Field conditions - is this normal?

[Westwind]

Respectfully - you are wrong. Title IX does not ensure the baseball and softball facilities are equal. It’s all sports across both genders. My baseball team may file a complaint, but not only on the grounds that the softball field is better.

“There is no requirement under Title IX that men’s and women’s teams in the same sports or like sports have facilities of the same quality. The analysis for the Title IX program component of the “provision of locker rooms, practice and competitive facilities” is an overall approach that compares all of the facilities for women’s teams to all of the facilities for men’s teams. Schools can emphasize different teams for men and women. If the softball field is lesser quality than the baseball field, a school can still comply if, for example, the women’s soccer field is better quality than the men’s soccer field.”

This is consistent with my experience.

When I raised some concerns about facilities, access to coaching and quality of coaching the school quickly added bowling, gaming and pretended to have girls wrestling. Problem solved, nothing to see here.

(It also created coaching positions for AD’s wife since she got canned for being a lousy volleyball coach. The joke was on me.)

This year I asked that the outfield fence on the softball field not be taken down so the football team can practice there.

They do drills, hit blocking sleds and generally tear the crap out of the outfield. They then put the fence back up. Full stop.

They are going to “look into it”, lol

 

[Dabears17]

This year I asked that the outfield fence on the softball field not be taken down so the football team can practice there.

They do drills, hit blocking sleds and generally tear the crap out of the outfield. They then put the fence back up. Full stop.

They are going to “look into it”, lol

As I said in the past, about 5 years ago my DD's school put a nice artificial turf coconut based field in our outfield. They wanted to make our infield turf as well, but we pushed back to keep the infield dirt. Their real reason was to create extra summer practice space for football, have a field for JH football in the fall, and more soccer practice space in the winter.

For JH softball they will not put up the fence because it would impinge slightly on the sideline for the football field, and it restricts our use of left field during our practices. We need to politely ask the JH coaches to keep their practices out of our outfield space multiple times. In the spring they don't put up our outfield fence until soccer season ends, which overlaps two to three weeks with the start of softball.

Not complaining about a nice turf outfield which we can use when it has rained, but I'm under no delusions it was out of their concern for the softball program.

This past winter they spent a ton of money putting in outfield grass on the baseball field and maintaining it to major league outfield standards. Need to have a discussion with the AD this summer about getting 10 to 20pct of that money budgeted for some needed improvements to softball infrastructure.

 

[Dabears17]

To expand on above post and repeat some stuff from posts on other threads:
1) Fall 2019 AD promises me they will get new dirt for the softball field.
2) Early Feb 2020 AD apologizes the budget for new dirt only is enough for the baseball field. They put at least a pallet, if not two, of turface material down on the baseball field. I buy 5 or 6 bags of turface out of my own pocket to fix things up around 1B and in front of the pitching plate. Covid cuts season short around March 10th.
3) 2021 Nothing really done to either field because of short notice of sports starting back up. We win a few games on lucky bounces because of the softness of our infield, lose a couple close games on bad bounces on a normal hardness field.
4) 2022 I don't have the exact number, but heard school spend over $300,000 to get rid of a rodent problem and plant major league field quality grass in the outfield and infield, not including the cost of mowing and maintaining it. They got new infield dirt and the softball field got some new dirt. Didn't ask the softball folks what kind of dirt they wanted. It's strange dirt that I've never seen before. I suspect at a minimum they got a good deal because they used the same material as the baseball field. I hope it wasn't the softball field just got the leftover material. Field is better, but still the balls bounce "softly".

Oh, one of 6 or 7 things that can be blamed for us losing a CCS playoff game 4-2 we should of won is the 3B misjudging a bounce of a ball based upon how the ball would of reacted on our infield, not a normal infield.