Someone, or a group of people, vandalized the baseball field at Northview High School over the weekend.
- Team arrived on a Saturday morning to find field vandalized
- Perpetrators have yet to be identified
- The incident has resulted in the team bonding more closely
Baseball players and coaches arrived on game day to find their field destroyed with holes in the ground and graffiti on signs.
At some time between 5:00 p.m. the evening of Friday, February 8, and 6:45 a.m. the following Saturday morning, perpetrators dug dozens of holes all around the field.
The team estimates there were about 30 of them ranging from 1 foot to 5 feet deep. The vandals also tagged multiple field signs with spray paint and spray painted in the dugout.
“It felt like all of our hard work just went to waste basically, because we do our field on our own and we put our own money into it," said first baseman Tommy Clark.
Coach Dan Roddy said he couldn’t believe it when he saw the field Saturday morning.
"I actually thought it was a whole bunch of crows that were on the field,” said Roddy. “When I first pulled up and I got out of my truck and I took a look and I realized -- my heart sunk down to my stomach.”
The team was forced to cancel a double-header game. It would have been their season opener.
Coach Roddy has been watching footage from security cameras hoping to identify a suspect.
“We talked to police and we went through our video cameras,” said Roddy. “We got a couple images we can take a look at but no concrete leads right now at this time.”
But the crime lead the team to work together, in the rain and over the weekend, to patch the field with the help of coaches and parents. Because of their hard work, they were able to take to the field for a game Tuesday afternoon.
I feel like it brought us together as a team more,” said Clark. “Our team is together and now we’re dangerous.”
They will reschedule the games they had to cancel.