Oconto Falls school officials plan to bring estimates to the school board’s next meeting Nov. 11 on the cost of designing high school baseball fields on the grounds of the new middle school, with an eye toward remembering a student who died too young.
Trent Maloney Memorial Inc. (TMMI) representatives appeared again at the Oct. 21 board meeting in hopes of getting a commitment to support a fundraising initiative for the fields in memory of Trent, a 9-year-old Oconto Falls Elementary School third grader who died Feb. 28, 2020, of complications from cardiac arrest he had suffered five weeks earlier.
The memorial fund was established by a group of community members whose children are in Trent’s graduating class of 2029, and they approached his parents, Greg and Randi Maloney, about creating a scholarship in his name..
Now they are advocating for the fields to be built at the middle school, which is currently under construction and scheduled to open in the fall of 2025. The goal is for the fields to be ready for the class of 2029 to play on them, and TMMI intends to raise private funds for naming rights and as many amenities as they can manage.
The group provided an estimate, provided in part by Hutchinson Property Services and numbers offered by the Wittenberg-Birnamwood School District, that a facility could be built for $1,327 million. Lighting and a sound system would add another $400,000 to the cost.
Greg Maloney and TMMI member Derek Tate described the group’s visits to four recently completed high school baseball facilities in De Pere, Kaukauna, Little Chute and Freedom, to get an idea what features to include for Oconto Falls.
The proposal includes an artificial turf varsity field, concession stand and restrooms, dugouts and other features, including a second ball diamond with a dirt and sod surface that could serve as a junior varsity field.
“The reason we included the second field right away is we all know costs aren’t going to get any cheaper,” Randi Maloney said, saying there’s an advantage to doing both fields at the same time and have one complete facility.
She pointed out that the baseball diamond at Memorial Field has been mostly unchanged for about 50 years, and the committee agreed the new facility should be built right the first time.
The group envisions combining the resources of the school district and the community similar to those that led to construction of the softball diamonds and the ST Paper Stadium football field a decade ago.
“We have beautiful facilities here, and this is kind of like the final piece of the puzzle,” Maloney said. “We want it to be something that we’re very proud of as a community, that we’re bringing people into our community, and let’s be honest, I would want people to be jealous, to say, ‘Wow, look at that, what they did, that’s pretty cool.’”
School board member Carrie Hill, who was part of a committee of TMMI and school board members that toured the other sites, said the group believes turf is necessary to reduce the constant need for rescheduling spring games because of wet grounds.
The fly in the ointment is that ball diamonds were among about $12 million worth of projects that were removed after a $49.9 million middle school referendum failed in April 2022. The scaled-down $36.5 million referendum passed the following November.
School Board President Clint Gardebrecht said he remembered cutting down pine trees with Mike Bouche, the district’s building and grounds supervisor and an assistant baseball coach, to prepare the grounds for the two softball diamonds at the high school.
“I firmly believe that this didn’t happen out here, until we had done that and proved to the community that we could do something that was fairly fiscally responsible when we built those softball fields,” Gardebrecht said. “And then a few years later we had multiple referendums that didn’t pass, where we had high-dollar estimates for what a football complex would be, and we had what turned out to be a school-driven, community-based effort to put in the football field, and it’s another marquee attraction that we have where other schools come and say wow, look at what they have.”
Bouche agreed that the community stepped up after the old Panther Pride group came with $40,000 to the board, which agreed to lease the land for $1.
“We stuck a fork in the ground and then people started coming,” Bouche said. “I am totally supporting this group — I think there’s a million different avenues to go to get it done and get it started so we can move on with it. Sometimes it just takes that first step and then people trust the fact that you’re actually going to do it.”
Board members were inclined to support the project but agreed that the first step is to get a design plan and more concrete numbers than TMMI’s rough estimate.
Superintendent Dean Hess suggested that he and district business manager Kim Sinclair get back to the board with the cost of design work and get some understanding what the board’s options might be.
“You don’t have to look very far to see some pretty neat things where people came together — softball fields, the football field, the veterans memorial — these are things where people came together and did something,” Hess said. “None of those things, by the way, happened without anxiety and some consternation, I’m sure.”
wbluhm@newmedia-wi.com
UPDATE: Several clarifications and corrections from the original version of this story, which appeared here and in the Nov. 1 Oconto County Times Herald:
• Although the proposal is to build two baseball fields at the new Oconto Falls Middle School, they would be designed for high school varsity and junior varsity play, for use by all players in the Oconto Falls community.
• Trent Maloney Memorial Inc. (TMMI) was established by a group of community members whose children are in Trent’s graduating class of 2029, and they approached his parents, Greg and Randi Maloney, about creating a scholarship in his name.
• Members of TMMI and the Oconto Falls School Board created a baseball field committee that toured existing baseball facilities in De Pere, Kaukauna, Little Chute and Freddom. The group obtained financial information from the new Wittenberg-Birnamwood baseball fields but did not actually visit that site.
• Carrie Hill was part of the committee in her role as a school board member; she is not part of TMMI.
• A community campaign a decade ago led to construction of two softball diamonds near Oconto Falls High School, not four as stated in the article.
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