Little League Seeks to Build Batting Cage, Pitching Tunnel at Nesbit

Little league officials are asking to build a batting cage and pitching tunnel at Nesbit Elementary, but on Tuesday night school district officials expressed hesitancy at the project as plans to expand Nesbit are moving forward.

Mike Davies, President of the Belmont-Redwood Shores Little League, addressed the Board of Trustees at Tuesday night's board meeting, concerning the hesitation to construct a pitching tunnel and batting cage at Nesbit.

Davies, who was appointed president of the league in September 2010, oversees several leagues spanning from Belmont Heights to Redwood Shores, including 700 little leaguers and over 500 families.

And according to Davies, the league is behind the competition in the equipment department, especially at Nesbit, a central location for the league that features kid-pitch. 

“Compared to our size, we’re probably the least equipped as far as field assets go in our district,” Davies said. “We’ve always wanted to do more capitol investment in the community. We don’t have a lot of physical assets, like park space relative to other communities around us.”

The school district however, is hesitant to allow the BRSLL to move forward with the project in the midst of the approval of Measure N, which focuses on the of Nesbit in order to increase student capacity.

“I think the issue is because we're doing work at Nesbit that we have to potentially coordinate the efforts to make sure that doing the batting cages is not going to impede or affect our ability to do the growth and the work that we need to do at Nesbit,” said School Board President Andrew Stulbarg.

Davies, however, said he is confident the structure, which will be used more for pitching than batting, will not disturb the efforts to expand Nesbit in any fashion.

“It’s a very simple structure,” Davies said. “It’s a concrete slab with a cyclone fence enclosure that at its peak is going to be 14 feet tall, 80 feet long and 30 feet wide. It sits on land that we use right now for baseball activities. It doesn’t encroach any access to school properties.”

“There’s no electrification, no plumbing; it couldn’t be a simpler structure,” he added.

Stulbarg, along with the rest of the board, and city contractors on hand at the meeting, explored other options that would allow the two projects to coincide peacefully.

The most popular opinion amongst the board members, as well as those charged with architecting the Nesbit expansion, was a combination of the two projects.

Contractors suggested that if the two projects were to become one, it would lower expenses for the BRSLL, namely inspection costs.

“How they can piggyback off of us, not from a dollars standpoint, but from a process standpoint, is important,” Stulbarg said.

Davies and his organization have gathered a significant portion of the expenses needed in order to construct the pitching tunnel, by means of a Hit-A-Thon, which raised $27,000.

Davies believes the project will require approximately $30,000, a figure that contractors say is on the “low side.”

Regardless, Davies maintains that the pitching tunnel is much needed, as well as much-desired.

“This is No. 1 on our list,” Davies said. “This is what got people excited to raise the money, and quite frankly, it’s what we need to be able to teach kids the principles and basics of pitching and hitting so that they can enjoy the sport more and they can be more competitive.”

“When you got 700 kids wanting something like this, failure is not an option for me,” he said.

Nesbit serves as the location where ages 9 to 11 compete, and Marina Field at the Belmont Sports Complex serves as the site for the Little League Majors, which are ages 10 to 12.

“One of the things that we know we need is to help our kids with their pitching and their hitting,” Davies said. “Once they graduate to a certain level, they do kid-pitch. We don’t have a lot of facilities in order to teach kids to pitch, or how to hit pitches that are pitched by kids.”

Although the pitching tunnel is an outside project in regards to the School Board, Stulbarg commented that he understands the importance of providing local children with the resources needed to remain competitive and improve in their sport.

"I think it's incredibly important to the community to have the batting cage,” Stulbarg said. “I think everyone benefits. But I certainly wouldn't support and I don't think Little League wants to do anything that would affect the projects that we have to focus on."

"I just think the expectation needs to be set by Little League back to the community that they can have their batting cage, but it won't be until the 2013 Little League season, not the 2012 season," Stulbarg said.