Every fall, College Hill braces for six Saturdays when out-of-town crowds fill the streets around the stadium in a way no other weekend in Pullman does. This year the games are the same shape they always are: tailgates, crimson everywhere, the roar carrying up the hill from the stadium. What's different is where everyone goes when the final whistle blows.
For a little over four years, a chunk of that postgame crowd drained downhill to a converted Quonset hut on North Grand Avenue. It isn't there anymore.
Six Saturdays, a New Coach, a Full Slate
Washington State opens its home schedule under first-year head coach Kirby Moore, and the six Saturdays on the calendar carry more built-in programming than a typical season:
- Sept. 19 vs. Duquesne — Crimson Out, 12:30 p.m. kickoff on USA Network. A Movie Night at the stadium the Friday before, plus Future Cougar Day for prospective students touring campus.
- Sept. 26 vs. Arizona — Stripe the Stadium, 4:30 p.m. on CBS. The Cougfest concert runs Friday night, Sept. 25.
- Oct. 3 vs. Fresno State — Family Weekend and the Cougars' Pac-12 home opener, 6:30 p.m.
- Oct. 24 vs. Boise State — Homecoming, 3 p.m. It's Boise State's first trip back to Pullman since 2017, when the Cougars won a triple-overtime game, 47-44.
- Nov. 14 vs. Colorado State — Native American and Military Appreciation Day, 7:30 p.m., after WSU's lone bye week.
- Nov. 28 — Senior Night, a Pac-12 flex weekend with the opponent (tentatively Oregon State) confirmed closer to the date.
Season tickets started at $200, and single-game tickets went on sale July 29. That's the scale you're working with if you live on the hill: six Saturdays of out-of-town traffic converging on a neighborhood that already hosts Martin Stadium, the WSU Bear Center, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art inside its own boundaries.
The Gap on North Grand
Here's what changed since last season. The Lumberyard, a food hall at 305 N. Grand Ave. that had become one of the go-to gathering spots for game-day crowds moving between campus and downtown, closed for good on Jan. 31, 2026.
The space had a specific history with football. Owners DJ Goldfinger and Molly Golden opened it in October 2021 after their previous bar, Stubblefields, was forced to close in August 2020 during COVID shutdowns. Goldfinger, a WSU alum and 30-year Pullman resident, built it around exactly this kind of Saturday. In an interview with The Daily Evergreen as the closure approached, he described what he wanted the place to be on game days:
"if it was game time, they could bring their brother and sister to play here"
That's not incidental detail. It's the difference between a bar and a place families actually used between kickoff and the drive home. When Golden announced the closure, she put it plainly in a release covered by The Spokesman-Review:
"Lumberyard was built around the idea of community"
What Actually Left When It Closed
The Lumberyard wasn't one restaurant. It was a cluster of independently owned vendors under one roof, which meant its closure scattered several small businesses rather than shutting down a single address. Two of them, Mang's Sushi and Mi Rinconcito Colombiano, told local outlets they were searching for new locations to keep serving the area. Whether they land somewhere within an easy walk of campus or somewhere else in Pullman entirely is still an open question as of this writing, which means the food-hall model of "one stop, several options" that game-day crowds had leaned on for five seasons doesn't have a direct replacement yet.
That matters for anyone weighing where to land after a game this fall. The old habit of "meet at the Lumberyard" doesn't work anymore. The businesses that made it work are dispersing rather than consolidating somewhere new.
What's Still Yours
None of this touches what actually makes College Hill on a Saturday. The neighborhood's own venues don't depend on North Grand Avenue at all. Beasley Coliseum keeps its own calendar of sporting events, concerts, and craft fairs independent of football. Bryan Hall Theatre runs performances and film screenings year-round. The Bill Chipman Trail is still there for anyone who wants to get out ahead of the noise on a Saturday morning, and Palouse Ridge Golf Club offers the same kind of escape. If you live on the hill, the neighborhood's own infrastructure for a game-day weekend was never actually built around one food hall down the street. It's just that a lot of people had gotten used to ending the day there.
Five Dates Worth Circling
If you're timing errands, houseguests, or your own tailgate around this season, the five Saturdays with extra programming attached are the ones to plan around first: Sept. 19 for Crimson Out and the Friday-night Movie Night beforehand, Sept. 25-26 for the Cougfest concert and Stripe the Stadium, Oct. 3 for Family Weekend, Oct. 24 for Homecoming against a Boise State team that hasn't played in Pullman since that 2017 overtime classic, and Nov. 14 for Native American and Military Appreciation Day. Each of those draws a heavier crowd than a standard home game, which means heavier foot traffic on the streets closest to the stadium and less predictable parking on the blocks in between.
The Season Ahead
This is a rebuilding year on the field under a new coach, and it's a transition year off it, with one of the neighborhood's longtime gathering spots gone and its replacement still undecided. Neither of those things changes what College Hill is day to day. It changes what six specific Saturdays look like, and it means the old assumptions about where the crowd ends up after the game don't hold this year. Worth knowing before the first Crimson Out crowd shows up on Sept. 19.
If you're already living the rhythm of a College Hill fall and find yourself thinking more seriously about your next move in this market, whether that's buying nearby or finding out what your current home is worth in today's conditions, Krista Gross knows this neighborhood block by block. Request a personalized home valuation and get a straight answer grounded in what's actually happening here, not a generic estimate.
