By Ryan Smith

MEADVILLE TRIBUNE

VERNON TOWNSHIP — "I’ve enjoyed my playing days. I don’t play like I used to, but I still enjoy it and I’m still involved in it,” says Dave Miller, a softball player in the Meadville Sertoma Club’s summer leagues since 1962.

And in his opinion, Vernon Township officials are hitting a home run with their plans for a roughly $375,000 project to upgrade the Lincoln Avenue Sports Complex, which Sertoma’s leagues and various tournaments have called home since it was built in 1975.

Vernon officials recently said they’re planning to use a $180,000 match grant approved by Crawford County commissioners under the county’s Growing Greener II state grant program for the project, which ties in to current improvement efforts already under way at the complex. Along with further upgrading the complex’s fields, township Manager Dave Stone recently said plans — now in preliminary stages — include using some funds to build an adjacent recreation environment with walking trails that could tie in to future industrial developments.

After 32 years of sports action and natural wear, the complex “definitely needs it,” Sertoma Club President Jack Thompson said of the planned major upgrade.

This year marks the first in two decades in which Lincoln Avenue will not be used for the District 10 softball playoff tournament. Postseason tournament director Tom Jakubowski recently cited the fields’ conditions as one of the reasons for the tournament’s move from the complex to Allegheny College and Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

In addition to coordinating the food and beverage operation, the club provides softballs, pays umpires, does some field maintenance,

and runs the local league and actively markets the fields to tournaments that bring visiting players and their families into town.

The fields’ ability to draw dollars to the region will not only be re-established, but enhanced, by the upgrade, according to Thompson. “If (township officials) do everything they say they’re going to do, we’ll have the best complex in the whole area,” he said.

The only catch, township officials said recently, is finding the funding source to match the grant allocated by the county. Officials said a number of funding sources may be pursued, including partnerships with local industries and the state’s Community Development Block Grant and/or Brown-fields grant programs.

No formal board actions on match-fund plans are expected to be taken until July or August, but “we’re moving ahead with this project,” township supervisors’ Chairman Bob Davis said recently. “We’re going to do it.”

Ownership of the complex, which is located in Vernon Township just outside of Meadville’s Fifth Ward, was transferred from the City of Meadville to the township in 2004 after city officials indicated budgetary factors were creating difficulties in maintaining the complex. Along with its four regulation softball fields, the site also includes a two-story administration building, a concession stand, parking lots, picnic tables, bleachers, public restrooms and playground equipment.

The Crawford County Convention and Visitors Bureau has maintained in recent years that every outside dollar will turn over seven times in a local economy, and has indicated that tournaments that bring outside visitors to local hotels, restaurants and other attractions represent as much as $2 million to the region’s economy annually.

“If you really study economic development,” Stone said recently, it’s clear that “these are the kind of things that help attract and help to keep businesses,” workers and families in the area.