aren’t guaranteed by what a player did on JV.
“We kind of stress that on them in the summertime,” he said. “Just be a sponge, learn other positions, and make yourself a better baseball player.”
Deciding who’s ready for a bigger role next spring goes well beyond box scores, Webber said, crediting assistant coach Lance Faxon’s approach of treating each summer outing as a chance to gather information on every player.
“We collect a lot of different data points over the summer just to see how different guys react, not just baseball-wise, but focus-wise, how they know the game, their mentality, how they interact with guys, how they work through the game,” Webber said. “So there’s a lot of things that go into it, but it’s fun, it’s good.”
That evaluation is individualized. With a young roster and inconsistent attendance, Webber said instruction is tailored player by player — refining a breaking pitch, working on throwing strikes, or testing someone at a new position — rather than applying one blanket approach to the whole team.
“Specific guys have specific things that we want them to work on,” he said. “It’s more by player, and then as a team — the majority of our players are young guys — it’s just trying to get them up to speed and just play the game the right way, play hard and play free and compete and do those things. And if we can really work on getting that to where it needs to be, then the baseball stuff tends to figure itself out.”
Webber said the team has already shown improvement on defense compared to a year ago, even as hitting remains the top priority simply because it’s the easiest area to rack up repetitions.
The D1 name is a holdover from a league structure that no longer exists, a detail that helps explain why Webber’s approach leans so heavily on individual development rather than competition.
“It used to be the Oregon Junior State organization that was basically for all high school kids that are returners,” he said.
Under that old system, D1 functioned like a varsity summer team while D2 served as a JV-level squad. Philomath once played in a summer league alongside Salem-area schools, Corvallis and Crescent Valley, complete with its own state tournament — a structure that began fading before the COVID-19 pandemic and dissolved during it.
Teams shifted to independent summer schedules, and in recent years some larger schools have moved to Class A American Legion ball. Philomath’s summer program is roughly equivalent in age and competition level, Webber said, but the D1 name stuck around out of habit.
“We just call it D1 because that’s what it’s always been for our summer,” he said. “It’s basically just like our summer program.”
Without a formal league or playoff race to build toward, Webber said, the summer months become almost entirely about the individual growth of each player — from young pitchers like Bennett working alongside players just months from varsity innings.
That development showed up Wednesday night, when Les and Bob’s jumped to an 8-0 lead through two innings and held on to beat Corvallis 11-7. The team now has a 7-8 record with two games remaining — Monday at home against West Albany and Tuesday at South Albany. The team will also play a Philomath High School alumni game at 2 p.m. Saturday.
