As summer rolls around and campus goes quiet, multiple facilities projects will begin behind the scenes, allowing for better conditions for athletes next school year. In June, three major changes will occur over the span of around ten days: PE Hill will be repaved, a section of turf on Witter Field will be replaced, and a new scoreboard will be installed in Binks Gym.
PHS Principal David Yoshihara said that PE Hill’s repaving was mainly needed due to safety concerns.
“It was seen as a safety hazard,” Yoshihara said. “We have a lot of traffic that goes up and down that hill, and it’s basically just degraded to the point where people may trip and hurt themselves. It’s a pathway used by kids in both middle school and high school, so it was for safety.”
Yoshihara said that the hill will be repaved in three phases, one of which has already been completed. Each phase is expected to take around a week, with most of that time being spent allowing the asphalt to cure.
“For PE Hill, that’s in June. They’re looking at ten days to do it, at the same time of them redoing the turf section of Witter,” PHS Athletic Director Tyler Small said.
Yoshihara said that the turf replacement on Witter is due to damage that occurred in the summer of 2025.
“The middle of the field will be returfed and resurfaced. There was damage done last summer, and it’s hard to find a time to do [returfing and resurfacing], so they’re doing it right at the start of summer,” Yoshihara said. “There was vandalism about a year ago that affected the logo area in the front, so we did a short-term patchwork. So under warranty, they’ll make it look new again.”
As for the scoreboards, Small said that work has already started, and that the old lightboards are beginning to come down.
“Install[ment] for the scoreboards is set for the week of June 22,” Small said. “Come July when we come back from our dead week of no sports at Piedmont, the new scoreboards will be up and live.”
Small said that the main reason for the scoreboards’ replacement is that they are nearly 30 years old and do not display very much information. The new digital scoreboards will be able to display much more.
“It can show highlight reels, or a sportsmanship video before the game. It can be used during things like schoolwide assemblies, and it can be used during PE class. It becomes so much more versatile than just a fixed number scoreboard,” Small said.
To determine what facilities changes need to occur, Yoshihara said that Facilities Director Pete Palmer assesses priorities for each school in the district and then presents them at a quarterly meeting.
“[Pete] Palmer is the lead of the facilities steering committee,” Yoshihara said. “It’s a public meeting, so anyone can go. At those meetings, [Palmer] shares what we call the priority list by school.”
Yoshihara said that funding for facilities depends on the specifics of the situation, but in most cases, funding requests are brought in through the school board.
“The things that come out of the general dollars of the school, ultimately the school board approves,” Yoshihara said. “[Pete] Palmer works with [Ruth] Alahydoian, who’s the chief financial officer, so she’s in charge of the budget. They’ll look at that and see if there’s funding, and then talk to the school board, typically.”
For both the turf replacement and the new scoreboards, funding was acquired separately from the school board, Yoshihara said. The field replacement is funded by an insurance claim due to the fact that vandalism was involved, and the scoreboard is paid for by a vendor through a lease agreement.
“We did a fundraiser this year to raise as much money as possible for the scoreboards,” Small said. “We didn’t reach our fundraising goal with that, but those funds that we did raise are being used for the install as well as all the hardware and the software.”
Small said that the actual scoreboards are paid for through an external partnership with a company called Scoreboard Media.
“They bought the scoreboards for us, and in return, we’ll split ad revenue with them for the next ten years,” Small said. “To us it was a win-win situation of updating some much-needed scoreboards and not waiting another two or three years to fundraise.”
