Softball Fields Project

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

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

  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

  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

  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

  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

  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

  Day 8 Blog - Tuesday 5/16 Written at 1:45 pm This morning I woke up eager to start my painting project at the Martin Field dugouts. I went to Michael’s crafts store at 9 am to shop for my materials for the spray painting. I purchased white spray paint, adhesive, and painter’s tape before realizing that I could purchase stencils rather than making my own, which is what I had originally planned on doing. It took me around 30 minutes to track down all of these items and purchase them in the store. I then went to the field and arrived around 9:45 am. Before starting my spray painting project, I put up “No Smoking” signs that one of the youth softball coaches asked me to put up. There were 4 of these signs and I needed to figure out the most visible places to put them up. This process took me 30 minutes due to the several issues that I had with faulty zip ties.  Around 10:15 I started measuring and figuring out how I would organize the letters on the dugouts. I then measured how far a

  Day 7 Blog - Monday 5/15 Written at 1:15 pm The second week of senior project is off to a great start! My plan for today was to start my spray painting work on the dugouts at Martin Field, however, I received a text from a member of the NH Lightning Softball board asking if I could do a few things to help set up the batting cage they are building. This batting double batting cage was supposed to be up a few weeks ago, however, it has been delayed by the rain we have gotten these past few weeks. I said yes because I know how beneficial it will be for youth players to have these batting cages before the end of the spring rec season. Today I was asked to help prepare the concrete that is going to be put in the cardboard tubes that I transported last week. This meant sorting through the 30-ish long metal poles that are laying out near one of the storage sheds. These poles come in 3 different sizes and I was asked to organize them by size and then carry 10 of them over to the site of th

Senior Project Week 1 Reflection  May 14, 2023 Week 1 Total Hours: 24 hours and 20 minutes My first week of senior project was successful. The overall objective for my senior project is to give back to the Concord softball program which has given so much to me and many of my friends. I went into the week with some ambitious goals and came out of the week with some new and more achievable goals. Going into the two weeks, I was planning on repainting 4 entire softball dugouts, redoing fencing in 1 outfield, and doing a lot of landscaping work at 3 total different softball fields. With the help of my mentor, I realized that these goals would take much longer than I have for a senior project. I adjusted goals to way more manageable tasks.  Although adjusting the majority of my original goals for the week I have worked toward 1 of them, the landscaping of fields. I have done a significant amount of weeding which is crucial to the safety and success of players. When there is too much change

Day 6 Blog - 5/13 Posted at 2:30 pm  Day 6 had more of a different start than I was expecting. I was planning on purchasing materials for my spray painting project today but didn’t feel fully prepared yet. I wanted to do a bit more research on what I needed to buy rather than the research that I did yesterday on the process of spray painting. I started around 8:00 am and ended up doing an hour and a half of watching videos and reading articles. As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday I am really nervous about spray painting the dugouts because I have never done something like this before and it will be difficult to fix if I mess up. I want to make sure that I am completely knowledgeable in this field before I start the actual painting.  Next, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the rest of my time, so I started to practice making stencils on white printer paper. There are 12 overall different characters that need stencils so I had to practice tracing the letters and numbers here.

  Day 5 Blog - 5/12 Written at 12:30 pm  I started off my day by taking a trip to Walmart to shop for the First Aid Kit that I assembled for Martin Field. I arrived at Walmart around 8 am to start shopping. Yesterday when researching places to buy these materials, I came to the conclusion that Walmart would be the most cost-effective option. Shopping took me around an hour as I was surprised at how many different first aid products they had available and how difficult it was to identify what I was looking for. I didn’t expect shopping to take this long but I underestimated the amount of options Walmart would have and how spread out everything was throughout the store. After purchasing everything I needed, I headed home to assemble the First Aid Kit. I first took some things out of their bulky packaging and organized some products in zip-lock bags. I then made a general list of everything in the bin to make it easier for coaches, or whoever needs to access the First Aid materials. I p

  Day 4 Blog - 5/11  Written at 1:45 pm I started off day 4 of senior project by arriving at Martin Field at 8:30 am. Last night I received an email from a volunteer on the board at Concord National Rec Softball, the league that runs Martin Field. As my day 1 blog mentioned, Concord National is building a batting cage at Martin Field. This coach for the league knew that I was working at Martin for my senior project and asked me if I could transport some materials from the storage shed over to the site of the batting cage to help prepare for the landscaping team that is coming this weekend to construct the cage. The process of transporting these large cardboard tubes took me about an hour as I had to go back and forth from the shed to the cage to carry 18 of these tubes. After they were all at the lot of sand where the cage is being built, I was asked to duct tape them together in groups of three. After this, I noticed that there was a lot of trash left over from games and practices las

  Wednesday, May 10th - Today’s Hours: 4 hours - Total Hours: 12 hours and 20 minutes Day 3 of my senior project was very productive. I arrived at Martin Field at 8 am ready to start my work for the day: spreading more Pea Stone and A LOT of weeding. Yesterday I only got to spreading Pea Stone in 2 out of the 4 dugouts at Martin Park, so today I tackled the last two dugouts. These dugouts are larger than the other field so I used 4 bags of stone in each dugout area rather than only 2. The spreading of Pea Stone is crucial to dugouts at Martin Field because there are very bad drainage issues after rain and the stone helps prevent major flooding in the dugouts. I am confident that my contributions to the dugouts will help make the fields easier to play on after rain storms. The process of spreading the remainder of the Pea Stone took me 1 hour to complete. Next, there was a lot of grass that was starting to grow underneath the benches so I cleaned this up in each of the 4 dugouts; this p

  Tuesday, May 9th  - Total Hours: 8 hours and 20 minutes Today was the second day of my project, I started at 8 am by first doing research on spreading Pea Gravel in the 4 dugouts at Martin Field. I watched a few videos on how to properly spread the gravel and then researched where I can purchase it, this process took 30 minutes. After this, I went to Home Depot to purchase 10 bags of Pea Gravel, this took another 30 minutes. When I took the gravel to Martin Field, at this point it was 10, it took me 20 minutes to unload the 10 bags of gravel from my car and into the storage shed. I started to work in the dugouts of the field with smaller dugout areas, first I weeded out all of the dandelions, then collected trash to prepare for the Pea Stone to be spread. This process took around an hour. Next was spreading the gravel, which took another hour. I ended up completely finishing the full weeding and gravel spreading process in 2 dugouts. For the next hour, I tackled the second field’s du