Monday, February27, 2006
Today we met with David Petersen, Chief of Facilities for Scottsdale Unified School District and his team today at a prospective site for a Miracle League field. This meeting had come about after my call to Judy Weiss in the Scottsdale Parks & Recreation a few weeks earlier. My call to Judy was to follow-up on meetings with her and her team, introducing Miracle League and their enthusiastic response to assist us in some way in early 2005.
Judy returned my call and said that she and her team at the Parks and Rec dept did not see that they would have a facility for us to develop with them and that she had been trying to facilitate a meeting with Scottsdale Unified Schools, specifically with David. Schedules had been impossible to match up, so she suggested I might call Dave directly. In my typically shy and retiring way, I called him right after I hung up with Judy.
David’s admin returned my call and asked about what we were looking for in a meeting with David, indicating that he would call me back if he was interested. David did call back the last week of February. He asked if we were the group interested in providing a handicapped accessible facility and if we were interested in working with him and his team to get one done. He had a prospective site for us in North Scottsdale, and perhaps we might meet at the site and look it over. I said yes, that was us and we set a meeting at the field for the next Monday.
The morning came and it was cool February day when we shook hands with David and his team. From MLoAZ was Terry Mickelson, Ken Staudenmayer and myself. The meeting was set for 9AM and everyone arrived pretty much on time; Terry brought me a warm cup of coffee…
The site is on the grounds of Cochise Elementary School in North Scottsdale. We talked about the public / private, nonprofit partnership we’re trying to start and they identified the prospective location to us, in the Northwest corner of the North playground of the school. There is an existing field used by the local Little League there now, complete with backstop and well worn base paths from kids playing baseball.
We were very excited, to say the least. Getting a site identified for the field we think will help quite a bit in getting funding and support, so this was a big step down that direction. Dave also gave us the name of the principal of the school, Diane Smith.
We agreed in principal to move forward with the site identified and after David and the team left, Terry, Ken and I inspected the site, looking at the locations for electrical, water and how much might be leveraged right into the project without any demolition. As we looked around, Ken punched the air with enthusiasm, thanking God for the many blessing provided that day in support of a dream he has nurtured in seeing a field become a reality.
Terry took a few pictures of Ken and I on the pitchers mound (we’ll post them soon!)and we talked about the work ahead of us. One of the realizations we talked about would be the need to gain the support of the local neighborhood and the school itself. This would have to be through a series of meeting and conversation, each of which would drive the project forward just a little bit more.
We decided that there was no time like the present to drop in on the school principal to introduce ourselves, so we did. We entered the administrative office and asked for Ms. Smith, who was gratious enough to take a few moments to visit with us. We talked about the scope of the project and where we were in the development of the field. She welcomed our involvement in the local community and offered the school cafeteria as a meeting room when we needed it to hold our meetings with the local homeowners.
She then took us on a walk outside to show us the North end of the schools facility, which was an enclosed playground for the younger students. She had picked up in our conversation that the surface of the field was rubberized, which was the same surface she envisioned for this play area. She asked if we might consider working with her and her local parent-teacher organization to piggyback off of our purchase of surfacing material – we accepted her invitation to explore the relationship and then parted on good terms, having found willing supporters in developing community with another.
What a great day for Miracle League in Arizona!
