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Senior Project Day 14

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Day 14 Blog - Tuesday 5/23 Written at 1:30 pm       This morning I arrived at Martin Field around 9 am to start my final day of senior project! I started off by walking around and picking up trash for about an hour. There was a lot of trash today, I suspect there was a lot more because I haven’t visited this site since last week. Next, with the help of my mentor, I put up a backstop net on the new batting cage, this was a long process that took me two hours. For this net, I had to first search for all the parts needed and figure out what goes where. Then the assembly process required me to use a ladder to get up high. I was very nervous about not doing this correctly, but it turned out well. For the last hour of my day, I did some landscaping work. One of the fields needed to be mowed so I mowed the outfield grass there. The last day of senior project was bittersweet. I am excited to graduate, but I had a lot of fun these past two weeks!  Today’s Hours: 9 am - 1 pm (4 hours)  Project T
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Senior Project Day 13

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Day 13 Blog - Monday 5/22 Written at 3:45 pm This morning I arrived at Sanel Park ready to start painting the interior of the dugouts. I started off in the third base dugout, typically used by the visiting team. I began by wiping the dust off the bench, taking a towel, and wiping down the walls to get an initial layer of debris off. Next, I started painting the interior walls. I first took a larger paint roller and painted the initial first layer. There were a lot of cracks and crevices that needed a more precise paint job so I went through after the initial layer with a small brush to get the small details. After this, I painted the bench with a different paint roller head adjustment that works better on wood. The first dugout interior, bench, and exterior walls took me about 2 hours to complete.       Next was the bench on the first base line, used by the home team. This dugout was in far worse condition. I am genuinely horrified by the disrespect for the home facilities that these
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Senior Project Week 2 Reflection

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  Senior Project Week 2 Reflection May 21, 2023 Week 2 Total Hours: 48 hours and 35 minutes Week 2 of senior project went very well. I was able to continue working toward my goal of bettering the softball fields of Concord for those who utilize them. I went into the week with more manageable goals than week 1 and achieved all of these goals. This week I also set new goals for myself for the two days that we have left during week 3. Overall I have continued to learn a lot about myself and the way that I work on projects of this sort. It is good for me to do a lot of research and planning before I start working on something. Time management is also something that is crucial to my success. This week I started sitting down every night and planning my schedule for the next day hour for hour in order to use my time the most effectively.  The first major project of the week was painting labels on the Martin Field dugouts. My original plan was to spray-paint these labels, however, after pu
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Senior Project Day 12

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  Day 12 Blog - Saturday 5/20 Written at 11:15 pm  I started off my morning at the field early to arrive before the players needed to arrive for games. I got to Sanel Park around 7 am to continue my preparations for painting on Monday. The first event on that field wasn’t until 12 so I had 4 hours to clean up the dugouts for the first coat of paint. I wiped down the walls of the dugouts and then swept the floors. After this, I had some time to kill, so I did some weeding of the infield. This infield was in a lot better shape than Martin so there weren’t many weeds here. Next, I walked around the entire complex and picked up trash. Sanel Park has 1 softball field, 2 little league baseball fields, and 3 batting cages. There is a lot of ground to cover here so it took me a long time to fully sweep the perimeter of this complex. I feel ready to start painting on Monday, I expect that I will have to do some more cleaning of the dugouts after a weekend of softball games and practices, howe
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Senior Project Day 11

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  Day 11 Blog - Friday 5/19 Written at 1:30 pm I started my day by going to Home Depot to purchase supplies for my next painting project. This trip took me around an hour as I needed to talk to someone who works in the paint section about color matching the original dugout and what type of paint I needed. I am painting two different surfaces, wood, and cement, so I needed a kind of paint that would work on both. Additionally, I needed to figure out the kind of rollers that I needed for both surfaces as well. After this, I went to Martin Field to take the stencils off of the field labels. I was very excited because my paint job turned out really well! This took me about half an hour. Next, I traveled to my other site, Sanel Park. I first took down the rotted bat holder then did some cleaning up of trash and a bit of weeding around the dugout areas. I was doing work at Sanel for about 2 and a half hours. As I briefly mentioned in my blog post from yesterday, Sanel is in a lot worse con
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Senior Project Day 10

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  Day 10 Blog - Thursday 5/18 Written at 1 pm I started the morning by going to Martin Field to do another coat of paint after yesterday’s layer dried. This took me about 30 minutes. After that, I spent around 45 minutes cleaning up trash, sweeping the dugout floors, and raking the fields a bit. I then traveled to my second site, Sanel Field to assess what work I will be doing there. My original plan was to clear the grass out of the batting cage at this park, however, my mentor and I saw the shape of the cage and decided that this would not be an obtainable goal. This batting cage is in such poor condition that professional landscapers with an excavator would need to come in and clear it out. So, we shifted to my backup task for this field. Cleaning out and touching up the paint jobs inside the softball field’s dugouts. These dugouts are in rough shape, I attached photos below where the dugout walls are completely vandalized. In addition to this, the benches and walls need a new paint
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Senior Project Day 9

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  Day 9 Blog - Wednesday 5/17 Written at 12:20 I started off Day 9 by arriving at Home Depot at around 7:45 am to purchase a few things that I forgot during yesterday’s trip. I got another set of stencils, a small tray to put the paint in, and a small paint mixing spatula. I arrived at Martin around 8:30 to start my painting project. First I needed to take down the stencils that I put up yesterday and re-measure and level the new larger stencils on the Martin 1 dugout. I then prepared my stencils and taped them to the wall. Next was the painting process. I decided to do three coats of paint on each letter and number. The preparation and actual painting took me about 2 hours just because I was extra cautious since it was my first attempt at painting something like this. After this, I repeated this process on the dugout of the other field, Martin 2. Because I had already done this before, the whole measuring and painting process took a little bit less, an hour and a half. Overall, toda
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