Sports

Bounceback: New Canaan Fifth Grade Black Crushes Darien

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Heading into Saturday’s game against Darien White, New Canaan Fifth Grade Black head coach Jason Milligan must have been wondering which team would show up—the one which dominated the line of scrimmage and played flawless defense in a 14-8 opening day win against Ridgefield, or the penalty-laden, underachieving one that lost 12-8 to a decidedly-inferior Darien Blue team. By halftime, the answer was obvious. Energized by the return of wide receiver Brendan Hagan, New Canaan (2-1) jumped out to a 38-14 lead at the intermission and cruised the rest of the way en route to a convincing 38-22 win over Darien, who fell to 1-2 on the season. “We’re not too accustomed to losing,” Milligan told NewCanaanite.com. “Typically after a loss the kids respond, and they were fired up all week.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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1994 New Canaan High School graduate David Burns is participating this coming Sunday in a special fund- and awareness-raising walk for a very personal reason. Burns, a tennis standout here in town who is now a 40-year-old father of two, was diagnosed last Novemeber with a life-threatening liver disease, and received a transplant in January at UCLA hospital. He’s participating in Liver Life Walk Los Angeles 2015. Together with sisters Mollie and Eliza, their team—the Healthy Hedgehogs—has raised more than $10,000 for the 5K walk, an important fundraiser for the American Liver Foundation. And he’s doing this within months of his surgery.

Government

Coming To Mead: ‘3-Hour Maximum’ Signs To Deter Long-Term Parking

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Commuters, some out-of-state, and guests at nearby condominiums appear to be using Mead Park for long-term parking, prompting the town to take action, officials said Wednesday. Public works has ordered up ‘3-hour maximum parking’ signs and soon will place them throughout Mead in order to empower parking enforcement officers to ticket the violators, members of the Park & Recreation Commission said at their regular monthly meeting. “The cars have three-quarters inches of that stuff coming off of the trees now,” commissioner Andrea Peterson said at the group’s meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center (“pollen,” others supplied). “There are cars that are laden with it.”

“There are cars with New York state plates, cars with Ohio plates. People must have out-of-town guests that just leave their cars there.”

She added: “One of the local condo associations says part of the spiel when you buy a condo is that yes, you can park at Mead.”

Recreation Director Steve Benko clarified that after the Park Mead Condominiums were sold, the new owner limited residents to a single car, “and some people have two cars.”

As a result, those residents at first were told to go park at Mead—a situation that the selectmen have addressed with the condos, Benko said.

Government

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

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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.

Government

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

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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.