In the coming weeks, roughly 900 kids will take to the town’s diamonds for Needham Baseball & Softball’s spring programs — diamonds whose upkeep has been a source of discontent for user groups.
Discussions about the maintenance of Needham’s 25 diamonds took off in recent months, spearheaded by Needham Baseball & Softball, the primary nonprofit running in-town baseball and softball programs for youth. According to NB&S reps, the program spent $46,000 in 2024 on diamond maintenance, $36,000 last year, and $9,000 so far this year — “and those are things that get built into our fees for our families to pay,” said NB&S treasurer May Steinkrauss.
“This is part of our last-ditch effort to find more funding for our fields,” said Andrew Fink, fields director for NB&S, in an appeal to Needham Park and Recreation on Jan. 12. “We are out of ideas, frankly.”
Conversations came to a head at the Finance Committee meeting on March 25. After receiving inquiries from residents regarding maintenance of the diamonds, followed by an in-person presentation from NB&S, the committee asked the Department of Public Works and Park and Rec to come in for a discussion. NB&S was also present.
“[I] just want to make it clear: we’re not deciding anything, we can’t decide anything, but we want to have a discussion that will hopefully be productive and work for all groups,” FinCom chair John Connelly offered as a disclaimer at the start of the meeting.
Limited time and resources was the refrain repeated by DPW and Park and Rec throughout the discussion.
The estimated number currently allocated to the up-keep of town diamonds is $300,000. This number is sourced from DPW’s operating budget and supplemented with a portion of user fees alongside $150,000 from Park and Rec’s rotating fund. Parks and Forestry, the DPW division responsible for maintaining and supporting the town’s athletic complexes, has a staff of 16 people with one staff member dedicated to diamond maintenance.
Diamonds are prioritized with a color-coded, tiered system, and maintained accordingly. “Green” fields are top-priority diamonds supporting high school and middle school athletics. “Yellow” indicates fields with shared usage, and “red” the fields where “dirt was pushed up and we called it a baseball field,” said Ed Olsen, superintendent of Parks and Forestry.
Every Sunday night, Olsen receives a list of upcoming high school athletics competitions. These competitions, coupled with the tiered system Olsen developed, determine which diamonds receive attention that week.
“I’ve heard [discontent] over the last few years on the real [bottom-tier] fields, like the Mitchell 2 and Hillside,” Olsen said. “The fields that we rarely touch because we never get that far, because we have only so much time and staffing.”
These bottom-tier fields are particularly prone to drainage issues, weeds and ruts.
“I don’t think Mitchell is unsafe [in the sense that] we shouldn’t play on it, but I do think there’s a lot of rocks in that field,” NB&S league director Steve Deroian said. “It’s not been appropriately groomed and taken care of over the years because, as [Olsen] just acknowledged, it’s a Tier 3 field that we’re not really paying any attention to.”
Olsen’s team has renovated almost half of Needham’s fields in the past 17 years — most recently, the Claxton and McLeod fields.
“It would be great to be able to have Fenway Park at each field, but it’s unattainable,” Olsen said. “So we try to do the best we can; I know I’m proud of my team, of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past 17 years.”
Issues around diamond maintenance boil down to limited hours in a day, staffing and funding. “Ed’s team works really hard, [Park and Rec] do as much as we possibly can and our fees supplement, but there’s only so much time in the day that we can work on all of these fields,” director of Needham Park and Rec Stacey Mulroy said.
“Ed and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, but at the end of the day I’ve come to respect the fact that I think he’s wildly understaffed,” said Deroian.
Compared to other sports, Olsen added, baseball and softball require constant maintenance: grooming and laser-grading fields, rebuilding mounds, rebuilding home plates.
“A good friend of mine, Dave Mellor, was the superintendent of Fenway Park for decades,” he said. “Dave had 50 staff for one field. I don’t think people realize the totality of the effort, the magnitude it takes to maintain one baseball field, nevermind 25 — so again, prioritizing and tiering how we attack that I think has been crucial to our success, and maybe to the detriment of some fields that are on the lowest end of that spectrum.”
Dollars, of course, also determine the amount of maintenance that can be done on Needham’s diamonds.
“We have many priorities for additional resources to come into the operating budget, most of which were not funded this year,” Needham DPW director Carys Lustig said.
“We know that [better diamond maintenance] would be an additional ask from a financial perspective,” she later noted to the Finance Committee. “And the question we’ve had is, ‘Where does that then fall [on the priority list]?’”
Location is also an issue, with many of Needham’s diamonds near schools that use the area for their own recreation, which limits the amount of maintenance that can be accomplished during school hours. When asked if DPW was performing fewer services than they have historically, Lustig responded, “No — we’re providing more services with the same resources we’ve had in the past.”
In an effort to compare Needham’s maintenance of baseball-softball diamonds with similar programs, DPW and Park and Rec surveyed surrounding and comparable communities.
“Basically the results are simple: it’s all over the place,” said Mulroy. “Some DPWs take care of things, sometimes they outsource, sometimes it’s user groups … and it’s hard to pull real apples-to-apples data.”
Park and Rec will consider increasing user fees and look at future ways to increase financial stability for Olsen’s program, Mulroy said.
“We can continue to increase field fees, but at the end of the day those actually affect the residents,” she said. “I don’t want to cut people out of being able to access our programs.”
She added that, with limited staffing, more funding for maintenance will likely result in outsourcing work and bringing in contractors. NB&S expressed caution at outsourcing.
“Last year we outsourced to get a bunch of our fields set up, and I don’t think they came through until May or even June,” Deroian said.
“The biggest amount of our children that play, they didn’t experience any of those outsourced dollars,” he added.
With no immediate solutions rising to the surface, Connelly assigned homework to those present at the March 25 meeting. The best solution, he said, will be found through a two-pronged approach — Park and Rec will coordinate with user groups to determine appropriate user fees, while DPW drafts a potential price-tag for upgrades to the field maintenance program.
The goal, Connelly emphasized, is to be in a position this time next year where every stakeholder is excited about the direction the program is headed.
“I think between those two sides … we can make the situation different and better than it is right now,” he said. “But it’s not all on [DPW] and it’s not all on user fees; it’s got to be both sides.”
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