By Selena Burke, News Correspondent
An estimated $15,000 to $20,000 will be donated by Northeastern University’s Office of City and Community Affairs to improve the drainage of McLaughlin Park on Parker Hill Avenue, where students coach Mission Hill Little League teams, said Northeastern Vice President for City and Community Affairs John Tobin.
The city will provide an official estimate soon, which is expected to be closer to $20,000, Tobin said. He said he hopes renovations will be done by the start of the next Little League season.
“We definitely did miss a lot of games last summer, I’d say four or five because of field conditions which is more than we wanted to, but last summer was pretty bad as far as rain,” Ryan Ulrich, a middler industrial engineering major and student coach for the Reds, said.
Mission Hill Little League Secretary Suzanne Hauck said she first noticed the poor drainage when her son joined the league eight years ago.
“There are puddles that accumulate at home plate, along the lines of the pitcher’s mound, in front of both dugouts, third and second, and I think along the lines between second and third,” Hauck said.
The drainage at McLaughlin Park has been an issue for years, Mission Hill Little League President Adabel Romero said.
Games and practices are sometimes canceled after the rain if the drainage is bad because it’s not safe for the kids to run on the field when there are many large puddles, Romero said. Depending on how rainy the season is, the conditions can be bad enough that the kids won’t get to play twice a week as scheduled, she said.
When the puddles are bad after rain, the student coaches are asked to assist in pumping out the field to dry it off, said Tobin. The puddles can linger for a few days, creating problems even when it’s not raining, he said.
“It could be 80 degrees out and sunny, and you can’t play ball,” Tobin said.
Some students, however, do not see the drainage at McLaughlin Park as a big issue.
“The Smith Street field is the one we had trouble with because it was lower, all the water kind of funneled down into the field. It’s not that the drainage was bad, but that was the one we had more trouble with rather than the McLaughlin field,” Ulrich said.
Northeastern’s Ultimate Frisbee team also practices at the park, around once a week said Devin Helmke, a member of the men’s team. He said he has not had issues with the drainage at the park in the past.
“We’ve been up there when it’s been a bit rainy and I wouldn’t say that [the park has drainage problems]; I haven’t noticed any significant problems,” Helmke, a middler environmental science major, said. But he added that he has not visited the field since last spring or last fall.
Tobin said that although the city has a large budget, what it gives to parks is small.
“We’ve asked the bus [sic] and park department to bring in more, to try to maintain it more in the sense of cutting of the grass and trying to deal with it more at the beginning of the year before we start using it, but it doesn’t seem to work,” Romero said.
In the past, French drains, which are perforated pipes buried underground to drain water, were used, but they didn’t work because of the runoff.
“I think they’ve tried applying the band aids over the years and eventually when you keep on applying band aids to things it works for a little while but you’ve still got a major problem on your hands,” Tobin said.
To fix the drainage, the field will be dug up to discover where the drainage is occurring now and what needs to be done to fix the problem, Tobin said. Pipes might be installed and for a while the baseball field will look more like a pile of dirt, he said.
“We look at it as instead of doing little one-off things here and there, we’d rather do things that make a difference,” Tobin said.
