New Canaan Baseball Unveils Dramatic Plan To Upgrade Little League Fields at Mead Park

Officials with the nonprofit organization that oversees youth baseball in New Canaan on Wednesday unveiled a dramatic plan to improve the little league baseball fields at Mead Park with larger dimensions and new fences, light poles, bleacher areas and scoreboard. New Canaan Baseball also is seeking to reorient Gamble Field so that home plate is located where left field currently sits and the diamond fans out in the same general direction as Mellick, according to the organization’s president, Jim Higgins. “Our overall guiding principle in terms of what it is we wanted to accomplish was we wanted to stay generally within the footprint of what is there,” Higgins told members of the Park & Recreation Commission at their regular monthly meeting, held at Lapham Community Center. “We are sensitive to reorganizing anything or disrupting any other part of the park, so the plan that we have come up with is substantially within the existing boundaries of the two fields. A couple of the key goals were drainage, trying to get state-of-the-art drainage and the right materials underneath the grass, because we lose a lot of game days due to rain—and not just on the days it rains, but the drainage is not as good as it could be.

NC Baseball Eyes Summer 2016 for Re-Grading, Drainage Improvements at Mead Park’s Little League Fields

The private nonprofit group that oversees youth baseball in New Canaan is talking with engineering and architectural firms in anticipation of a major capital project at Mead Park that recreation officials say hasn’t been done in 42 years. New Canaan Baseball has offered to pay for the estimated $1 million re-grading of the two little league fields at Mead, and has set a target date for the starting the work next summer, according to the organization’s president. “The critical path is ultimately finding one or two people that are going to be chiefs of the project,” Jim Higgins told the Park & Recreation Commission at its regular meeting Wednesday night, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “It is significant project. The board has a desire to do it.

Leaving New Canaan after 20 Years

I write this poem (at right) because we are leaving home. The only home I’ve really ever known. It wasn’t my first home, but after 20 years of living on Park Street, the Sauerhoffs are leaving New Canaan. But the history of the Sauerhoffs in New Canaan extends much beyond 20 years. In fact, us moving in 2015 makes this the 49th year that a Sauerhoff has lived in New Canaan.

Private Group Offers to Fund Re-Grading of Mellick, Gamble Fields at Mead Park

The private group that oversees youth baseball in New Canaan wants to fund a full re-grading of the little league fields at Mead Park—a project that could cost $1 million and hasn’t been done in 42 years, recreation officials say. New Canaan Baseball Softball Inc., a nonprofit organization, are at appoint where “serious capital expenditures” are needed to bring it up to snuff, the group’s president, Jim Higgins, told the Park & Recreation Commission at its most recent regular meeting. “To cut to the chase, Mellick and Gamble are long, long, long overdue for a major renovation and New Canaan Baseball is proposing to—out of our own money and money that we raised—spent somewhere between half a million and a million dollars, completely redoing Mellick and Gamble,” Higgins said at the March 11 meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “When I say ‘redo,’ the footprint stays the same, we are not asking to change any aspect of the park, so the footprints of the fields will stay where they are. But we think the only way to do it right is to scrape the whole fields.

Parks Officials to NC Baseball: At Season’s End, Take Down the Outfield Windscreens at Mead

Parks officials last week approved a private group’s request to hang a windscreen on the outfield fence of the large baseball field at Mead Park, but are insisting that this time around the opaque netting come down at season’s end. That didn’t happen in the case of the little league fields at Mead that got the screens last spring, despite New Canaan Baseball’s agreeing to do so, Park & Recreation Commission Chairman Sally Campbell said during the group’s regular monthly meeting. The commission had received feedback that residents didn’t want to see the netting in the winter months, Campbell said during the meeting, held Wednesday in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “New Canaan Baseball said they would put them up and take them down last year, and they never came back to take them down last year,” she said. “So this windscreen, too, it needs to put up by [New Canaan] Baseball and taken down by X day by [New Canaan] Baseball and we should not have to go back to you all to say to take it down.