In Between Inning Promotions
The attendance for the San Angelo Colts was down drastically this year. There was a new general manager running the team and at times it seemed as if he didn't know what he was doing. For the first two thirds of the season there was no in between inning promotions. This caused some fans to be very upset because why would they want to bring their children to a game that didn't have any in between innings promotions or things for the children to do. We tried and tried to get the Colts to bring back the promotions and finally the last three weeks from the end of the season the front office listened. They began having the chase the mascot race where the mascot starts and second and a little kid starts at first and they have a race. The first one to third base wins. They have also slowly gotten other in between inning promotions that are sponsored by local businesses to help get the community interested in coming out for games.
Charging for parking
The San Angelo Colts are the first team that I have played for that hasn't charged for parking. I remember early in the season when I first heard that they weren't charging for parking I was shocked. We kept trying to get the front office to go and hire a couple of the local college students to sit out in the parking lot and collect money. This way you could get two of them, one for each entrance to the parking lot. It would only cost the team $20 to do it an they would pay for that in the first ten cars that they had come to the game. After that it would have been all profit for the team. However this never happened and it seems as though it would have been a very easy way for the team to make a little bit more money.
Field Improvements
As the head grounds keeper for the field I wanted to make sure that the field was better at the end of the season than it had been before I got my hands on it. At first the infield was rock hard, and played as if we were playing on cement. In order to fix this I found the spike drag and used that on the infield for approximately 30-45 minutes. After I was done with the spike drag, I watered the infield. Then I put the regular drag back on the infield and evened out the now much softer dirt. The only real problem was that the mixture between dirt, turface, and clay was completely wrong in the infield. Every time that the field got soaked the dirt would clump up and when groundballs were hit the ball would bounce every which way. The only true solution to that problem would be to take all of the current dirt off of the field and get some bulldozers to level out the infield. Then you would get a correct dirt, mud, and turface mix so that the dirt wouldn't clump.
When I took over the field crew the pitchers mound and home plate were extremely worn out. And one day the sprinklers ran all night and flooded the mound and home plate. I had to scratch all of the loose wet mud off the top and then shovel it all into the back of the tractor so that I could get the field ready for the game. However, I knew that something had to be done to keep this from happening. There was still some dirt left over that was out behind the fence so I went out to grab a truckload and brought it back to the plate. The conditioner was a dark red almost maroon color, and it was a lot of work to evenly spread it out across the whole plate. When we got done putting it onto the plate area I came to the conclusion that the mound should be done with the same dirt. So we took all the excess mud and wet dirt off the mound, then proceeded to get more dirt which we brought back out to the mound and evenly spread it out over the mound.
After the plate and mound got a face lift they still required a lot of care over the rest of the season. Everyday I would take a broom and sweep out the holes at the plate and the mound. Then I would go and get dirt to make clay out of. Once the clay was good to go I would fill in the holes in the batters boxes, the catchers area, and the pitchers mound. The next step was to pound the clay with the tamp to make it nice and hard for the game that night. Once the holes were filled and tamped it was time to sweep the conditioner back onto the mound and plate. Our final field crew project was to make a stencil of the Horseshoe in the Colts logo. Once we had the stencil created, we would place the stencil on the back of the mound and use white spray paint so that the horseshoe logo was on the back of the mound.
When I took over the field crew the pitchers mound and home plate were extremely worn out. And one day the sprinklers ran all night and flooded the mound and home plate. I had to scratch all of the loose wet mud off the top and then shovel it all into the back of the tractor so that I could get the field ready for the game. However, I knew that something had to be done to keep this from happening. There was still some dirt left over that was out behind the fence so I went out to grab a truckload and brought it back to the plate. The conditioner was a dark red almost maroon color, and it was a lot of work to evenly spread it out across the whole plate. When we got done putting it onto the plate area I came to the conclusion that the mound should be done with the same dirt. So we took all the excess mud and wet dirt off the mound, then proceeded to get more dirt which we brought back out to the mound and evenly spread it out over the mound.
After the plate and mound got a face lift they still required a lot of care over the rest of the season. Everyday I would take a broom and sweep out the holes at the plate and the mound. Then I would go and get dirt to make clay out of. Once the clay was good to go I would fill in the holes in the batters boxes, the catchers area, and the pitchers mound. The next step was to pound the clay with the tamp to make it nice and hard for the game that night. Once the holes were filled and tamped it was time to sweep the conditioner back onto the mound and plate. Our final field crew project was to make a stencil of the Horseshoe in the Colts logo. Once we had the stencil created, we would place the stencil on the back of the mound and use white spray paint so that the horseshoe logo was on the back of the mound.