Baseball Team, District at Odds Over Timeline of Field Project

Members of the Scotch Plains-Fanwood High baseball team and their parents showed up at the Board of Education meeting Thursday night to express their frustration with the fact that repairs to the baseball field began in late January, leaving the team without a home field for the time being.

"None of the athletic people were consulted about this," said Doreen Binkiewicz, the mother of Raiders player Gary Binkiewicz. "Now they have no good place to practice and no field to play on."

Binkiewicz said she and the others have been waiting since the end of the 2009 spring season to see the repairs start. Now they're underway at the height of the team's preparation for its 2010 season, forcing them to practice at Park Middle and potentially play their first few games all away. The game season begins April 1.

Business Administrator Anthony Del Sordi said a number of factors led to the project beginning in late January, but assured those in attendance that only five days of work were left and that it would all be complete by the end of March. Del Sordi said the workers continued throughout February in the midst of the snow storms, and that the only real delay they faced was the rain storm last weekend. From the get-go, he said, they thought they had sufficient time to do the work.

"It's never our intent to disrupt school or sports to do construction," he said. "The baseball field has given us a unique situation to deal with."

Still, that answer was not satisfactory to the parents and players, who pointed out that the baseball season really begins when the players start practicing in early March.

Raiders' player John Maxwell prepared a speech for the board about how he and his fellow players have been excited since last season to finally play on a new field. Now, he said, they've lost their home field advantage and disrupted other spring programs.

"Scotch Plains is notorious for having dismal playing fields," he said. "I only ask who took our field to give it back."

Doreen Binkiewicz and fellow mom Laurie Maxwell accused Del Sordi of not effectively communicating the plans with the athletic director, leaving everyone surprised when the project began a few weeks before the boys started practice. Binkiewicz went as far as calling Del Sordi a "micromanager" who tried to handle the project without consulting those involved and said she'd be willing to serve on a search team to replace him.

"We stood here and heard about how the budget process is definitely going to be rough this year," Maxwell said. "You've got this mess from the governor, and you feel all your hard work went nowhere, that it was ripped right from under you. Well, that's exactly how these boys feel. They knew it needed to be ripped up, and since last year we've been patient. We've waited. We've watched. Why did you pick two weeks before the season?"

"When people make statements that I work in isolation, I can assure you that's not the case," Del Sordi replied. "The assistant principal for athletics was involved in the process from Day 1. We had professional doing the work, and we ran into three individuals who couldn't determine the exact problem we were facing. That took longer than we would've liked to get resolved. When it was all said and done, we reached out to the community for assistance, but that doesn't always happen because people have jobs. We have to go through a state process, and that ended in mid-January, so we couldn't start until late January. We did feel we had sufficient time to do the work."

The business administrator also took issue with a Patch article that ran Thursday, stating that the claims in it made by baseball coach Tom Baylock implied to Del Sordi that he seemed to be misinformed about the project.

"When people say no one was involved in the process, people knew it was going on," Del Sordi said. "I wish that message would have been passed on to the players."

"Did you ask if it was ok to dig two weeks before the season?" Maxwell asked.

"Of course," Del Sordi said.

At that point, the high school's assistant principal for athletics, Rob Harmer, shot up in the back of the room.

"I'm sorry, but I can't take this anymore," he said. "I was not informed that the field would be dug up."

Harmer approached the microphone and said that the problem was the result of "a lack of communication for many years." When Del Sordi asked him if the district's buildings and grounds director had discussed the project's start date with him, Harmer said no.

With the meeting particularly tense at that point, Board President Trip Whitehouse called an end to the public portion of the session and requested that Harmer, Del Sordi, and others involved in the project meet within the next two days to sort out where the lines of communication broke down. Whitehouse asked that they report back to the board during its budget meeting on Monday.