Field status

[Jonathan Lim-Breitbart]

Hey Mitch, any updates on the lights for this week?

[Mitch Negus]

Hi Jon, all,

Unfortunately, I think we're going to be out of luck this week. I received confirmation from Rec Sports last week that there is little that we can do to get the lights fixed. They're not interested in doing much there where Cal Athletics is slated to take over that field in the near future.

I did get back in touch with the folks at Cal Athletics and they're looking into whether they can squeeze us in. IM sports is playing on Levine-Fricke field this fall, but I don't believe they are using the field all night, every night. Even if we are able to get back there, Cal Athletics has informed me that it is their policy to shut down that field in early November for maintenance. That means our time there would be limited to not much longer than a month. I don't figure we'll get everything worked out there before tomorrow night, so that's why I made the assessment for tomorrow's games.

With that in mind, we have some tough decisions to make. I see a couple paths forward:

1. Rec Sports has offered to let us reschedule on Golden Bear Field at a time that doesn't require lights. I think weekday mornings/afternoons are out, but we could consider moving to weekends for this Fall. I don't know how anybody feels about that; it's a pretty dramatic shift I'd think. It's also late notice to change the schedule all around for everyone involved, but at least we get to play. If you and your teams are willing to consider times when field lighting isn't necessary, that would be really helpful for me to know going forward.

2. We try to take whatever Cal Athletics can find in their schedule on weekday nights at Levine-Fricke (provided it's reasonable). This carries us until November.

Either way, I believe it is also necessary for us to start looking at city fields. I have no idea what availability/cost of those will be. We might find that it is unaffordable for graduate students (I've seen field reservation costs at at least twice the rate we were paying at Golden Bear now), or that none of the times available are workable. I'm happy to start exploring this, but being realistic, I only have so much time and I can't guarantee that I'll be able to work something out to get us on a field there in the next few weeks.

All together, this means that we don't have a place to play. Until something changes, I think we need to suspend the season until we get more information. I really hate to do this, but I'm running out of ideas to remedy this immediately. I'll send out a league-wide email when I have some time later this evening, but feel free to let your teams know sooner than that if you'd like.

I'll keep pushing with Cal Athletics to get us playing in the near term, and I will start talking to the city about reservations there. I'll keep you all updated throughout, and fingers crossed Cal Athletics will have some available time and we'll get at least a few good weeks.

-Mitch

PS: If there's any good news from all this, my conversations from Cal Athletics have led me to believe that summers are much better for scheduling with them. The reason we couldn't play there originally this fall seems to have been some sort of perceived difficulty scheduling both IM softball and us. I think there is a decent chance we could continue playing there during the summers (of course, probably not during renovations of that stadium, whenever that takes place).

On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 3:57 PM Jonathan Lim-Breitbart <brei...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Mitch, any updates on the lights for this week?

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Mitchell Negus | Graduate Student
Department of Nuclear Engineering

University of California, Berkeley

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[Raj Kumar]

Hey Mitch

Sorry to hear about this. Let me know if you need help getting in touch with anyone from Rec Sports. I can also try to make a call to their office. Seems pretty ridiculous they cant get any of the lights fixed... I've been asking about it for years now.

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Rajan Kumar

Lecturer, Materials Science & Engineering

Stanford University

(224) 522-0532 | linkedin.com/in/raj-kumar8/

[Mitch Negus]

Thanks Raj.

I had given them several calls when scheduling and had spotty luck, though I eventually was able to talk to them. Later, in discussion about the lights via email, they explicitly told me that they weren't going to be fixing them. (Quoting their response: "These lights are extremely expensive to fix and since Athletics is taking over the field in a few months and building a new facility there, it is not worth it for our department to put in the thousands of dollars to fix the lights.")

I followed up with a request about whether we could get an estimate of the cost and look at perhaps even covering some of the replacements ourselves (even 4-5 well placed lights might be enough for us), but they remained steadfast on not wanting to replace them. Unfortunately, I think that's a dead-end.

-Mitch

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