Boys Baseball

After hundreds of man hours of work, spanning several weeks, the fathers, coaches, and players of River Hill baseball completed construction of dugouts for the varsity baseball field. The thousands of dollars of cost for the materials were supplied through the generosity of many companies. Engineering to ensure a more than strong enough structure was done by the Brian Nordyke Design Group. KKC Construction Company cut the holes in the existing slab of concrete for the vertical supports. The LaFarge Company gave the team all of the gravel and concrete to fix in place the 6 x 6 posts that hold up the dugout. The Wilson Lumber Company provided most of the lumber and hardware. Kendall's Hardware provided funds for materials. ABC Rental helped out with equipment, and The Roof Center donated the tar paper and shingles. Without this much-appreciated support, the dugouts could not have been built.

Every project of this magnitude needs a crew boss and ours was Mike Marrie. He showed up first and was last to leave. Mike is not only extremely knowledgeable in construction, he is also an extremely good slave driver, working his crews many times to, and beyond, the point of exhaustion. Seeing as the average age of the adult part of the work force was 52 years, the point of exhaustion usually came after 30 or 40 minutes. The players, being younger and stronger, were made to do most of the heavy work -- hauling wheel barrows full of gravel or concrete -- and for baseball players, they did real well. Mike even enlisted the volunteer help from Dick Young and Kenny Erskine, his co-workers in his company, to do most of the skilled work in carpentry, while the rest of us did the grunt work. Coaches Rick Lloyd and Rick Marquart, before and after every Saturday practice, worked side by side with the fathers and players to get the work done. To be able to get to know these fine men in that way was a special bonus.

Being able to work side by side with our sons and their coaches was a genuine joy for all of us. The fathers normally would arrive at 8:00 am on Saturdays and begin work. At 9:00 am (needing an additional hour of sleep) the ball players would show up for a 2-hour practice. As everyone knows, parents are never welcome by their sons at team practices. But as the volunteer work force for their beloved dugouts, we dads just became part of the scenery. At 9:00 am, if you looked closely, the work slowed down just a little, as the fathers looked, just a little, but closely, at their sons practicing. I don't think any of us realized how much fun a bunch of baseball players could have doing something they love -- practicing baseball .... and horsing around.

To say that these dugouts were well built would be an understatement. These massive structures, engineered to withstand a small tornado or a large hurricane, are estimated to be able to tolerate wind speeds somewhere between 182 and 217 miles per hour! The original holes dug into the ground to hold the support posts were 15 inches by 15 inches by 30 inches deep! However, after a series of rain storms, the sides caved in and many holes ended up being more like 2 feet by 2 feet wide. And sometimes Mike just kept telling us to "dig deeper," so some holes were a good 3 feet deep. With so much hard work to do, our only form of relaxation was to constantly poke fun at our boss, Mike. Sub-crew chief, Mark Bilohlavek, became especially adept at needling Mike. Others, such as Gary Heinz and Rich Konapelsky, discovered that if you walked about in small circles, it might take an hour or more before Mike realized you weren't working! But in truth, it would be hard to call what we did work; it was fun.

One father expressed what all of us must have been feeling when he explained, "You know, it has been great coming out to work and getting to know the other fathers. Now, at games, we know each other and have shared something in common." One might think that, after all that hard work, we would be glad we don't have to do something like that again. But, the fact is, if we all thought about it, we would probably feel sorry for future teams and their fathers that they won't have a big project like this to bring them together. When one dad was asked by crew chief Marrie how he was doing, he answered, "You know, there's no place I would rather be right now than helping build these dugouts for my son's baseball team." Call it male bonding or whatever you want, but it was, in many ways, the icing on the cake of a wonderful baseball season.

In our minds, River Hill has the best team, the best parents, and, now, the best dugouts!