Philomath High athletics continued to perform at a high level in 2024 with 19 of the 20 sports programs advancing teams or athletes to state competitions. Two teams won state championships.
Philomath’s female runners again dominated the 4A landscape with the cross-country team winning its second straight state title this past fall. In the spring, many of those same athletes along with exceptional athletic ability seen at shorter distances and in the various field events led to a third straight 4A championship in track and field.
Football, volleyball, boys soccer, girls soccer, boys cross-country, boys basketball, girls basketball, boys swimming, girls swimming, boys wrestling, girls wrestling, dance, cheer, baseball, boys track and field, boys tennis and girls tennis also sent teams or athletes to state competitions.
Among those, the football, girls soccer, boys basketball and girls basketball teams advanced past the first round in their respective playoff brackets. Philomath High’s cheer squad won a third-place trophy and the girls basketball team had to settle for fifth. In addition, boys cross-country placed sixth while boys wrestling, boys track and field and girls tennis all finished seventh.
Individually, Riley Barrett in wrestling, and Ahnika Tryon and the 4-by-100-meter relay in girls track and field won state championships.
Here are the top 10 sports stories of the year as chosen by the Philomath News:
The possibility of a three-peat by the Philomath High girls track and field team appeared to be in jeopardy May 18 at Hayward Field in Eugene.
Heading into the weekend, Philomath had already seen its potential for points lessened by a couple of bad breaks in the previous week’s district meet. Then on Day 2 of the 4A State Championships, a difficult-to-watch scene unfolded in the 400-meter dash when junior Natalie Dunn appeared to be cruising to victory but fell close to the finish line.
But in the end, those setbacks didn’t knock the Warriors off the perch. Philomath won the title yet again — and actually quite handily by a 23-point margin.
Philomath ended up with 74 points with Cascade and North Bend tying for second at 51. The Warriors became the first 4A team to three-peat since Astoria from 2015-17.
Tryon won a state title in the javelin and the team’s 4-by-100 relay took first place with Ellie Morton, Dunn, Petra Hernandez and Janice Hellesto.
In Philomath’s season-opening cross-country meet, freshman Cassidy Smart had a solid high school debut with a top-10 finish. Although the course was just 3 kilometers in length, Smart showed her running potential to onlookers that afternoon in Monmouth. Little did anyone know that in 2-1/2 months time, she would finish as the school’s top individual runner to help the Warriors girls cross-country program win their second straight state title and 10th overall.
“They were challenged a little closer than we expected — a couple of kids had tough races — but we were deep enough to come through,” PHS coach Joe Fulton said after the team had received its latest trophy. “They’re happy … there’s a lot of seniors on the team but our top runner was a freshman.”
And that freshman would be Smart. Despite working through knee issues during the season, Smart never finished outside of the top 10 in any race. In the 4A finale, she placed 10th with a time of 19:34.2. Senior Adele Beckstead, a stellar runner for the PHS program over the past four years, settled for 16th with a time of 20:09.0. Melea Lattin, Lucy King and Hallie Morrison also contributed to the team score.
Walking off the mat at the 2023 state wrestling tournament with a fourth-place finish did not sit well with then-freshman Riley Barrett. In the months that followed, he upped his commitment with a level of hard work often only seen in athletes who reach the top of their sport.
As it turns out, he hasn’t lost since.
Philomath’s Barrett won the 150-pound weight division Feb. 23 at Veterans Memorial Coliseum with an 8-3 decision over Sweet Home junior Jacob Landtroop. He finished the season with a 48-0 record with 32 pins.
Barrett’s first-place finish represented one of five Warriors to win medals at the tournament. Sophomore Porter Compton had a strong tournament for third and both senior Gradin Fairbanks and sophomore Lake Mulberry won fifth-place matches. Junior JJ Lewis was on the medal stand as well with sixth place.
In the team standings, Philomath was seventh.
A few missed opportunities, a couple of ill-timed turnovers and seven points scored in the final seconds separated Philomath from reaching the Class 4A state semifinals for another shot at No. 1 Cascade. But Warriors coach Alex Firth told his team after their 21-14 road loss to Henley Nov. 15 to hold their heads high for the heights that had been reached over the course of the season.
Firth said he told the team afterward, “Don’t let this loss diminish what you guys accomplished this year … you did some great things. You laid the foundation for this program and you should be proud of what you did.”
On a cold but dry evening on Mazama High’s field in Klamath Falls, the defending state champion Hornets scored the winning touchdown with 13 seconds remaining.
Philomath finished the season with an 8-3 record. Henley reached the championship game where the Hornets lost to Marist Catholic.
The Philomath High School girls basketball team has developed a tradition of bringing home hardware from the state tournament. And following the March 9 game against Cascade, the Warriors accepted the fifth-place trophy.
As it turns out, perhaps they should have had at least a share of third place.
Although the final score showed Cascade beating Philomath, 35-33, an apparent scoring error in the tournament’s official scorebook awarded the Cougars with two points that it did not score.
“The score was messed up and I don’t know what the actual score was,” PHS coach Ben Silva said a few minutes after coming out of the locker room following a postgame chat with his team.
A few hours later after video from the game could be checked to confirm the scoring error, Silva commented further.
“It’s frustrating … you would hope that they would work to get it right,” Silva said. “I just wish there would’ve been a way for them to adjust that. But there were also things we could’ve done to not make it a two-point game. I knew they made a fix (to the score) but they half-fixed it.”
The OSAA later acknowledged that a scoring error had occurred. Peter Weber, OSAA executive director, said that although it’s unfortunate for all involved, the game is official. “The way that the NFHS rulebook and then the OSAA handbook are set, the score is going to stand at 35-33,” Weber said.
Philomath’s Caleb Russell in football, Lucas Brandt in swimming and Warwick Bushnell in track and field all etched their names into the school record books in 2024.
Russell, a quarterback, put on a passing clinic Sept. 27 at Clemens Field in Philomath High’s 56-0 rout over The Dalles, a performance that included 375 yards through the air with a school record seven touchdown passes. He also tied the all-time record for most TDs thrown in a game among schools in Philomath’s classification (3A until 2006 and 4A since). In fact, counting all classifications, Russell was just the 29th quarterback in Oregon high school history to throw seven or more TDs in a game.
Swimmer Lucas Brandt broke two school records during the calendar year. As a freshman in January, he broke a 41-year-old swim team record while winning the 200-yard individual medley in a four-school meet at Sweet Home. Brandt swam the event, which includes the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle, in 2:03.39. The school record of 2:05.10 had been held by Rex Watkins, a PHS senior standout during the 1981-82 season. Just last month and now a sophomore, Brandt broke the school record in the 100-yard breaststroke with a time of 1:01.53. The previous record of 1:01.61 had been set by Patrick Williamson in 2015.
PHS sprinter Warwick Bushnell broke two school records at last spring’s state track meet. Bushnell ran the 400-meter dash in 49.78 seconds, which broke the school record of 49.94 that had originally been set by Berle Stratton in 1969 and tied by Abe Brown in 1995. Later in the same afternoon, Bushnell broke the school record in the 200 with a time of 22.34. Trevor Sartnurak had set the previous record of 22.40 in 2015.
Riding a 15-year-old former pack horse, Paisley Grant put together a clean, smooth run at just the right moment to finish in first place Dec. 14 in a national barrel-racing competition in Las Vegas. Paisley pulled off the impressive performance at the Junior World Finals on her horse, Tanner.
“It was a really crazy experience,” said Paisley, who turned 16 in December. “This year was really a comeback and it was really nice.”
Paisley referred to the accomplishment as a comeback because two years earlier when she competed in the Junior World Finals, she had qualified for the short go — the terminology used for the final round when the top competitors square off for the highest places — but didn’t fare so well.
Dani Grant, Paisley’s mother who also competes and trains, called it a great performance.
“You need tight turns but also they have to have good execution out of them,” she said. “You don’t want to be too straight, you don’t want to be too round. It’s really hard … the timing and the queuing is the key to quick runs. She rode him perfectly.”
In the final run, Paisley and Tanner finished the pattern in 13.830 seconds to win not only the senior division but all-around honors for top average time.
Huddled around their head coach following a 2-1 loss to Marist Catholic Nov. 9 in the Class 4A girls soccer quarterfinals, Philomath High’s players shared the emotions of the realization that another season had come to end.
Head coach Mat Phelps told the girls they should be proud for playing a great half of soccer after trailing 2-0 at the break.
“I feel like that was the best half of soccer we played this year and not because it was the prettiest, but because we worked the hardest and did the things that we wanted to,” Phelps said he told the team after the game, a group that included 10 seniors.
Marist has been on an impressive run in the sport in recent years. For the second time in three years, Philomath had seen its season end on Kevin Teller Field at the hands of a No. 1-seeded Spartans squad. Marist beat the Warriors, 2-0, en route to the 2022 state title.
After beating Philomath this time around, the Spartans again went on to win the 4A state championship.
In what could be viewed as an improbable accomplishment, the Philomath High volleyball team won the Oregon West Conference title and advanced to the 4A state playoffs despite an overall record that ended up at 9-13.
Philomath and Cascade each finished with 8-2 records in league play but the Warriors swept the Cougars in head-to-head matchups to claim the crown. It was the first Oregon West Conference title for the Warriors since 2017.
Playing under a new head coach and losing its first seven matches of the season, Philomath’s season got off to a suspect start. Outside of tournament pool play, the team failed to even win a set until the third week of the season in a home loss to Junction City. But once the schedule transitioned into conference play, the team started to click.
Philomath went on to fall to Crook County in the first round of the playoffs.
While youngsters in uniform warmed up to play baseball games on Philomath’s two newest ballfields May 29 at Skirvin Park, the Philomath Youth Activities Club led a small crowd that had gathered through a dedication ceremony. The occasion marked the end of a four-year effort from conception to construction to completion. Originally, the two new fields were going to be used only as practice space.
“But then as raffle money became available and more volunteers became available, we realized if we have these resources, why don’t we build it as good as possible, make it as nice as possible,” PYAC Executive Director Eddie Van Vlack said.
The fields were dedicated to the late Ralph Hull and current and longtime volunteer Denny Bennett. PYAC had needed more ballfields for several years and this project saw its share of challenges along the way.
“We had added one field in 29 years and so it’s not something that happens every day,” Van Vlack said. “So to be able to have two fields … and probably our nicest two fields, it’s big, it’s huge. With our numbers continuing to increase, it was much needed for sure.”
Several other stories were considered for the top-10 list — the cheer squad’s third-place trophy at state; boys soccer reaching the playoffs and pushing the eventual state champion to PKs; the school district’s approval of adding golf and boys volleyball in 2025; Preston Kramer’s 40 points in a PHS win; the baseball team’s 12-game winning streak; boys basketball’s latest advancement to state tournament; a minor league basketball team’s interest in Philomath; the latest PHS Hall of Fame class that included Terry Garvin, Cathy McNeely, Ed Young and Mike Thurman along with the 1995 and 1996 dance teams and the 1994 wrestling team; Bailey Bell’s fourth-place finish at state in her final act of an impressive PHS tennis career; three medals won at the state swim meet; and PHS coaching hires in volleyball, girls tennis, softball and dance.
