KFDM COOP Posted February 2, 2009 Report Posted February 2, 2009 Baseball field’s still feeling Ike’s wrath By Dave Rogers Published February 2, 2009 Last week’s email from Anahuac baseball coach Curtis Penn struck a chord: The Panthers had been forced to amend their 2009 high school baseball schedule because they couldn’t promise to play night games at their ballpark at Fort Anahuac Park. Four and a half months after Hurricane Ike hit the upper Gulf Coast, the light poles and their fixtures have still not been repaired. And the folks at Anahuac are not alone. Preseason high school baseball practice officially began Friday. At Baytown’s Sterling High School, some things were noticeably different than in past seasons. For one, the press box was missing from atop the bleachers behind home plate. For another, the wooden outfield fence had given way to a chain-link replacement. At Goose Creek Memorial, the 100-mph winds generated by the Category 2 hurricane blew down the new scoreboard at the softball field last Sept. 13. Robert E. Lee’s Gary Herrington Park, home to the Ganders’ baseball team, has newly repaired dugouts, fences and a patched-up press box. While Ike is a distant memory for many who live in the Baytown area, its effects will live on for years. And when it came to repairing the storm’s damages, school districts understandably last fall put spring sports facilities on the back burner. But most of the repairs are complete. “The things that haven’t been repaired to this point are on the hot plate right now,†is the way Tom Ed Gooden, Goose Creek school district athletic, put it recently. For Sterling’s Kluch Field, that means opening preseason practice with two batting cages instead of three and doing without a press box until sometime early in the season. Anahuac athletic director Darrell Barbay is hopeful that the Panthers will fix their lighting problem soon. “Some of the poles turned and moved some of the fixtures,â€Barbay said Sunday. “The winds blew some of the wires and stuff. “I think we’re going to get them taken care of. I talked to the (Chambers County) commissioner yesterday. He’s going to try to do some stuff, but we’ve got to go ahead and prepare just in case.†For the Panthers, that means moving varsity game times 7 p.m. to 4 p.m. and moving junior varsity games to different days. For now. “I don’t think it’s that big of a job,†Barbay said of the lighting repairs, “but I can’t do it.†Paul Tadlock, Sterling’s head baseball coach since 1998, said he’s been told to expect a new press box sometime this month. “We’re just waiting,†he said. “Our last cage is going up, we haven’t gotten a wind screen up (on the outfield fences). The press box will be pre-fab and they just have to drop it in. But they haven’t started building on the base of it yet.†The biggest change for Sterling’s ballpark will be the outfield fence. “I guess the biggest disappointment to us was we had that big monster wooden fence,†Tadlock said. “It made our park unique. Now we don’t have that. I guess that’s the way life goes when you have a disaster.†The wooden fence had been built with money raised by the baseball team’s booster club. Ironically, the booster club had been raising money before the hurricane to replace Sterling’s wooden dugouts with some built with cinder blocks. The hurricane blew down the wooden dugouts and the school district rebuilt them, this time using cinder blocks. So the fence is the thing at Sterling. “We went to a cyclone fence, to have a fence that would withstand that type of thing,†Tadlock said, meaning a hurricane. “But if a hurricane wants something, it’ll take it.â€
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