Bases will soon be loaded as work progresses on a baseball diamond between Black Diamond and Turner Valley this summer.
Construction crews are working around intermittent rainfall to build a wheelchair-accessible Field of Dreams ball diamond along Highway 22 - a $401,000 project that includes a regulation size diamond, parking lot, dugouts, bleachers, pathways, picnic area and bathrooms.
“We expect to have the ball diamond portion, including the backstop, landscaping and dugouts, completed the end of July, weather permitting,” said Shirley Puttock, chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Foothills. “The rain has held us up a little bit. It just looks like a big old pile of dirt right now.”
Puttock expects the bleachers and picnic area to be ready later in the summer and the parking lot to be paved in late fall.
The ball diamond was made possible after the clubs applied for and received a $150,000 grant from the Jays Cares Foundation, a charitable arm of the Toronto Blue Jays that invests in infrastructure projects through its Field of Dreams grant program to build, enhance or refurbish spaces for youth to play ball, develop skills and learn from positive role models.
The Boys and Girls Club also received $50,000 from Canadian Tire’s Jumpstart Accessibility Grant to construct wheelchair-accessible dugouts, bleachers, pathways and bathrooms, the Town of Black Diamond provided $77,500 from its recreation reserve fund and the club contributed through its own fundraising initiatives.
Another $50,000 must be raised to cover the remaining costs of the project. Puttock said the club is waiting to hear back from two grants it applied for.
In the meantime, hype is building around the project, she said.
“The contractor said there’s people pulling in every day who want to talk about it and ask when it will be ready. We’ve had lots of interest from local teams and people wanting to start scheduling for baseball. I’m hoping by the end of July we can start scheduling people,” she said.
Among the first users will be youth in the club’s day camps and before-and-after school programs. The club has programs in Black Diamond, Nanton, High River and Blairmore that offer activities to more than 800 youth ages five to 18 from cooking lessons to outdoor play, said Puttock.
“It will be accessible to everybody,” she said. “We’re hoping to see lots of baseball played on it, even though it’s late in the season. It’s such a beautiful space along the river.”
In the colder months, the facility will be open for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.
Black Diamond mayor Ruth Goodwin said she’s excited about the potential to build on the town’s recreational opportunities while drawing more people to the region.
“All of the community is really looking forward to being able to utilize that field and both adults and our youth alike, I would imagine, are going to be very excited about being able to have baseball once again within our community,” she said. “It's just another recreational opportunity for town residents to be able to use.”
A regulation ball diamond behind the Oilfield Regional Arena was removed in 2007 to make room for the Scott Seaman Sports Rink. Although there are ball diamonds in the town’s two schoolyards, neither is regulation size.
Construction of the new diamond was scheduled to occur last year, but the project was delayed after a bear was in the area for a few weeks and some endangered Alberta cliff swallows nested on a pile of dirt.
