Subs Move Along On Arvest Ballpark

Come spring, it will be time to play ball in Springdale.

Construction of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals minor league baseball stadium – estimated to cost about $33 million – is on pace to be finished in time for the opening game on April 10.

The team announced the stadium will be named Arvest Ballpark on Sept. 5.

General contractor Crossland Construction is currently within one day of its building schedule, and “progressing along rapidly,” said site superintendent James Farmer.

“It’s going real well,” he said. “The weather’s been pretty good after those torrential rains.”

The dugouts are complete, the stadium bowl has largely been defined and Crossland crews have started pouring concrete for the seating, which will be manufactured by Irwin Seating Co. and installed by Crossland.

Concrete has also been poured for about half of the party pavilion area as well as the slab for the administration building

Crossland is handling all of the rough carpentry, steel erection, concrete, handrails and dirt work on the project. But specialty subcontractors have been brought in for some jobs.

One such subcontractor is Athletic Fields LLC, a company that specializes in the demanding task of building fields for stadiums, arenas and other sporting grounds.

“We make sure that everything is safe, perfect and without flaws,” said Spencer Cultra, president of Athletic Fields.

The company, which also has offices in Atlanta, typically works on high-end stadium projects for high schools and colleges, but rarely for major or minor league teams.

The Springdale stadium is an exciting opportunity for Athletic Fields, because less than half of 1 percent of all athletic facilities built are for professional teams, Cultra said.

Since it began, the company has built more than 550 sand-based facilities such as Arvest Ballpark, employing between 24 and 30 workers on jobs throughout the southeast region of the country. Athletic Fields is currently active in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, and has worked on projects as far away as Arizona.

Building a baseball field is an exact science. All 100,000 SF of the field has to be leveled between a quarter-inch and one-eighth of an inch.

“It takes a lot of lasers,” he said.

Not only does Athletic Fields have to be precise, the company has to work quickly as well. Most of its jobs are fast-tracked.

“Football guys want you to start June 1 and be done by October,” Cultra said. “We’re always fighting the clock.”

Of all the steps involved in building a field, installing the drainage system takes the most amount of time. The system includes nearly 10,000 linear feet of pipe, and is designed to function like a vacuum, sucking water away from the field and out of the stadium area.

Cultra said his crew will finish up the drainage phase in mid-September and will then begin building the profile of the field. They’re on schedule to start installing sod by Oct. 15.

Other out-of-state subcontractors on the job include C&H Baseball of Bradenton, Fla. and Nationwide Fence, of Chesterfield, Mich.

The stadium is scheduled to be finished by Feb. 29.