Jeff Mitchell has been a Westport resident for over 30 years, and a Westport Baseball and Softball volunteer for more than 20. For the last decade, he has scheduled baseball games and practices in town, and worked with the Parks & Recreation Department on reserving and preserving baseball field space. He writes:
For the upcoming spring season, Westport’s youth sports programs will schedule hundreds of teams for games and practices on our scarce few athletics fields.
This process is complex, time-consuming, unrelenting — and apparently completely misunderstood.
Every field in Westport is considered multipurpose. Like rooms in a house, some are obviously more suited for one purpose than another. But very often it boils down to which location is available when you need it. It therefore makes the most sense to make every location as multipurpose (flexible) as possible. In simple terms, that means drawing as many different lines on them as feasible.
The Wakeman Fields adjacent to Bedford Middle School are used for soccer, lacrosse, baseball, football practice, school sports, frisbee and more. The “B” field (center left) is artificial turf. The rest are grass.
At the start of all 4 seasons, schedulers of all the youth sports meet with Parks & Rec to make their case for who gets priority on which fields on what days, and at what times.
There is no such convenience that soccer gets to use all the soccer fields, baseball all the baseball fields, etc. That’s because field space is so tight in Westport that no town-administered field can afford to be deemed single use.
For example, even the wonderfully renovated Staples baseball and soccer terraces are used seasonally. The 2 sports have shared the same field since 1958.
Youth sports has exploded lately. Kids not only play on Westport’s recreational teams, but also on our many travel teams. Sports are no longer seasonal; they are year-round. Girls now play sports such as lacrosse and rugby that traditionally were played by boys. Just because there are fewer girls playing a particular sport doesn’t mean they don’t deserve equal access to field space. How else can they grow their sport?
Westport PAL lacrosse players, at Paul Lane Stadium.
Schedulers never know until after our registration deadlines how many kids we’ll need to accommodate, hence how many fields of what size we’ll need to reserve. Even once we know, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to reserve that number of fields.
Worse, our travel team schedules are beholden to whatever external leagues we enter them in. The result is often one sport calling another asking if a field primarily reserved for that sport’s use might miraculously be free. That’s the benefit of fields being as multipurpose as possible.
Parks & Rec’s maintenance staff schedules athletic field maintenance for when the sun comes up, so that our kids can use them when they wake up.
Their schedules are based on what else they need to do the rest of the day. How many guys they have on call on any given day in the morning varies with how many fields need prepping, which we schedulers try to give them a reasonable idea on as long in advance as possible.
Because Little League uses the baseball fields at Town Farms and Coleytown Elementary School almost every daylight hour school is not in session, we pay a third-party landscaper 6 figures specifically to assure as little downtime as possible.
Westport Baseball and Softball outsources some maintenance to third party vendors. (Photo/Eric Bosch)
The problem with having such a demand for field space is that the wear and tear on fields is horrendous. When it rains, baseball fields turn to mud. If the clay is not immediately properly raked, it gets rock hard in the sun.
One tournament on a grass field can destroy it for an entire season. For example, in the summers of 2022 and ’23, a well-attended lacrosse tournament damaged the Staples soccer field so badly that the boys and girls varsity soccer teams had to move all their remaining home games to Wakeman.
A private organization rented Staples’ Loeffler Field in the summers of 2022 and ’23. It rendered the field unplayable for the varsity boys and girls soccer teams for those fall seasons.
Parks & Rec has asked us to please keep a field free for just one season so they can remediate it. That’s sadly not feasible in Westport.
Why do so many kids play sports these days? Of course, for fun — but also for opportunity. A recent Fortune Magazine article cites a 2003 book, Reclaiming the Game: “athletes are twice as likely to be admitted to an elite college as legacies and four times that of under-represented students. Since this study came out, the number of recruited athletes has increased 45%, compared to overall college growth of 33%.”
Parents know this. Parents see that Staples High School has won numerous state championships in a wide variety of sports. Staples baseball just had one player, Hiro Wyatt, sign for $1.5 million with the Kansas City Royals right out of high school.
The list of top schools our student-athletes have gotten admitted to is mind-boggling. These kids began their sports careers playing youth sports. People even tell us they moved to Westport because we are such a phenomenal sports town.
Yes, we are. But we have the ability to be even better.
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