The Beatty football field looked absolutely fantastic at the beginning of the football season. Finally, for $50,000, it looked as if all the curse of the Beatty football field had been broken, a problem with the grass on the field, which has persisted for some time was fixed.
Unfortunately, the problem was not fixed. The field was mostly back to what it looked like before the work was done by mid-football season.
Nye County School District Maintenance and Operations Manager Cameron McRae said the problem goes back further than his two years with the district. He said Tonopah and Beatty both received brand new grass when he first started with the district. The Tonopah field survived and the Beatty field did not.
In a recent conversation with former Nye County Commissioner Robert Revert, he said the field looked awful and was furious over the problem. He believes heads should roll.
“From the clinic you can get a good view of the field and how dead it is,” Revert said. “If you spend $50,000 on something, you would expect that somebody would take care of it. It started going bad as soon as they put it in. The people leave gates open and the burros would go in and break sprinklers and eat the grass. The guy should inspect the gates every day to see they are closed. They should have done something about this early on.”
No Beatty High School personnel would comment on the situation.
Dale Norton was asked about the situation and responded in an email, “I will be reviewing the concern and assessing the recommended next steps.”
McRae was the only person willing to say anything about the situation in detail and took some responsibility in the matter.
The bottom line is it takes money,” McRae said. “We made an attempt to put a little bit of money in, and I shouldn’t say a little bit, it was almost 50 grand to accomplish it. We had it set and a chain of events changed that, but I am not a guy who points fingers. Every time you point a finger, three will point it right back at you and I recognize that. The buck stops with me for some respect. What we did — did not maintain and did not stay. Now is the question comes down to what are we going to try next? Can we fix some of the items or have we fixed some of them already?”
Revert is positive that it was incompetence that destroyed the grass. He blames the people taking care of the field for the bad maintenance on the sprinklers and for not keeping the burros off the field. He said he will pursue this matter at the next school board meeting.
McRae feels there are people to blame but could not get into the details.
“There was a period of time for whatever reason it did not get watered. How that happened and why that happened we still don’t know. The question is was water the only issue? I don’t think so. We have spent money on sprinkler heads and made sure they were up and correct. I am 100 percent sure that every sprinkler that works that field has been done, but we are going to find out before the next season. Now, we need to decide if we are going to rehab it with seed, topdressing and fertilizer or are we going to go for additional sod, or something different. These decisions have yet to be made, so I can’t answer it at this time to make anybody feel better,” he said.