Curt Seeden: Fountain Valley High baseball supporters swing for the fences
Football was on the minds of most people this past week, but at Fountain Valley High School, the great American pastime is clearly the hot topic.
A group of baseball supporters – Head Baseball Coach Deric Yanagisawa and other coaches, parents, educators, alumni and the FVHS Baseball Boosters Club — has embarked on a campaign to revamp the high school baseball stadium to better represent the school’s baseball legacy.
What legacy? Well, for example, if you look back to 2011, Fountain Valley High School became what is believed to be the only high school – ever – to boast four alumni playing Major League Baseball in the same season.
Pitchers C.J. Wilson (Texas Rangers), Casey Janssen (Toronto Blue Jays), Chris Tillman (Baltimore Orioles) and outfielder Blake Davis (Orioles) were in the big leagues and making their high school proud.
Fountain Valley High, in fact, has over the years produced 33 players who have been drafted by Major League Baseball organizations.
With that kind of history, the Baron Baseball Stadium Improvement Project Campaign – also known as the “Envision Baron Field” project — has been kicked off. This is a fundraising effort that would support upgrades to the baseball facilities, including:
- New snack bar, restrooms and a pressbox
- Five rows of stadium seating for 275 people
- New bullpen and visitors’ dugout
- Artificial turf
- 16-foot fencing and windscreen
- New batting cages
- A Baron Hall of Fame monument
“We feel that with the open school district that allows students to go to any high school within the district, if we don’t improve our facilities to attract local Fountain Valley baseball talent, they will go to Edison or Huntington Beach High which have invested in their facilities the last few years,” said Corey Wentz, president of the Baseball Boosters Club.
Wentz said the Baseball Boosters have put together a capital fundraising plan and an engineering project plan and have saved enough through fundraisers over the last year and a half to begin the first phase of the project.
Phase one includes demolishing the old concrete slab, pouring a new slab that extends concrete from dugout to dugout, adding pavers to the stadium entrance that creates a “legacy walk” leading to a Baron Baseball Hall of Fame area, and adding the 16-foot-high perimeter fence that encloses the seating area.
The Boosters Club, Wentz said, is reaching out to the community and seeking corporate sponsorships to raise the funds needed for subsequent phases.
“We have a wonderful, highly motivated group of families within our program right now that want to do the work that it will take to improve the baseball facilities so that Fountain Valley High School has something that the city and community will be proud of, and will want to come support our school and baseball program,” Wentz said.
“Baseball programs in general have the worst circumstances, when compared with other sports,” he said. “We have to pay to maintain our own facilities, which is historically around $25,000 per year. This includes cutting of our outfield grass, sprinkler repairs, windscreens, nets, field conditioner, clay and seed fertilizer. We can’t keep asking our parents and families to donate more than they already do.”
As part of the “Envision Baron Field” project, the FVHS Baseball Boosters Club is holding a drawing for a 2018 Ford Mustang from Theodore Robins Ford.
Tickets are $100 and can be purchased with cash, check, through PayPal or by calling 714-804-7193.
The grand prize drawing is set for March 1 on the FVHS varsity baseball field. Second prize is $1,000 cash.
A minimum of 600 tickets must be sold. If 600 tickets aren’t sold, the drawing reverts to a single grand prize that is determined by the gross ticket sales revenue. For a complete set of rules, go to fvhsbaronbaseball.com.