The next phase of the Philomath Frolic and Rodeo’s arena project — new grandstands on the east and north sides — remains on hold while the board works through planning details.
“We’re kind of in a holding pattern at the moment,” board president Alyssa Collins said in a mid-July interview, conducted shortly after this year’s rodeo wrapped up. “There’s some things that we’re trying to finish addressing and trying to kind of line things out so we know what is our vision and how does that align with everything with the city.”
Fundraising for the next phase of construction won’t move forward until that alignment is settled, Collins said. Once the board and the city are on the same page, the Frolic plans to reconnect with the Eugene-based firm assisting with its capital campaign to establish a clearer direction and timeline for the project.
The pause comes a year after the organization celebrated the completion of the project’s first phase. New grandstands went up on the west side of the arena, along with a rebuilt announcer’s stand and rodeo office, upgraded restrooms and a modernized network of livestock pens, chutes and exit alleys. The arena also got new lighting and paved surfaces to improve accessibility.
Gerding Builders served as general contractor on that phase, which also included volunteer-driven work such as new fencing, a water line and cleanup of the Yew Wood Corral.
Those improvements traced back to a June 2022 fire that destroyed a section of the grandstands, which pushed the board to accelerate long-discussed plans for a full arena rebuild. At the time, board members talked about weighing everything from an addition to the existing grandstands to a complete rebuild or even relocation. The Legislature helped jump-start the effort with a $1.9 million earmark secured in 2023.
With the first phase complete, the Frolic’s focus was expected to turn quickly to the east and north grandstands. But for now, that next step appears to hinge on the board and the city settling on a shared vision for the rodeo grounds before fundraising and a firm timeline can resume.
2. Mat magic
Philomath High School hasn’t crowned a girls wrestling state champion yet, but incoming freshman Olivia Hernandez may be the one to change that this coming winter.
Hernandez placed second last month in the U.S. Marine Corps Junior Nationals in Fargo, North Dakota, earning National High School All-American status in the process. She opened the tournament with three decisive victories, then needed decisions to get past the quarterfinals and semifinals to reach the championship bout in the 100-pound weight class of the 16U division. There, she fell 6-0 to Iowa’s Abigail Peterson.
Hernandez backed up the Fargo finish with another big international win. On July 25 in Mexico City, Hernandez claimed her third straight U15 Pan American Championship in her weight class while wrestling for Team USA. She’s now a three-time Pan American junior champion. Her international schedule kept rolling this month with a wrestling trip to Japan.
Hernandez got her start in the sport at age 6 at the Philomath Mat Club after watching her brothers compete and deciding she wanted to try it herself. Her father, Sal Hernandez, told me a few years ago that he was initially against letting her wrestle, but Mat Club coaches Mark Woosley and Jeremy Robertson convinced him to give her a shot. She borrowed a singlet for her first tournament in Harrisburg. As far as I know, her dad still has video from that tournament on his phone.
Under Woosley and Robertson’s guidance, Hernandez developed into one of the top young wrestlers in the region before continuing her training with coach Jason Lara at Mat Sense Wrestling, a Corvallis-based club program.
Now headed into her freshman year at Philomath High this fall, Hernandez arrives with a résumé most varsity athletes would envy — and expectations to match. Given her trajectory, it wouldn’t be a surprise if she gets her name up on the wall in the PHS wrestling room sooner than later. I hesitate to make such statements, especially with young athletes, but it has become clear that she’s wrestling at a very high level.
3. Bean counting
I wasn’t entirely sure I qualified for the label, so I did what any self-respecting journalist would do — I looked it up. Turns out “coffee snob” is a real term tied to what’s known as the third-wave coffee movement, a shift that pushed coffee away from mass-produced cans of grounds toward beans sourced from specific farms and roasted to bring out their character. By that definition, the evidence against me is piling up.
I’ve watched documentaries about coffee bean farming and harvesting — for fun, not for a story. I own at least a half-dozen coffee makers and two grinders. Since moving to Oregon, I’ve drifted well past the standard auto-drip machine into AeroPress, espresso and Chemex pour-over territory. I can’t remember the last time I bought coffee that was already ground. And although we have some great coffee shops here in Philomath and Corvallis, my favorite statewide is Sisters Coffee Co. — not just for the coffee, but for the log-cabin vibe at the flagship location. A man who picks a favorite coffee shop based partly on interior design has probably lost the argument that he’s just a guy who likes coffee.
The verdict got clearer on my current trip to visit family in Nebraska. Friday morning, I stopped at a coffee shop in North Platte to caffeinate and finish the newsletter before a 90-minute drive. I ordered a 20-ounce Americano. The woman at the counter paused, looked confused and responded, “What’s that?”
I quickly glanced at the menu board — Sweet Nectar, Bonfire, So-Cal, Java Crunch — and realized we were speaking different coffee languages. I folded. “Never mind, I’ll just have a large coffee.” She pointed me to a thermal carafe and a basket of Coffee Mate creamers. Not a drop of half-and-half in sight. It was basically motel coffee, and I felt every mile between Nebraska and Oregon in that first sip.
It wasn’t always this way. In my early newspaper days, coffee was fuel — Folgers, Maxwell House, whatever was on sale, or a strong cup straight from a truck-stop pot. So what changed? Probably just time, geography and the slow, insidious influence of an Oregon coffee culture that makes it very easy to care more than you probably should about a bean’s origin story. I won’t fight the label anymore.
(Brad Fuqua is publisher/editor of the Philomath News. He can be reached at News@PhilomathNews.com).
