Painting by numbersKeeping midfield decorations maintained is a difficult chore

Published 11:43 am Friday, October 14, 2011

When fans attend football games, the first thing that catches their eyes in the view of the field is the team’s logo emblazoned at midfield.

Done in brilliant team colors, the logo contrasts with the manicured green of the playing surface.

It’s a point of pride for local coaches, who paint the midfield decoration and maintain it.

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But it isn’t a matter of taking a few cans of spray paint out to midfield and painting away. First, there is a template made of cardboard and Visqueen polyethylene plastic sheeting for each color. In St. Al’s logo, there are three colors, while in Warren Central’s, there is just red and white. Each color has to be applied separately and allowed to dry. It takes about four or five people to set up St. Al’s stencils.

At Warren Central, the process takes about 30 to 45 minutes. Using an interlocking WC stencil cut into Visqueen by assistant soccer coach Drew Ranier, the coaches lay down the white first before adding the red.

“You want to put the stamp on your home field and it sets your stadium off,” WC coach Josh Morgan said. “It gives a little pop to the field and our boys take some pride in that WC, so it means a lot to them.”

While the work usually looks great after application, all it takes are a few snaps during a game to mar it. While a game during dry conditions doesn’t completely ruin the white outline, a gullywasher of a rainstorm has the coaching staff starting anew. Last fall’s heavy rains played havoc with the fields and forced coaches to give up the decorations and just worry about the lines.

“You’d like to keep the outline, but a few rains here and there and you’re having to do the whole thing all over again,” Morgan said.

The hard part starts at the beginning of the season when the first logo is painted. Thereafter, the painters can follow the outline of the old one and just fill in.

“We’ll outline in white and keep it up the whole year,” St. Al coach B.J. Smithhart said. “If you put the thing out there, it takes about three hours. It’s time consuming.”

For St. Al, it usually takes about 10 to 12 cans of spray paint to put down the logo. Two white cans, three or four gold and three or four purple make the three-color script stand out.

Despite the fact Balzli Field’s playing surface gets heavy use year-round, the Flashes’ coaching staff, led by baseball coach Derrik Boland, handles the painting chore with ease and pride.

“I feel we’ve got to work really hard, but it doesn’t look like it because the high school practices on our field, the junior high practices on our field and soccer uses our field. It’s used all year long,” Smithhart said. “Derrik Boland does it for us because he’s a baseball guy and baseball guys are meticulous. It’s definitely a point of pride for me.”