Oregon State Ballpark To Host Summer Baseball

The Knights play a 54-game schedule, including 42 league contests, and their first game at OSU will be June 14th against the Bend Elks.

Photo: OSU Athletics

CORVALLIS - Starting this summer, Oregon State’s Goss Stadium at Coleman Field will be the home of the Corvallis Knights of the West Coast Collegiate Baseball League.

The team – formerly based in the Portland area as the Aloha Knights – will play 26 games on the home diamond of the OSU Beavers, the 2006 NCAA national champions.

“I’m thrilled for the community,” OSU head coach Pat Casey said. “The Knights are a first-class organization and are going to put on a great show this summer. We are pleased to partner with a like-minded group like the Knights. I’m confident they will enrich our community and better baseball here and in the Valley.”

The Knights are a minor league-like team, made up of collegiate baseball players, that competes in the West’s leading summer college wood bat league – the WCCBL.

The team played its last seven seasons at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham.

The club is sponsored by Penny Knight, the wife of Nike Chairman Phil Knight.

Established in 1990 by co-founders Dan and Joe Segel, the Aloha Knights won the 70th National Baseball Congress World Series in 2004, a summer national championship held in Wichita, Kan.

That team featured Oregon State stars Kevin Gunderson, Andy Jenkins and Nate Fogle.

There have been 37 OSU players who spent summers with the club, including College World Series heroes Gunderson, Bill Rowe and Daniel Turpen.

At least three more Beavers will be featured on the team in 2007, with OSU junior catcher Erik Ammon and freshman infielder Brett Casey returning to the squad and freshman pitcher Blake Keitzman, the 2006 Oregon High School Player of the Year, slated to join them.

Brooke Knight, a former OSU baseball and football player, is the Knights’ acting general manager. Knight, no relation to Phil and Penny Knight, grew up in Corvallis and starred at Crescent Valley High School.

“Corvallis is the perfect place for a team like the Knights,” Brooke Knight said. “Being a native, I think the community will enjoy coming out to Goss in the summer. My sense is they are going to embrace what we have to offer, which is really more about community than sport.”

OSU and the Knights signed a one-year renewable contract, which can be renewed for five successive terms; terms call for the team to pay $900 per game plus actual maintenance material costs.

The Knights will also use OSU’s housing and dining services for their players.

“We are great admirers of Coach Casey’s program and are delighted to call Corvallis our new home,” Penny Knight said. “We appreciate Pat’s support and are excited to begin a new era at Goss Stadium.”

“This is a great baseball town,” team president Dan Segel said of Corvallis. “It’s actually an extraordinary baseball town, thanks in large part to the efforts of Richey’s Market (American Legion program) and the Beavers.

Both are community institutions as well as elite amateur programs. We’ve admired and respected their leaders for many years and were attracted to Corvallis long before considering this move.”

“In fact, combined, nearly 50 Richey’s and OSU players have honed their skills with the Knights - Kevin Hooker, Mike Thurman, Andrew Checketts, Joe Gerber, Andy Jenkins, Bill Rowe and Billy Clontz to name just a few.

We can’t wait to get this started and look forward to partnering with both Richey’s and the University and to growing here together.”

Adding comments to these stories has been disabled. View the current sports stories Salem-News Sports