Sure, we'd like to take full credit for the outstanding recreational facilities that St. Mary's College of Maryland offers the student-athlete - or any student, for that matter. But we'll have to share it with Mother Nature.
After all, we didn't build the scenic St. Mary's River, which flows past the campus and provides an ideal venue for sailing, rowing, kayaking and other water sports. Or the Chesapeake Bay, just four miles to the east. Or St. Mary's State Park and St. Mary's Lake, just nine miles north of campus, where many students go fishing or mountain-biking.
The outdoor action is in high gear 10 months a year, thanks to... well, you know, what's-her-name. St. Mary's is located at roughly the same latitude as Charlottesville, Virginia, and the climate is mild enough to hold our home baseball opener in early to mid-February each year.
What we can take credit for is the renovation and expansion of Somerset Hall into the Athletics & Recreation Center (ARC), which opened in the spring of 2005. St. Mary's home for athletics includes an arena for basketball and volleyball, an Olympic-size 50-meter swimming pool, and a fitness center/weight room that nearly doubled the size of the facility.
The entire complex is 110,000-square feet. The recreational courts and 25-yard pool from old Somerset Hall remain in use for recreation, club sports, classes and an intramural program that offers everything from soccer to flag football to volleyball.
The tree-lined baseball field, known as the Hawk's Nest, was completed in February 2001 after two years of painstaking work guided by the former head groundskeeper at Camden Yards.
The Somerset Tennis Complex, which opened in March 2001, was built to such exacting standards that it may be years before anyone spots a water puddle anywhere on the playing surface.
Seahawk Stadium, where the field hockey, soccer, and lacrosse teams play, is one of the best Bermuda grass fields in the nation.
The home base for the national championship sailing team and for an enthusiastic, up-and-coming club crew team was revamped and the new, $5-million boathouse for the nationally recognized sailing program was completed in Fall of 2008.
THE ATHLETICS AND RECREATION CENTER
Basketball/Volleyball Arena: The ARC
arena includes seating for 1,200 fans, Ed Cole Court - a
hardwood maple court, and NBA-style portable baskets. The
stands are retractable at one end, leaving room for a stage for
concerts and other special events.
Olympic-size Swimming Pool: The 300-seat natatorium features a pool with the size (50 meters long) and state-of-the-art design demanded for major competitions. The planning was entrusted to Counsilman/Hunsaker, the internationally-recognized consulting firm that has overseen pool construction for two Olympic Games. The pool can be divided by bulkheads when necessary into smaller sections, such as the standard 25-yard lap used in collegiate meets. It has several features meant to minimize wave action, including specially designed gutters, and a state-of-the-art heat-recovery and dehumidification unit to cut down on humidity.
Health and Fitness Center - The fitness center comprises three areas and is outfitted with a variety of state-of-the-art fitness equipment, including cardiovascular machines, a comprehensive circuit of resistance-training machines, Olympic-style benches, and 6,000 pounds of free weights. The Fitness Center student staff is available to assist both athletes and recreational exercisers with use of the equipment. Excellent stretching/floor exercise space is available as well. Equipment is provided by Life Fitness, Hammer Strength, LeMond, Hampton Fitness, Concept II, and Schwinn.
Training Room - The training room, which nearly doubled in size after the renovation, added hydrotherapy equipment to its current facilities, allowing the athletic training staff to provide a greater array of services. A separate entrance provides direct access to the playing fields, just yards away.
14 Locker Rooms - The number of locker rooms nearly tripled from five to 14, allowing each team to have a room to itself in season. Nine rooms are set aside for athletic teams and two (one men's, one women's) are designated for general use. In addition, the complex includes two rooms for faculty/staff, and a visitor's team room.
HAWK'S NEST
St. Mary's baseball field, which opened on February 11,
2001, is a thing of man-made beauty surrounded by natural splendor.
The field itself benefited from the guiding hand of Paul
Zawska, former head groundskeeper at Camden Yards, home of the
Baltimore Orioles. The outfield is the same hybrid bluegrass
used at Camden Yards, the infield the same mix of clay material and
additives designed to keep it soft but resilient.
The end result of the $1.3-million project is informally known as the Hawk's Nest, a fitting name considering it's surrounded by woods on three sides and sits just up a slope from Fisher's Creek. The rustic-looking wooden dugouts, designed by landscape architect Michael Vergason, seem to blend into the surroundings.
The near-major league dimensions are 320 feet down the leftfield line, 400 to dead center, and 330 to right. So is the scoreboard, one of the largest in Division III. Even the backstop has a major-league look. It's made of salt-water netting - thinner and easier to see through than chain-link or nylon fencing - and from the same supplier as (yep) Camden Yards.
Twenty thousand cubic feet of soil were displaced to create the Hawk's Nest, much of it deposited at a nearby farm. But the really heavy lifting - the careful planning and attention to detail - came before the first bulldozer went into action. Construction took just 102 days, while the planning stage took nearly two years.
SEAHAWK STADIUM
Seahawk Stadium, home of the St. Mary's field hockey, men's and
women's soccer, and men's and women's lacrosse teams, manages to
stand up to a lot of punishment and keep its good looks. The
field was resurfaced two years ago with an improved Bermuda grass
known as Riviera. The new Bermuda hybrid has a tighter knit
and finer leaf texture, allowing for very fast play. It was
engineered specifically for the transitional zone in which the
College is located and can handle the local clement better than
other types of turf.
The stadium as a whole is ringed at one end by student townhouses, and often its occupants bring out their couches and lawn chairs to take in the action. The setting makes the game an unmistakable part of campus life, not something set apart from the rest.
Bleachers line one side of the field, trees and open fields the other, with a wooded hill off in the distance. Whether you're playing the game or watching it, Seahawk Stadium is one of the finest venues around.
SOMERSET TENNIS COMPLEX
If you've seen one tennis court, you've seen them all,
right?
Wrong. If that were the case, St. Mary's wouldn't have spent $400,000 to make the Somerset Tennis Complex a cut above the rest.
The complex, which opened for play on March 9, 2001, includes six courts painted with a water-resistant acrylic base coat and two finish coats.
The courts are arranged in three groups of two, with walkways in between and separate fencing for each group. The drop-down fencing - high at each end, belt-level on the sides - allows for easy spectator viewing and does away with that caged look.
"It opens up the courts, so the fencing is not so overwhelming, the way it is when you have a 12-foot fence all around the perimeter," said Larry Hartwick, the former capital projects manager at St. Mary's.
On the courts themselves, the concern is more with 12-inch puddles than with 12-foot fencing. At St. Mary's, they've become a rare sight.
"A lot of people take tennis courts for granted," Hartwick declared, "but they need to be laid out with a minimum grade, so you don't get ponding and things like that. They have a tolerance of only one-eighth of an inch per 10 feet.
"Our new courts are the first time I've seen it done really well. We told the contractor that we absolutely wouldn't accept anything less than the specified tolerance, and they got the message. We were there to make sure everything went right, and they did a great job."
VARSITY PRACTICE FIELD COMPLEX
St. Mary's purchased the land across Mattapany Road and
developed five full-size practice fields in the Fall of
2003. The fields primarily service the varsity athletic
programs but are also used for community events like soccer and
lacrosse tournaments, along with other campus recreational and
intramural activities.
THE JAMES P. MULDOON RIVER CENTER
Over the past 20 years, the St. Mary's sailing team has
become a perennial national title contender, and the
team finally has a spectacular, multi-million dollar
facility, which opened in September of 2009, to call home in the
center of campus on the banks of the St. Mary's River at the Teddy
Turner Waterfront.
The James P. Muldoon River Center, in combination with the Rowing Center, measures 13,700-square feet and serves the sailing and crew programs as well as recreational users, biology students and other researchers. The project, funded through private donations, also includes docks, ramps, and improved beach access to the river. Protection of the shoreline and other environmental concerns figured prominently in the planning.
Any St. Mary's student, faculty or staff can learn to sail free of charge and gain access to one of the College boats. They need only pass a basic swimming test.