FORKS — Two years from now, Quillayute Valley School District baseball and softball teams will finally have home fields to call their own.
A $1.2 million grant from the state Recreation and Conservation Office has seeded a $3 million project that will see the installation of new baseball and softball fields on the southeast corner of the district’s campus on what is now an open field.
QVSD will fund the balance with timber dollars and other local funds approved by the school board.
The school district doesn’t have its own ballfields. Students play at the city’s Tillicum Park or at Clallam County’s Fred Orr Ball Fields, which is nine miles out of town in Beaver.
Neither location is ideal, Superintendent Diana Reaume said. After heavy rains last week, the field at Tillicum Park was so muddy that the high school softball team was unable to practice.
That won’t happen with the new turf fields.
“If it stops raining before game time, we can still play on the field, which is really nice in our climate, ” said QVSD maintenance and facility manager Bill Henderson said.
The fields will be designed to Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association standards and the district will have complete control over their maintenance.
Once the district receives the RCO contract and the board approves the architect, it will be ready to start, Henderson said.
“We’re going to have to push this pretty quickly,” he said.
While a mandated cultural resource study is underway, the architect will develop drawings and the district will sit down with the athletic groups to design the field. The project will then go out to bid with the goal of breaking ground in spring 2026 and opening the following year.
A significant amount of groundwork will be needed to prepare the site and install drainage systems under the field before the turf can be installed, Reaume said.
Phase 1 will see the installation of the field, conduit for lighting and construction of a small bathroom. Conversion of a play shed into indoor batting cages and the installation of lights will come in Phase 2.
While primarily dedicated to baseball and softball, the multipurpose fields will be able to be used for other activities.
“This is going to be great for all our kids,” Henderson said. “They’re going to be able to use it for kickball and at recess. One of the ideas we had was to be able to tie the two outfields together and use that for a soccer field.”
With the ball field project, the school district has replicated the model it created for its $3.35 million Spartan Stadium grandstand replacement and football field project completed in April 2023 with a phased approach starting with the installation of the field, a flexible, functional design and open access to the community.
When school district football and soccer teams aren’t practicing or competing on the field, children play and practice their soccer shots on the nets after school. Community members run and walk on the oval running track that circles the field throughout the day.
“It’s an advantage for our community,” Henderson said. “It will bring people into the community. There’s more game time and we can host tournaments.”
The school district is now in the planning stages of preparing to run a construction bond in 2026 to replace Forks Middle School, which is more than 70 years old. Six firms responded to a request for qualifications it placed in November for architects.
“We’re booming,” Reaume said. “It used to be we couldn’t get an architect to come out here, an engineer to come out here, we couldn’t get a contractor to come out here. It’s good for our economy, but moreso for our kids.”
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
