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By GLEN WERLING
In the movie “Field of Dreams,” a mysterious voice tells actor Kevin Costner’s lead character Ray Kinsella “If you build it, he will come.”
So Kinsella sets out to turn part of his Iowa farm into a baseball field complete with lights and bleachers. And sure enough, his long dead father returns in a vintage Chicago White Sox uniform along with the rest of the 1919 team.
At Norwell High School, there is a similar “field of dreams” under construction now. In the planning stage for several years, finishing touches are now being applied to Norwell’s first-ever regulation soccer field—complete with lights and bleachers—risen out of what was once a farm field.
It is surrounded by wide open grassy areas. To the west will be three football practice fields. To the north—well, those are just grassy fields of dreams of their own right now. They will be used for practice fields but someday, they too may become fields, including a new baseball diamond.
Brooks Construction of Fort Wayne won the bid to build the soccer field and the practice fields in 2007. Their bid of $1,169,557 was the lowest of two received, with the only other bid coming from Fleming Excavating Inc. of Decatur at $1,221,957. Although more contractors expressed an interest in the project, they declined to bid because of the tight time line set for the project’s completion.
Money for the project came from funds originally slated for the field construction in the Norwell/Lancaster Elementary School project of five years ago.
The bid was slightly above the $1.1 million that the school corporation had remaining from the Lancaster/Norwell project, but the remaining amount was pulled out of the capital projects line item for athletic facilities.
Plans were to have the soccer field ready for play last fall, but Mother Nature had other plans. A wet August followed by a rainy fall stretched out that time line. “We got so far and then we had to hold off working on the fields until spring,” said Northern Wells Buildings and Grounds Supervisor, John Kochert.
The original dream was to build an eight lane track around a practice soccer field to the east of the regulation soccer field, but that would have pushed the bid beyond the funds available.
So, the plans now are to completely refurbish the six-lane track around the existing football field from the base up. That’s another project slated for this summer.
“This project is long overdue,” said Norwell Athletic Director Eric Morgan. “They’ll have a really good surface to run on next spring. We looked at enlarging our existing track to eight lanes, but it required tearing out a lot of stuff and we decided it wasn’t worth it.”
In order to build the soccer field and the practice fields, hundreds of tons of dirt had to be moved. Norwell, in the past, was bordered by a large wall of dirt to the east of the school complex. That all had to be moved, observed Kochert.
The competition soccer field is just about finished. The lights are in place, the underground sprinkler system is about finished, the field is ready for seeding and the bleachers are built. A new well has been dug to provide water to the fields and the plans are to use a water wheel irrigation system to water the practice fields.
Surveying the multi-acre grassy area surrounding the new soccer field to the east and north, Kochert observed, “This area is ready to be converted into athletic fields, if the projects are ever ready to go.”
The hope is to have the new practice fields seeded in the fall and ready for practice by the 2009 football season.
“It’s neat to see this go from a conceptualization, from something that we’ve always wanted to do, to something that we’ve actually gotten underway,” admitted Morgan. “For the soccer program, this is great. They’ve been playing on the football field ever since soccer began here at Norwell.”
That has probably hurt some of Norwell’s better soccer teams, Morgan said. A regulation soccer field is 75 yards wide by 120 yards long. A regulation football field is 120 yards long but only 53 1/3 yards wide.
“That may have played to our strengths when we were on our home field, but when they went to a bigger field, it’s harder to get used to. So this will be great for our soccer program to have a full-sized competition field.”
He added that getting the boys and girls soccer programs off the football field will also keep the football field in better shape. “We’re not going to be on that field practically every night like we are now,” said Morgan. He observed that especially in poor weather, the grass had little or no time to heal because there was always kids on it every night during the fall. “If we weren’t playing soccer on it, then it was varsity football, or freshman football or middle school football—there was somebody on it every night,” said Morgan.
Included among all of these fields is a parking lot with over 200 spaces. The lot is currently stone, but plans are to asphalt it this summer.
“That parking lot made a big difference this spring for our softball fans,” observed Morgan, adding, “They were able to park a lot closer to the field. Before they had to park by the middle school and walk all the way around to the entrance to the field. It will be great for the soccer program, too, because the fans will be able to park up close to the field.
In addition to a proposed new baseball diamond, another dream on hold is a central concession stand and rest room complex. The original plans included the complex as an alternate in the overall field construction, however, the alternate’s bids came in too high and the plans had to be put on hold.
“Right now it’s just not in the budget to do that, so we’ll have to have port-a-johns. But plans are to eventually get this built,” said Morgan. The plans are to have a versatile facility available to serve the softball, soccer and football fields.
When the bids came in over budget for the complex, the Northern Wells Board had discussed possibly seeking donations to fund the project similar to a community-funded concession stand project completed a couple years ago at Adams Central.
“But right now we’ve been so busy on getting the athletic field part of this project done that we haven’t even thought of how we’re going to get this built yet,” said Morgan.
Another plan for the future is a second access drive off of U.S. 224 to improve traffic flow to and from the fields. The groundwork for the drive is finished and ready for it to be installed.
“At some time we would like to be able to access that but I’m not sure if the state will ever let us do it,” observed Kochert. He pointed out that the state would have to construct deceleration lanes on the highway leading to the drive and that becomes a complicated process.
However, the goal is to one day have the new drive in place so people can access the soccer and softball fields directly from the highway.
The final feature of the fields will be a retention pond that will be located at the south end of the complex. The pond will be the largest of several drainage features.
The middle school will also be setting up a cross country course around the new fields, probably starting this fall, depending on the construction progress of the fields.