With usage increasing at the Bridgeport Recreation Complex, officials with Parks and Recreation have found a way to help cut down on field preparation time between games and also free up manpower to do additional chores. Earlier this week, a Pennsylvania company began work on a project that will help in curtailing dust problems on all four fields.

 

Workers with Rain-Tec were installing what are known as “infield dusters,” which P&R Deputy Director Joe Shuttleworth said is a system that will be tied into the existing irrigation system. Once the work is complete, the manpower and time needed to spray down the infields between games will be drastically reduced.

 

“We have the existing irrigation system, which works extremely well, but this is an add-on to that,” said Shuttleworth. “There will be a station tied to each field that will allow us to manually turn the water on from a location and manage the dry, often dusty conditions that you get with use of the fields.”

 

For the first two years, the P&R staff handled the duties in the same manner that see at PNC Park and other professional and collegiate fields. Whenever there was a break in the action, a one-inch, heavily pressurized garden hose would be taken out on the field by three to four members of staff. Shuttleworth said on the bigger fields it could take between 25 and 30 minutes to do the work.

 

“With this, you’re looking at just a couple of minutes,” he said. “That not only can speed up the process between games, but it frees up manpower to address other issues at the facility. The staff does a great job in how they’ve been doing it, but unlike teams like the Pirates we don’t have the luxury of having dozens of staff for the field. This should really prove to be a benefit to the entire experience at the complex.”

 

Shuttleworth said there will be irrigation heads situated along the edge of the grass on the baselines and other parts of the field. However, they will be out of the way and covered to eliminate any issues.

 

“Anyone involved with baseball fields will tell you that on a dry day, when you run across the field you create a dust cloud and the only way to eliminate it is to moisten the ground,” said Shuttleworth. “This is going to eliminate that in a much more efficient manner that’s not nearly so labor intensive.”

 

The project should be completed this week, Shuttleworth said, and be in working order for activities in 2015. The cost to do the work was $12,500.

 

Editor's Note: Joe Shuttleworth shows some of the hardware being installed at the Rec Complex, while workers with Rain-Tec cut open the field to install the lines needed for the new system.