‘A soupy mess.’ Should this Pierce County district upgrade its baseball field?
Some parents of Gig Harbor High School baseball players are urging the school district to install artificial turf on the school’s baseball field, pointing to drainage issues and uneven ground that they say present safety issues and hinder the team’s budding talent.
The Tides varsity team, which earned its 21st win May 5 after just one loss this season, practices at Sehmel Homestead Park, but the junior varsity team and C-Team hold practices at Gig Harbor High.
That home field, freshman Jonah Vitcovich said, is “super soggy” and difficult to play on, with divots, holes and bumps in the ground.
“Almost all of our conversations are about the field when we’re playing on it,” he told The News Tribune.
Vitcovich remembers having to sit out a practice after he sank into a mud puddle in the outfield and tweaked a muscle in his foot, he told The News Tribune, adding that there’s been “a couple instances” where other players have almost gotten hurt this season.
Several parents of players told The News Tribune they’re frustrated their sons have to play on the field because it takes days to drain after a rain and has several times required players to move practice indoors to the Gig Harbor High auxiliary gym, where they can’t practice true baseball. The problem has persisted for years, even going back to their own time in the baseball program, two former players and a former coach said.
Tim Attebery, whose son Chase plays pitcher and outfield for the Gig Harbor High JV team, told The News Tribune that he believes the field’s poor condition doesn’t meet the team’s caliber.
“There’s some communities that don’t take baseball very seriously,” Tim Attebery, whose son Chase plays pitcher and outfield for the Gig Harbor High JV team, told The News Tribune. “But Gig Harbor takes baseball very seriously.”
The Tides have had a successful spring, The News Tribune reported, with four standout pitchers and a 21-1 record as of May 5. Gig Harbor High graduate Michael Toglia played for the Tides before ultimately joining the Colorado Rockies.
The News Tribune reached out to the Peninsula School District for comment, including about what renovations to the high school baseball fields at Gig Harbor and Peninsula would cost and when changes could potentially be made. District spokesperson Jake Voss didn’t directly respond to those questions but said in a phone call that the district planned to have a broader discussion about improvements to facilities at the May 20 school board meeting, and that his understanding was that the baseball fields would be part of it.
Asked for an interview, current Tides baseball coach Ben Sleeter referred The News Tribune to Voss.
Other districts moving to artificial turf fields
Just up the hill from the Gig Harbor High School baseball field, several upper fields for soccer, football, softball and lacrosse have artificial turf. The Peninsula School District installed the fresh turf — replacing the old turf, which was about 13 years old — in 2018, The News Tribune reported.
In the last five years, several other schools in western Washington have installed all-weather turf ball fields, including Stanwood High School in Skagit County and Hudson Bay High School in Clark County, according to local news releases. There’s also been a push in areas like Seattle for artificial turf softball fields, according to The Seattle Times.
Last spring, Tacoma’s Lincoln High School debuted its all-turf baseball field and softball field as part of a new sports complex, The News Tribune reported. High school sports reporter Jon Manley wrote that the move reflected “a larger trend in western Washington toward moving to all-turf fields for spring sports,” following sports like football and soccer that have been played on turf for some time.
Tacoma Public Schools spokesperson Kathryn McCarthy wrote in an email that the cost of renovations to Lincoln High’s baseball and softball fields was $14 million: about $13 million for the fields and $1 million for lighting.
Funding for the improvements came from a 2020 capital bond for $535 million, 4% of which went toward athletic courts and fields, according to McCarthy.
Parents say poor field conditions date back to the ‘90s
Derek Vitcovich, Jonah’s father, said he remembers the field being difficult to play on when he played for the Tides in 1992-1995.
“It was a soggy mess, all dirt in-field,” he said, adding that the team often had to be in the gym for workouts.
He partially blames the field for an injury that he said derailed his prospective baseball career. During a sliding drill in the outfield, his foot got stuck in the soft grass and he sprained his ankle, just before his senior season. Vitcovich had hoped to play baseball in college after he was recruited to be a walk-on at Washington State University, but he believes that setback in his senior year held him back during tryouts and prevented him from making it through the last cut.
“I don’t want that to happen to any of the local talent that the baseball program has right now,” Vitcovich said.
Erick Griswold, a former teammate of Vitcovich in the ‘90s, agreed in a separate phone call that the field hasn’t changed much since he played. His son, Luke, plays as an outfielder on the C-team. The team had to have several practices in the auxiliary gym in March because the field was too wet to play on, Griswold told The News Tribune.
Derek Vitcovich shared screenshots of several messages to families via the platform FinalForms indicating that the team had to move practices to the auxiliary gym several times this season because of weather and field conditions. That included tryouts on March 4 and JV practice on March 21 and 28.
Other messages showed that a JV game against Peninsula High School was moved to Sehmel Homestead Park on March 29, and a JV game on April 8 was canceled, both “due to field conditions.”
Maintenance efforts
Former coach Pete Jansen, who led the Tides to a stream of victories during his coaching career from 1990 to 2022, told The News Tribune he put in many hours trying to keep the field playable during his coaching career.
If the team had a game on Tuesday and it had rained the day before, he would go down to check out the field early Tuesday morning, Jansen recalled. There would be puddles all over, and he’d rake some of the areas that were really wet. At lunchtime, he’d look at the field again and decide whether to cancel the game.
“Because the field never recovered after it rained, you always had to have kind of a second practice plan,” Jansen told The News Tribune. He remembers many times the team had to move into the auxiliary gym for practice.
He mentioned that Peninsula High School’s baseball field has had drainage issues in the infield.
Three parents told The News Tribune that the district provides mowing services for the field. James Bonnici, parent of varsity baseball player Wesley Bonnici, also told The News Tribune that he remembers the district lining the field with chalk before games and bringing in extra dirt to level the ground.
Currently, the players rake the field after practice and cover parts of the field with tarps, but “it still gets soaked,” according to Erick Griswold.
With money from the school boosters’ club and team fundraising, the baseball team got a $9,000 indoor batting cage for the auxiliary gym to help with indoor practices in 2010, The Kitsap Sun reported.
Baseball field built near wetland
Gig Harbor High School opened in 1979, according to Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room records.
It’s not clear whether the baseball field was part of the initial school, but an article in The Peninsula Gateway reported that the fields were set to be renovated beginning in 1992 as part of a larger expansion of the school’s athletic facilities. The school district and Gig Harbor Rotary Club partnered on what they called the “Field of Dreams” project, paid for with $100,000 from a school district bond issue in 1990 and another $28,000 donated from a Rotary Club auction.
The project planned to add dugouts, bleachers, a new practice diamond and a reworked backstop, according to The Gateway’s reporting.
Gig Harbor High School is near wetlands, which recently presented a barrier to a developer that proposed building 31 single-family lots on two parcels west of the school campus. That developer requested that the city adjust its development regulations to allow filling the wetlands with 60,000 cubic yards of soil, and reduce the required dense vegetative buffer dividing the site from the city’s public works facility and the Gig Harbor High School campus from 40 to 25 feet, according to city of Gig Harbor records.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated the cost of the batting cage purchased for the Gig Harbor High School auxiliary gym.
This story was originally published May 13, 2025 at 11:44 AM.
