San Francisco City College still has no baseball field 

By Cooper McDonald

cjknowledge301@gmail.com

 

          City College of San Francisco has been without a dedicated home-field diamond for its baseball team for the last few years.

          This issue has become troubling not only for the coaches and players of the City College baseball team but also for the fans and families of the team.

          “I’ve no idea why we don’t have any facilities. I’ve been fighting this for years,” Mendoza said. 

          Trying to find answers has not been an easy process for the coaches which leads everyone involved to beg the question: why are they not using Balboa Park as their home diamond? The park is located across the 280 freeway from the Ocean campus.

          For the past few years, the City College of San Francisco baseball team has been commuting and holding their “home field” games at Fairmont Field, located in the north part of Pacifica, barely a mile from Serramonte. 

          Being a seven-mile drive from the Ocean campus, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get to the Fairmont baseball diamond on a traffic-free day. 

          The Fairmont Field baseball diamond has been used primarily by St. Ignatius College Preparatory for their home baseball and field hockey games. However, sharing a primary baseball diamond between a Community College and a preparatory school has come with its challenges.

          Multiple CCSF baseball games were sometimes canceled, other times moved to different local fields or delayed due to St. Ignatius having their home baseball games interfere with CCSF’s scheduled games. 

          The question of why CCSF isn’t utilizing Balboa Park has been most likely overlooked because of its poor and uneven conditions. The field is rarely managed. 

          Mario Mendoza, the head coach of the CCSF baseball team, has had concerns over the matter of trying to get a dedicated home field for his team now for years. 

          “No, I still haven’t heard anything about getting a home field or if we’ll ever use Balboa Park,” Coach Mendoza said. 

          In the past, Mendoza said he’s tried many different times to bring this issue up to the Administrative Faculty and the Sports Department. “They always give me the runaround and always say they don’t have any finances to get a field,” he said. 

          “I’ve no idea why we don’t have any facilities. I’ve been fighting this for years,” Mendoza said. 

          It has been quite an inconvenience for the team to have to commute from the main Ocean campus in the Ingleside neighborhood to the baseball field in Fairmont. “It’s been a major inconvenience to commute to that field,” Mendoza said. 

      Fairmont, being a small, hilly, and quiet, tightly enclosed suburb of the 280 Freeway, is very difficult for a 35 to 40-foot team bus to navigate through the right streets with the street-parked cars, making it hard to make turns at certain intersections. 

          The field is nestled at the lowest elevation point of the neighborhood and is located at the bottom of a hill at the corner of Edgewood Drive and El Dorado Drive. 

          There are still questions to be answered about why CCSF does not have a dedicated baseball field that has yet to be answered by the City College Facilities Board.