The Town of Olds says it will endeavour to provide a higher level of service for Olds Minor Baseball after the organization's president brought concerns to council and administrative staff over ball diamond upkeep, availability and diamond closures.
Josh Zanolli brought up those concerns during council's policies and priorities meeting.
“If you look at a hockey season, they get maintenance during every game, every practice from the beginning of September or even late August, all the way to the end of the season,” Zanolli said. “We’re not asking for that level of service, not even close, but it does need to improve.”
One big concern is that the dirt gets hard. Zanolli said that leads to the diamonds becoming unsafe.
“There have been multiple times we’ve had to shut down practices because you can’t even get a ball to roll straight," said Zanolli.
“If there’s a ground ball coming in at 70 or 80 miles an hour, hits a footprint and catches a 12-year-old in the lip, it’s not a good scene.”
Zanolli noted the Rotary Athletic Park, now under construction and expected to open next spring will have new ball diamonds.
“We have a multimillion-dollar facility going up by hopefully next year. We want that to last and be in good condition,” he said.
A meeting between administration and Olds Minor Baseball representatives was held last month.
According to chief administrative officer Michael Merritt the meeting went well and all parties came away satisfied.
Merritt outlined some of the commitments town officials made.
“For 2019 we agreed to provide additional draggers to the ball fields,” said Merritt. “We are looking at ordering some additional shale; basically spreading that around where there’s any bare spots.”
Additionally, the town has agreed to work more closely with the minor ball association when it comes to the use of fields.
“The town did allow us to manage the closure of the diamonds if rain is involved. So we do have some power if it’s raining to keep the diamonds open,” Zanolli said.
Zanolli said he came away from the meeting satisfied with what had been agreed upon between the two parties.
“It was nice to finally have an open discussion. So I guess we’ll leave that as a step in the right direction for sure,” Zanolli said.
The two parties discussed the possibility of getting the fields open for use earlier in the spring for tryouts and extra practices, but no decisions were made on that front.
“No decision was made because that is a service level adjustment which would require obviously additional costs," Merritt said.
“What we did say was we would bring it forth in the 2020 budget deliberations and look at it at that time. So that would be really a council decision to decide to make changes to the service level.”
