The North Shore’s fields of dreams are taking shape.
Two of the three venues — St. John’s Prep and Swampscott — that have been under construction since last year will be ready for use by the beginning of the fall season.
The third, Winthrop, will not be. But football coach Sean Driscoll hopes that Miller Field will be operational by Thanksgiving so that the Vikings can play their traditional Turkey Day game against Revere at home.
“Until then,” said Driscoll, “we have a ‘Willie Nelson’ schedule. On the road again.”
The Vikings played their entire 2016 season on the road after the reconstruction of Miller began.
By far the most ambitious project of the three was St. John’s Prep, which, upon the conclusion of the 2015-2016 school year began construction of a new health and wellness center, which included a makeover of the football field. The Eagles converted their practice field into makeshift home facility in 2016.
According to football coach Brian St. Pierre, that field will be ready for use by the first home game of the season, scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 23, against Everett. Prior to that game, which begins at 4 p.m., the field will be named for Fred Glatz, who coached at the school from 1967 through 1983. The official name of the field will now be “Glatz Field at Cronin Stadium.”
The new facility has an artificial surface, lights that are in place, and bleachers on both sides. The seating capacity will be 2,200. Included is a new, state-of-the-art press box contained within the health club and a new concession stand.
According to St. Pierre, the home-side bleachers will be connected to the health facility via a walkway, where there will also be a ticket booth. Accessibility to the stadium will not change from the way it was before construction began.
“Now,” said St. Pierre, “we just have to get a team ready that’s worthy of playing on such a facility.”
The quickest rehab was in Swampscott. The Big Blue football team played on Blocksidge Field last year, and construction really didn’t begin in earnest until the season ended. However, by Sept. 9, when the new facility will be dedicated to thank all the volunteers that made it possible, all the amenities will be in place save for lights.
“We still have to do some more fundraising for those,” said Gino Cresta, director of the town’s Department of Public Works. Cresta said that between $200,000 and $250,000 in funds are needed for construction of the lights. The footings are in place now, he said.
“They’ve already started fundraising,” he said. “So we may have already raised some of that money.”
Cresta said that bleachers for Blocksidge will only be on the home side. He added that there were a couple of reasons for that decision, one of which was that visitors’ bleachers might crowd the junior varsity baseball field.
“But they were mainly financial,” he said.
The home-side bleachers are currently being constructed, as is a press box “that’ll be modeled similar to the one in Revere (Della Russo Stadium),” Cresta said. Both will be ready for the Sept. 9 dedication.
From end to end, the bleachers will take the same amount of space the old ones did, but they will be deeper, which will up the overall capacity. The press box will be state-of-the-art, he said, with handicapped accessibility.
Also still to be constructed is a landscaped roadway at the Humphrey Street end of the field for buses. That end will no longer be used for fans to enter the field. The sole entrance way will be on Bondelevitch Way, the street that goes off Humphrey Street and leads to the parking lot in back (half of which will be paved), Cresta said.
The first home football game of the season will be at noon Sept. 16, against Triton. Any fall sport with a home game on its schedule between Sept. 9-16 will be able to play at the new facility, but not before the ninth, Cresta said.
“So,” he said, “conceivably the first game at the new field might not be a football game.”
The concession stand was not taken down and will be used when the season begins, but Cresta hopes that in time that’ll be torn down, with a new one behind the end zone opposite Humphrey Street.
“We hope,” he said, “that when people see how beautiful this is, it’ll up the fundraising.”
