What’s Right With Our Schools: OLPH Baseball Field

CHATTANOOGA, TN (WDEF) – Our national pastime is more popular than ever at OLPH thanks to the addition a brand new ball field. It’s the culmination of a long time effort that will soon have bats cracking and gloves popping.

Dewarren Lamb is the Athletic Director at OLPH.

He says, “We decided that we wanted to have baseball here at OLPH. So, we started looking into different places where people that can help us build in the field.”

Chase White is the head baseball coach.

He adds, “So, when I took over as head coach last year, we didn’t have a home field. We had to practice wherever we could find, wait on other teams to get finished with practice first, and then,  then we got to finally practice. So, what this field means to us is, you know, we finally have somewhere to call home.”

Charlie Hunt from St. Jude Catholic School adds,”Before, we just had to go from field to field, and we didn’t really have anywhere that we could practice regularly, and we didn’t really have that many home games, and we would just play at everyone else’s field, and, now that we have a field, it’s awesome because we can practice every day whenever we want.”

Holder Donnelly from OLPH chips in, “When I was here before, there was really no dirt on the field. It was just grass. Home plate, where the catcher would be, was just like a fireplace. And it’s amazing to have her out here.”

Dewarren points out, “We combine OLPH and St. Jude together. The reason why we do that is, because neither school has enough players for each school to participate, so we combine them as a catholic school. Designing this field and putting a lot of hard work into it. We have to build new fences, build a batting cage. The dirt that you see on the field, all this is donated.”

Chase adds, “So February 26th we’re doing a big Opening Day. We’re starting at 10 o’clock in the morning with some skills competitions between our Varsity and J-V team. We’re going to do fastest base runners, a bunny competition. We’re all going to grill out and eat lunch. We got a we got a scrimmage game that day at one o’clock. And then our J-V is going to play the same team again right after the varsity game.

Dewarren concludes, “It is definitely a field of dreams. We want people to come.  We think people will come and just enjoy the game of baseball.”