Yellow Jacket field in need of grass, drainage

By Pete Kendall/reporter@trcle.com

Past and present Cleburne ISD employees concur on what turned the Yellow Jacket Stadium field from lush green to gumbo brown this football season.

Crabgrass.

“A lot of the problems late this season were because of the crabgrass,” said Roy Holland, a retired Cleburne coach who maintained the field in the ’80s. “Crabgrass is not a grass. It’s a weed. There isn’t a root system for when it rains. The crabgrass comes up, and all you have underneath is dirt.”

Crabgrass is among the problems, superintendent Dr. Ronny Beard said.

“There are several issues. One is that several areas of that field stay wet all the time. There are drainage problems that cause a safety hazard for anyone who plays on that field in whatever sport. That should be addressed.

“The other issue is that at least a third of the field currently has no grass because the crabgrass took over and killed out the Bermuda. Now, the crabgrass is gone or dormant, so there’s nothing there. When the boys play on it and churn it up, it’s just dirt.”

“There is one area of the field on the northest end, about the 20- or 30-yard line, that won’t drain right,” Holland said. “It probably needs a little bit of dirt. But I think what’s there can make a very decent field. Bermuda will grow anywhere. The field just needs weed control. You can’t wait until the weeds take over before you go in and spray. If you do, you’ll shock the grass.”

Beard said he doesn’t know why crabgrass was allowed to spread at the stadium field.

“That happened before I came. All I know how to do is fix it. I think we need to plow it up, resurface it, take care of any crowning issues and drainage issues, put in an irrigation system and either go from seed or turf to get it ready to go by next football season. The irrigation system was put in by coaches a long time ago, and it doesn’t function well anymore. We probably need to replace it.”

Fixing the field might be relatively simple, with either newly seeded grass turf or artificial turf.

Financing the fix might not be so easy.

“I haven’t looked into artificial turf. I don’t think we can afford that,” Beard said. “We have an estimate of a little over $100,000 for a grass field with all the other things like the irrigation system. It’s a tough year fiscally. It’s hard to spend money on things that are not academic. But the [stadium field] issue is pretty serious. It’s partly a safety issue. Kids are playing on a surface that’s nowhere close to what I think our community expects them to play on.”

Beard said he thinks a good grass field would be acceptable.

He said he’s aware of recent criticisms of the field and stadium.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love the old stadium, but there are some serious issues with it, parking being a main one. There’s going to come a point in time that the community has to decide to either spend a lot of money to upgrade that stadium or decide to build a new stadium. I’m not pushing either way.”

With the exception of press box renovation after a recent fire, Yellow Jacket Stadium has had no major facelifts since 1992, when new field lights were installed.

“It is my opinion, and the opinion of this school board, that we need to maintain the facilities we have,” Beard said. “If we’re going to continue to play in that stadium, we need to maintain it like any other facility. Part of that maintenance is the playing surface. It’s not acceptable.”

Beard said he doesn’t know where the money would come from.

“We’ll keep looking,” he said. “Maybe somebody who loves us will come along and write us a check for it.”

Corners could be cut.

“We’ve looked at doing some of the work ourselves,” Beard said, “but $100,000 is a really good estimate, if we could get all that done for that amount. A lot of people aren’t going to understand why we don’t have that kind of money available because when you look at our total budget, that’s not that much. But our operating budget is very, very tight this year.”

If the stadium field renovation were to begin in January or February, soccer might have to move to the Marshall Young Track Complex. That’s not a bad option, Holland said.

“We did a lot of work on that field,” Holland said about head coach Jerry Cunningham’s staff in the ’80s. “We put a layer of sand below the dirt. That field really absorbs moisture.”