Parents,
Thought I'd get the UR parents blog off to a start. Just dropped my son Blair off at 8:30am at the U of R baseball field. Standing water throughout the outfield and 36 degrees, but 24 student athletes (our sons) and Coach Reina trying to get things ready for a 12 noon start of a weekend doubleheader. No grounds crew assistance and no pumps getting water off the outfield. Just our sons and their coach lugging buckets of water to the side. I am a big believer in the D3 athletic concept, but at 32K per year I have a real problem with the fact that there is no University support out there helping them out.
Plan on addressing this complaint with athletic department and university administation. Comments and suggestions?
Agreed and have parent support?
Ken Veenema
Mar 25 09:56:05 2007
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9 comments:
Thanks for the heads up. That is pathetic. UR is one of the most well funded and fully endowed Universities around....not to mention w/ housing a whopping 45k. I give these boys a lot of credit....no glory here and they stick with it regardless. Tell me what you need from us as we are 100 percent on board.
Elizabeth Park
Anything we could do to get some additional help from the school would be great. It would be nice to see someone from the UR grounds crew around to help out, other than the team.
Bob Fishback
The difference between the glorious football field and the baseball field is striking. (Not only the difference in turf, but the fact that the outfield goes directly from football practice field to varsity baseball outfield without a growing season to reclaim it.) Spoke to Coach R after the game, who indicates that he'll be approaching the administration about upgrading the field. I'd certainly want us to be behind him in support. I was there on Friday watching the team take snow shovels full of muddy infield slop off the field-hours worth of work. The time commitment to baseball is significant without including landscaping for the university. I'll help in whatever way everyone thinks is appropriate.
David Little
I think at this point we all agree that this is an issue that has to be resolved not only for the immediate but ongoing. Michael never complains but when he recapped his weekend to me on our traditional Sunday call it included aprox. 7-10 hours over the course of Fri-Sun of outside field work and quite frankly I find it unacceptable. Besides the fact that they have an intensive practice and conditioning schedule in addition to a full weekend schedule of games with travel time in most cases there is this minor thing called academics which I assume is the primary reason all of our kids are there to begin with. As I said in an earlier e-mail and I will reiterate the intense practice and game schedule is the price of playing and I do believe the boys think that it is worth the commitment or they wouldn't do it but the field maintenance and clean-up requirements need to substituted with study and academic involvement. The Baseball team should not be treated as second class citizens in the overall Sports Program and it is our job as parents to make sure this does not happen. Beside the fact that shoveling muddy water and snow outside for x amount of hours isn't exactly the healthiest scenario I can think of. By the way...he doesn't even shovel our driveway at home...nice!
Good suggestion but it may be more appropriate to gather the facts first as I was under the impression that the baseball program gets some form of compensation or avoids a variety of fees by doing much of the work themselves. I believe having the team do the grounds work etc is a coach’s decision so the first place to start may be with Coach R himself to determine the reasons why they do it.
Dick Kloc
We are not sending Luke to U of R to do heavy field work so that he can play baseball. His summer job last year included hauling river rock for a landscape company, and he got paid for that. Furthermore, at his high school last year, they maintained the field so the boys could spend time on academics, then play baseball. Certainly U of R can afford to maintain the baseball field for our wonderful group of boys.
Let me know how I can help accomplish this effort.
gretchen brocks
Luke's(freshman) mom
25 young men at roughly $40,000 a year is $1,000,000. They also raised enough money this year to buy their team/university a new sound system, a new tarp for the field, new foul and flag poles...and now they(with their coaches) have to clean and groom the field in order to play their game and represent their university??! C'mon. I know it's not a revenue producing sport, but does the golf team(which I am sure doesn't draw the crowd that the baseball game saw on Sunday)cut the grass, rake the bunkers and put the pins in before they can play a match? Our boys and their coaches deserve better.
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