The District 205 School Board this week approved a number of bid specs for upgrades to different athletic facilities including some new additions.

Among the upgrades to be seen in the near future will be upgraded lights, new surfacing, and new bathrooms and team facilities for the tennis courts; new lighting at Jim Sundberg Field; and a new soccer practice field to the East of the Fieldhouse. 

Galesburg Athletic Director Eric Matthews tells WGIL that the interest in upgrading and fully lighting the tennis courts came from community use of the facilities.”We had a lot of people at the end of COVID that got, I think from what I’ve seen, more into tennis. The community has gotten more involved in tennis. Those courts are always being used. Not only during the day with our own students but with community members. And then at night time, when I drive by to check on things, the courts are always lit up. There is always people out there playing.”

“I know we have a lot of community people but I have friends that live over in Monmouth that come over all the time and use the tennis facilities. Some people from Knoxville come ’cause there’s not a lot of tennis facilities out there,” said Matthews.  “I think it’ll get more use in the evening times just with having more of the lights up and about.”

In addition, Matthews said that with the expanded lights on the tennis courts, should Galesburg be a host school for a tennis sectional, having lit courts would make it easier for scheduling purposes.

The new lights will be more cost-effective because they’ll be LED, which will be brighter and will allow the district to use fewer lights on the courts. Matthews said the school board looked at both just replacing the lighting that was currently up and lighting up the whole facility, opting to light everything up.

The addition of restroom facilities and a team room for the tennis team would reduce the need for the district to rent porta-potties during tennis matches. 

The City of Galesburg will be paying for half of the tennis court light upgrades and resurfacing. It is unclear if the city is paying for the restroom facilities and team room upgrade. 

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Another facility that will be seeing upgrades soon is Jim Sundberg Field. Matthews says that the current lighting is original to the field’s construction and the bulbs and ballasts are no longer in production.  “Last year, the left-center pole really just died. It was no longer functional. It kind of pushed us to where we’re at.”

Matthews says that there will be fewer poles because of the lighter, brighter LEDs. The hope is to have the lighting upgrades on the baseball field finished before the March 24 early season invitational.  “We can have it without lights,” Matthews said. “It would be kind of tricky managing all those games without lights but we’re hoping we can get to that.”

The other athletic facility upgrade that could be coming, pending approval of bids, is a new practice soccer field. The old practice field was behind Gale Elementary but was designated as a home for solar panels. 

To the East of the Fieldhouse is a section of grass that Matthews says isn’t used for anything except PE and is big enough for a soccer field. It will be fenced off, a storage facility for equipment will be put up, and a scoreboard will be installed on the east side of the Fieldhouse. 

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Matthews said that another aspect to the soccer practice field addition would be giving the school an option to host a round-robin tournament with teams playing on both soccer fields, instead of relying on the YMCA’s soccer field which would require a walk or drive there and isn’t very convenient. 

“We could, in theory, host a little round-robin soccer tournament and have two fields going at the same time and people could just walk out of the east side of the stadium and the field is right there,” Matthews told WGIL on Wednesday. “We get the scoreboard put up and now we could really use the field for tournament games and instead of having a portable scoreboard, we’d actually have one on the east side of the Fieldhouse.”

The goal is for the soccer field to be ready for practices in the fall.