Eatonville High School football utilizing Yelm High School’s turf space for two home games

Though the Cruisers have played all of their home games in recent memory at Eatonville High School, the EHS football team is taking a 21-mile detour for two of its home games this season — calling Yelm High School home for a pair of the Cruisers’ home contests this football season.

According to Eatonville’s athletic director and head football coach Gavin Kralik, the Cruisers’ home location is undergoing a facelift with upgrades to its stands and track, and with the introduction of a new turf field.
Kralik’s Cruisers picked up a 35-14 victory against Clover Park on Thursday, Sept. 18 at YHS in the team’s first of two “home” games in Yelm.

“We’re kind of in a challenging situation as a school district,” Kralik said of Eatonville School District. “Our field and stadium is under construction, and so we’re not able to host any games up at our field we traditionally play on. Yelm was gracious enough to allow us the opportunity to play over there for a few games this season.”

He noted the second of two home games at YHS will take place on Friday, Oct. 3 against Franklin Pierce High School — which also will mark Eatonville’s 2025 homecoming football game.

“From a scheduling standpoint, we were able to get two games there. We’ll be hosting our homecoming game against Franklin Pierce at Yelm as well too,” Kralik said. “We’re really grateful that Yelm has provided us that opportunity. It’s something they didn’t have to do, but they’re being really good neighbors to us in this situation. It’s really unique to play a homecoming game off-site, but we’re thankful for the facility and also it being a close, neighboring school district.”

Kralik added that ESD is renting the facilities from Yelm Community Schools, and said his district is happy to do it. He noted that renting facilities is common practice when having to use another district’s stadium.

“We anticipate in probably late-November that we’ll have a new track installed, and a turf field as well. Probably in January sometime, we’ll have close to a 1,300 seat covered stadium,” he claimed. “We raised a lot of money through grants. People in our school district really worked hard to go after grant money, as well as a capital levy that was approved by our voters. It’s the payment for the costs coming from those two sources, and some sponsorships as well.”

Kralik also reiterated his, and ESD’s, graciousness in YCS allowing the program to utilize the fieldspace and compete in “home” football games at a location in a neighboring city. He said the gesture means a lot to the Eatonville community.
Looking forward, Kralik believes the renovations and upgrades will serve a big purpose to EHS athletic programs, and to different entities and members around the local Eatonville community.

“We’re definitely excited to be able to utilize that field. When you have a grass field in our area, you’re really limited on use of it,” he said. “Now that we’ll have the turf field, it will allow for outdoor sports to be able to use it as well as community groups — which we’ve been really limited with field space and trying to make it work with the grass fields we do have. Being able to expand our use to groups outside of our school teams is something we really look forward to.”