Bulls Front Office Teams Up to Renovate Youth League Field

When the Durham Bulls front office staff started looking for additional ways to serve the community while team building together, they ended up finding a way to keep baseball in the mix. The crew found out that the Durham Bulls Youth Athletic League (DBYAL) fields were in need of some TLC. They quickly knew that helping out at the DBYAL would be a homerun.

DBBC Director of Stadium Operations Scott Strickland reached out to the Durham Parks and Rec about their desire to perform a field renovation and user the renovation as an office-wide service project. He explained the process to Capcom:

“The fields were built in 2004 and were due for a reshaping, as I call it. This meant reforming edges to proper measurements by cutting back overgrowth, while also forming cutouts around the bases that better suit the user groups.

This formed nice, clean cut, uniform edges which really made the field much more pleasing to the eye. This was hard physical labor that took numerous employees to pull off.

We then brought in 20 tons of infield material and tilled that into the existing infield material. After tilling, we graded the surface to match up to the surrounding grass edges and insured there were no low spots.

We have performed this type of quick field renovation many times to church fields, middle school fields, etc. in the community and are lucky enough to have most of the necessary equipment already in our fleet. So, instead of it sitting in a shop over the off season, we are able to utilize it to give back to the community that supports us during the Bulls season.

Our primary equipment rental provider, Sunbelt Rentals, also kicked in a few pieces of equipment that were essential.

I am obviously a little biased, but as someone who works in baseball and loves the game so much, there is no better gift than to insure our local youth have safe, aesthetically pleasing athletic surfaces to play and have fun on.”

Besides the work on the actual playing field, the Bulls staffers pressure-washed dugout floors and walls and then added a fresh coats of paint. They cleaned trash in and around the park and repaired dugout benches.

“It was a great way for members of various departments to ‘crossover’ with other department members they might not usually work with, while giving back to the Durham community,” concluded Strickland. “A true win-win for everyone involved.”