By Diane Campbell
The head of Lisgar Collegiate Institute’s physical education department says she’s not satisfied with the condition of the school’s sports field, and plans to help Lisgar do something about it.
Karen Cairns says she’s trying to start an improvement project to give the field a much-needed facelift.
“I’ve got a couple of Grade 11’s researching it. I told them what we needed before we could put our proposal in,” says Cairns.
The field – which is mostly dirt, with grass growing around its edges – has been run down for years.
Lisgar principal Angie Spence says overcrowding at the school means the field is constantly in use.
This forces the students to share the field or, in some cases, train elsewhere.
Maryan Mohamed, a Grade 12 gym student at Lisgar, says she isn’t happy with the arrangement.
“During my period, there’s three gym classes – the Grade 9’s, the Grade 12 boys’ gym class, and there’s our gym class,” Mohamed says. “And the half the time, we have to split the field in half.”
“That small field, for two classes. Most of the time, we end up going to the regional field, and even then, I don’t think that’s an improvement,” she adds.
About 450 Lisgar students on school teams and in gym classes use alternative fields, including a nearby field owned by the region, and Confederation Park.
“We have to fill out field trip forms,” says Spence. “It’s really quite silly.”
The field’s condition also prevents Lisgar’s outdoor sports teams, including soccer and girls’ touch football, from playing home games.
“It doesn’t really help with school spirit, because you never have your home fans there, so it’s hard to get a bit of momentum,” says Cairns.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board’s maintenance department put down some seed on Lisgar’s bald patch at the beginning of the last school year, but Spence says it didn’t seem to help.
Maintenance staff still tend to the grass growing around the field’s outer edges. “The field really needs to be dug up and resodded, not reseeded,” Spence says.
Bill Traill, supervisor for the school board’s custodial services – which also looks after sports fields – agrees but says it’s just not in the cards right now.
“Given the budget constraints we’re working under,” he says, “our priority is to keep the inside of the school as safe for students and staff as possible.”
Aside from the expense, Traill says a resod job would mean putting Lisgar’s field out of service for an entire year, so that the new grass can take root. He would not give an estimate of what the resodding would cost.
“In a situation like Lisgar’s, you can’t take the field out of service, because it’s the only one they have,” he says.
Although the field isn’t great, Traill says it’s OK as long as it doesn’t develop holes or craters that could potentially injure students.
Mohamed disagrees.
“I find it painful, because there’s actually, like, bumps all over the place,” she says. “It’s not steady. During soccer and football, you’d see people falling all the time. I don’t think it’s safe enough, honestly.”
In the meantime, Cairns isn’t giving up, and says she hopes the improvement project will succeed where the school board has failed.
“You know, with facilities, you have to keep trying to improve it, whether it happens during my lifetime, or my children’s lifetime,” she says.