McCulloch Stadium: The Stadium in the Middle of Salem's Favorite Park
Willamette's Bearcats play football and run track in a 1950 stadium tucked inside Bush's Pasture Park — a home field like few others in college sports.
Most college stadiums dominate their surroundings. McCulloch Stadium does the opposite: it disappears into them. Set inside Bush's Pasture Park, a short walk from the Willamette University campus, the Bearcats' home for football and track is ringed by the park's oaks and lawns, so that arriving at a game feels less like entering a sports complex than like finding one in the middle of a picnic.
The stadium, opened in 1950 and named for a longtime Willamette figure, hosts the university's football program and its track and field teams on the Charles Bowles track. Its scale is the scale of NCAA Division III athletics — the level at which Willamette competes — where the athletes are students first in fact as well as in slogan, the crowds are heavy with families and alumni, and the opposing team's fans can hear themselves think.
That setting shapes a particular kind of home-field advantage. November football at McCulloch is valley football: low sun through bare oaks, mist off the park grass, the smell of wet leaves under the bleachers. Track season in spring trades it for the park in full leaf. Few programs in the Northwest Conference — Willamette's league — play in anything resembling a public park, because few universities have a city willing to share its favorite green space with a stadium.
The sharing is formal as well as friendly. The city and the university have maintained agreements for decades governing Willamette's use of facilities in the park, including McCulloch and the neighboring baseball field, balancing college schedules against public access to the surrounding grounds. It is one more example of Salem's defining trait: its institutions do not sit apart from the city. They sit inside it, sometimes literally inside its parks.
Salem Cherry City News will cover the Bearcats as what they are — Salem's college team, playing in Salem's park, in front of Salem families. When the stadium lights come on inside Bush's Pasture on a dark fall evening, there is no clearer picture of how this city works.
