The Park District of Forest Park is winding up to make repairs to its softball fields.
The fields, outside the park district building at 7501 Harrison St., will undergo leveling updates so they drain better.
“It looks beautiful from the street and the grass is always plush,” said Jackie Iovinelli, the park district’s executive director, of the softball fields. “But over the last three years, we’ve been noticing some areas where it’s dipping a little bit. If you look at it from the side, you can see.”
For the park district, fixing this uneven ground became all the more relevant after the most recent softball season.
“We did have a wet spring. We were like, ‘This is why we have to do this,’ because the fields are not draining after a rainstorm and we’re canceling our games,” Iovinelli said.
Iovinelli added that the park district’s board and staff estimate that the softball fields haven’t seen any drainage or turf repairs in about 20 years.
So, at the annual Illinois Association of Park Districts and Illinois Park and Recreation Association conference in January, the park district met with exhibitors to discuss what repairs to softball fields would look like.
“We didn’t really understand how it looks underneath with the drainage and everything,” Iovinelli said.
After gaining a better knowledge of how the fields drains, the park district hired an architect that specializes in Chicagoland sports fields to help them create construction documents.
The park district went out to bid for contractors to repair the fields at the beginning of June and received two bids that they are choosing between. The park district’s board will receive a staff recommendation July 18 on which bid to choose.
Iovinelli said that, depending on which contractor the park district hires, repairs will cost between $300,000 and $400,000, funded by the park district’s capital budget.
In addition to repairs on the park district’s two softball fields, the organization is removing the adjacent Field 3. The smaller field was used for Forest Park’s T-ball league, which merged with River Forest’s little league more than five years ago, Iovinelli said. But the merged team uses the softball fields, rather than Field 3, so the park district is getting rid of it.
Field updates will follow this year’s No Gloves Nationals softball tournament July 25 through 28. Because renovations will likely start at the beginning of August, the park district’s fall softball league will be canceled this year.
“The grass, it has to be planted in the fall,” Iovinelli said, since the end of summer is considered the best time of year to plant grass seed due to cooling temperatures. And after a bout of construction, the new grass might be the most obvious indicator that the fields have been redone.
“Most people just from the street won’t really be able to see the difference,” Iovinelli said. “It’s just a matter of the drainage underneath, building the turf back up and leveling it off so that it’ll properly drain for play.”