Latest upgrades at Gilman’s ball fields are just about complete

The return of spring sports in a couple of weeks will allow Gilman to show off upgrades to its softball/baseball facilities, located just northeast of the school building and football field/track.

About four years in the making, a 40-foot by 40-foot covered pavilion is completed and ready for use, providing event attendees cover from rain or hot sun as well as a place to enjoy food and drink bought at the concession stand.

A third softball/youth baseball diamond is just about ready to go. It is located just south of the full baseball field.

A northward expansion to the parking lot was completed two summers ago, bringing some parking spots closer to the fields, but wasn’t used to its full capacity last spring due to the COVID-related sports cancellations.

“It’s a pretty impressive facility we have out there now,” Gilman athletic director/head softball coach Brian Phelps said. “We’re very fortunate to have the facilities we have for a school our size just overall.

“My philosophy has always been no matter what our sport or facilities, we always want our kids to be able to be proud,” Phelps added. “When they walk out there they can be proud to say, ‘wow, we get to play on this.’ Uniform-wise and everything, when you look good, you feel good, you play better. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that here and our community is very supportive. We’re pretty fortunate with that kind of stuff.”

The pavilion project got a big boost with financial contributions from the Green Bay Packers Foundation and Forward Bank and generous pricing and labor from local sources.

The new field will be ready for play once dry weather allows for final tweaks to be completed. It will be used during the Gilman-Thorp Slamfest softball tournament on May 8. During the spring and summer months, it will primarily be used by Gilman’s Little League program.

“To see it all starting to come together is really cool,” he said. “This field is primarily going to be designed as a Little League field. We’ve had some problems finding fields that are open for our Little League program. So now we have another option for them. Our south softball field and our north softball field, we can all share and work together on those. It will be nice to have a centralized thing. We have the concession stand there so all of our organizations in the summers will be able to sell concessions and help raise funds for our programs to get more summer stuff going.”

Phelps said it became obvious in recent years that the parking lot at the facility, which first opened for baseball and softball play in 2005, wasn’t large enough to handle the bigger crowds that assembled there.

“We’ve had so many problems when we have multiple events going,” he said. ‘We had people driving out to what will be our Little League field area out there and getting stuck and tearing it up because we didn’t have a big enough parking lot. So hopefully this fixes some of that problem.”