June 22, 2009

Josh Katzowitz
Special to Rivals High

Richmond, Calif., is not an easy place to live. Not an easy place to grow from childhood into adulthood. Not an easy place to polish.

The murder rate is high. The gang activity ? and all the dangers that go with it ? is common. Barbed wire dots the landscape, even around the parks that should be idyllic, and the city's infrastructure is crumbling.

Salesian High School always has been an oasis in a desert of danger. It's a college prep school in the San Francisco Bay Area that demands the best of its students ? mostly made up of the lower-middle economic class ? and the administration takes great pride that at least 98 percent of the population graduates every year.

Three years ago, the stadium in which the Pride football and soccer teams play was in disarray. Well, disarray is probably a nice word to describe the mess the field had become. Disaster might be closer to the truth.

"Picture an empty lot, or you can think about how an old sandlot baseball field back in the 1930s would look," said Janet Wilks, Salesian's director of development and communications. "It was rocks, dirt and a few blades of grass."

It was ugly, it was embarrassing and it was dangerous. The original construction of the stadium ? with a dirt track and a grass field ? began in the early 1970s. The underground fill for the field came from construction debris from a public transportation site, and it was composed of dirt, rock and chunks of cement. The Pride began playing there in 1972, and for the first two decades, the field was fine.

Then rocks began appearing at the surface.

"What happened over time was that rocks tended to rise to the top as we groomed and weeded," Wilks said. "Over the course of 15 to 20 years, it deteriorated. It wasn't because we didn't feverishly maintain the thing. It was just because the fill that had been used was suffering. This was way back in the day when you could fill something with anything. As the soil eroded, the rocks didn't. We had many a rock-picking session, as they were called, in order to make the field playable."

These days, life for the Salesian sports teams that use the field is fantastic. After receiving a new field in 2007 (featuring a state-of-the-art urethane running track and a synthetic turf field), the stadium is no longer a disaster. If Salesian High School is an oasis for the Richmond community, the stadium is now its jewel.

In April, it was recognized as such. No longer is Richmond only known as the city with the highest murder rate in California. Now, it's also home to the winner of the grand prize in the Search For the Real Field of Dreams ? a national contest run by the Synthetic Turf Council that hunted for the school with the most compelling story behind its synthetic turf field.

"The field had an enormous impact on our school's athletics, and with the final product, which is stunningly beautiful, we can build future [capital] campaigns on that," Wilks said. "Now, there's a history of success."

That point was driven home by a local sports writer who told Wilks, "You know, when I came through the gates of the school, it was like a Disneyland feeling."

More important to Salesian athletic director/football coach Chad Nightingale is another benefit to the student-athletes ? the injuries for his teams have decreased dramatically.

"There's been a plethora of schools in the area that have gotten these fields," said Nightingale, whose football program is 41-9 the past four seasons. "For us, it's lessened injuries. What you have now is a homogenous playing surface, and you don't have the scrapes and bumps because of an uneven playing surface or a pot hole or if it's partially wet."

The field was made possible by a major donation from the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, one of the key charitable foundations in the Bay Area. Other donors were willing to match, and the school had to pitch in about $500,000 to finish funding the new construction. The school administration wanted something that would be visible and that would truly impact the majority of the student population (about 75 percent of the students participate in athletics at Salesian). Reinventing the field, the administration figured, would have more impact than, for instance, building another classroom or two.

Initially, the field was estimated to cost $1.5 million ? "For me as a teacher," Nightingale said, "that's a hell of a lot of money" ? but considering the economy has since tanked and gas prices doubled (remember, everything in the stadium ? the turf, the track, the asphalt underneath the track, the granulated rubber that makes up the field ? is a petroleum-based product), Salesian got a bargain.

The field opened in 2007, and in the Pride's first football game, in front of a crowd of about 1,000, they upset McClymonds 40-37.

"For me, it was about the first practice," Nightingale said. "By the time our first game rolled around, the field itself wasn't the issue. But that first day of practice, they laid on the field. They rolled around. You know when you get a new bed, and you just kind of lay on it? That's what it was like. The kids were in La-La Land."

Said Wilks: "That used to be our eyesore. You drive on to our campus now and you see the facility, and it's beautiful. Now, it's a shining star."

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