Benefield: Maria Carrillo coaches decry shoddy stadium field

Maria Carrillo High School athletic director Jerry Deakins likens them to crop circles.

They are lush circles of longish, green grass about 10 feet in diameter. They dot the landscape of Carrillo’s upper practice fields like oases in a desert of rock hard earth.

I’m no landscaper, but they might indicate leaks. Water seems to ooze out around the sprinkler heads, and only there. Everywhere else is like cement.

And that’s just the practice field.

Ask coaches about the game field that the soccer teams and football team use, and the tone turns to disgust.

“It’s not safe,” said Debra LaPrath, coach of the Pumas girls soccer team.

Maria Carrillo is the only high school in Santa Rosa City Schools with natural grass fields. And with what school officials say is a cutback on regular maintenance, including watering and mowing, they argue the field now presents issues regarding not only quality of play and safety, but equity.

“We are the only field that is dealing with this struggle in Santa Rosa City Schools,” LaPrath said. “If the grass is maintained, we don’t mind, but it hasn’t been maintained in 15 years. It’s a joke.”

She put her money where her mouth is. So incensed over the condition of the fields was LaPrath that she used the team’s fundraiser account to rent an off-site pitch when the school hosted two out-of-state teams this past weekend.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said.

“There is no way I’m having these teams spend thousands of dollars and time and money and play on a field like that,” she said. “When they came to our field for a barbecue and bubble soccer, I walked them on the field and they couldn’t believe it.”

The field has bedeviled officials for some time.

Jim Moorhouse, the district’s relatively new director of maintenance and operations, declined to discuss the field issue Tuesday other than to call it a “touchy subject.”

But in a project update Moorhouse gave to the school board on Aug. 10, he struck an optimistic tone.

“We started this process well before graduation,” he said. “We actually exceeded what the original plans were.”

The original plans came from a January 2014 assessment conducted by Tangram Landscape Architecture that calculated water use, efficiency and supply issues. It also provided specific aeration, seed and fertilizer recommendations.

As an aside, and this is clearly me picking nits, the report identifies the game field as the football field with no mention of boys or girls soccer - the latter being a program that has brought Maria Carrillo five North Coast Section banners in the past five years. And the baseball diamonds are identified, but not the softball field.

But back to the report.

In his August report, Moorhouse acknowledged there were trouble spots on the field.

“Things went well but we did have a couple of bare spots that we are working on and we’ve actually reseeded those bare spots twice,” he told the board. “Those bare spots are now germinating and looking pretty good and the field is well on its way. We plan on doing a broad leaf weed and feed before the first football game and our intent is to make that field look better than the artificial turf fields and make everybody else jealous of that field.”

On Tuesday, the bare spots were readily apparent. Large swaths of dirt with nary a blade of grass scarred the north end of the field. Football coach Jay Higgins sent photos to The Press Democrat of rocks and glass he said he removed from the dirt patches before Friday night’s home opener against Redwood High.

At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, five sprinkler heads were casting a wide arc of water over the south end of the field. Watering at nearly high noon? Kudos for seemingly getting after the problem, but that’s a water efficiency no-no.

Walking across the field Tuesday morning, Deakins pointed to his leather dress shoe. The grass rose a good three inches over the top of his foot. At another spot he tugged gently at the corner of a sod patch. It lifted like a door mat.

He worried about athletes - football and soccer players alike - planting a foot and having their cleats get snagged on the surface or lodged in one of the many holes that pocked the entire field.

He spoke of competitive disadvantage. Soccer’s a fast game. But put a ball on long grass or a choppy surface and suddenly players look like they are running in sand.

“Is the field negating some of that speed?” he wondered aloud.

LaPrath certainly feels overlooked.

She said she’s been paid “lip service” over the years when she raises issues about the condition of the field.

“We are not asking for a golf green,” she said. “Just a safe, low cut, reseeded properly.”

The clock is ticking on a fix.

The Pumas host their next home football game against Santa Rosa on Sept. 30. The timeline for the girls soccer team is much tighter. They are scheduled to host arch rival Montgomery on Sept. 15.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield.