‘Not Looking Good at All’: Spring Sports Must Wait for Sodden Grass Fields To Dry

With snow on the ground and insufficient relief in the forecast, New Canaan’s grass playing fields won’t be ready for full practices and scrimmages as planned, parks officials say.

The large/main baseball field at Mead Park on March 17, 2015. Credit: Michael Dinan

While the turf fields at New Canaan High School are clear, the grass at Mead and Waveny won’t have a chance shed its moisture either into the groundwater or atmosphere in time, for example, for the varsity baseball team’s planned scrimmages during the final week of March, according to John Howe, parks superintendent.

“It’s not looking good at all,” he said. “I don’t see much chance at all, unfortunately. We are ready as a department to get out there and move goals and lay out fields and paint them and move things up.”

Mellick Field at Mead Park on March 17, 2015. Credit: Michael Dinan

Dunning Field and the turf field by the water tower are usable now, Howe said, but all baseball and softball fields, and those youth and high school field hockey, lacrosse and soccer teams that practice and play on grass likely won’t be able to do so for three weeks.

Even if the snow melts off of the fields, the earth will be mushy and soggy (remember last spring), and the only effective way for it to dry out is with sustained, arid warmth, Howe said. Yet the fields lose about 12 hours of drying time after every night the temps drop freezing, Howe said.

“We are three weeks behind from what we were able to do last year,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’ll be three weeks late opening by any means, right now we are kind of in a day-to-day type thing knowing that we will not be able to do anything this week and the 15-day forecast doesn’t have the weather great even next week.”

Most of the water now is trying to get through the soil, and a little bit of frost in the ground could be holding it up, he said.

“We need windy days like [Tuesday] with the temperature up around 65 to really start drying it out, and our forecast barely has us into the 50s for the next two weeks,” Howe said.

A private group had offered to pay to clear the snow off of the baseball fields at Mead with a snow blower, but with such a wet surface, the effort would cause more damage than anything else, he said.

“We cannot beat Mother Nature on this one,” he said.