Mira Costa’s athletics scored a new facility this year with the Manhattan Beach Unified School District’s finished construction of a new multi-sport turf field on S Meadows Ave.
The new turf field started construction on November 17, 2016 and was completed on September 20th. The field will be used by Mira Costa’s football, soccer, baseball, softball, lacrosse, rugby, marching band, and some track and field events. It will also be available to sports programs outside of Mira Costa, such as club sports or recreational sports leagues like AYSO.
“Finding practice space for the three boys and three girls soccer teams has always been difficult,” boys soccer head coach Gary Smith said. “The old northwest field was in such bad condition that we tried to avoid it by taking the varsity team to a different facility off campus for practice in order to let the JV and Frosh-Soph teams on the stadium field.”
The area that occupied the land before construction was both a smaller grass field and a parking area next to the baseball field separated by a driveway that stretched from S Meadows Ave to S Peck Ave. Now, it’s a larger field made of turf that spans all the way to the current baseball field and includes a soccer and baseball field.
“The new turf field will allow us more area with a quality surface, which obviously helps especially in the game of soccer,” Smith said. “There is quite a bit of useable turf outside the actual marked field too which is very nice for drills and pre-game warm-up.”
The old Meadows field was completely worn down by overuse to the point where the grass field is now partially dirt. The current field offers a larger and safer area for Costa’s sports to perform at their top level during practices and games.
“The old field was unsafe,” Principal Ben Dale said. “It’s one of many upgrades to our athletic facilities in general.”
The field was funded by MBUSD and MBX, a branch of MBUSD that financially supports athletic and academic programs for MBUSD. The total facility costed a total of ___ . Construction was approved by MBUSD on November 2nd and MBX will host a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new field after it opens on October 6th at 3:15pm.
“The first meeting I had at Costa was about the new field in 2010,” Dale said. “We just took forever to get it done and paused it because of all the Measure BB stuff we did.”
Costa’s sports teams have been using Waller Stadium and the Southern baseball and softball fields while the new field is under construction. Varsity teams will continue to play their games on Waller Stadium while Junior Varsity and Frosh-Soph teams will use the new Meadows field.
“I think the new field will give our players a stronger mentality going into games and training sessions,” varsity goalie Andrew Fasano said. “Playing on a new field will drive us to work harder since having great facilities allows for a higher quality of play in both trainings and games.”
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