Field of Dreams

By Tim Renneberg

Tucked away in the northwest corner of Prince George, British Columbia, is a place that’s been called the local Field of Dreams.

It’s a baseball field, of course, named in reference to the 1989 Kevin Costner movie. Like the field in the movie, the complex is, at first glance, unremarkable. Four diamonds form a ring around a two-storey building. The diamonds, with chain-link fencing, grass infields and red-shale base paths, are baseball-pretty, but don’t look significantly different from any other Little League complex in this sports-mad city of 80,000. Nor is the setting especially remarkable: Surrounded by a community hall, an ice arena and several other baseball diamonds, the complex looks like part of any other recreation facility in any other small city in Canada.

But what makes the newly minted Prince George complex dreamy is the details: The dugouts are long, wide and deep and at ground level; the gates to the field are wide and not in that V-shape designed to keep all but foot traffic out; all the doors to the concession building are slightly wider than usual; the bathrooms all have wheelchair-accessible stalls; and there’s an elevator shaft (the elevator itself is still $35,000 worth of fundraising away) between the two floors.

When it’s completed, organizers believe it will be the first fully wheelchair-accessible Little League diamond in Canada. When the elevator is in and the paving is done -- the parking lot and paths between the diamonds are still gravel -- it will be a place where everyone from the players to the umpires to the scorekeepers to the fans could be using wheelchairs and have no accessibility problems at all.

It’s a place that will be a dream come true for Shawn Creelman.

Creelman is the woman in charge of Prince George’s Challenger program, a Little League program for kids with disabilities. Currently, the four Prince George Challenger teams play on three other diamonds scattered around the city. While Creelman says those diamonds are acceptable as they are, they’re no "field of dreams."

"A lot of the parks have crushed rock [pathways]; you just can’t get a wheelchair through that," she says.

"When the [four-diamond complex] is paved, they’ll have access to the whole park. For some of the kids, that will be the first time they’ve been allowed to go to the concession on their own. That’s a pretty small thing to some kids, but it’s a pretty big thing to a lot of our kids."

She says just getting into the park can sometimes be an issue.

"There’s a lot of parents that basically have to carry their child to a ballpark because of all the crushed rock," she says. "That’s a little embarrassing sometimes for the child."

The dream has been six years in the making for Nechako Little League, the organization responsible for kids’ baseball in the area of Prince George known locally as the Hart.

In 1994, as they were gearing up to host the Canadian Little League Championships two years later, Nechako faced a spike in registrations. President Audrey Foster says that was when the original plans for the complex began to take shape.

The uniqueness of the facility, however, was formed over the next few years. Constructing a fully wheelchair-accessible field was not the original $650,000 plan. In 1995, Foster was doing some research at the Canadian Little League championships in Perth, Ontario, where she saw a Challenger game being played. She brought back some information on the program and it was launched for the first time in Prince George in 1997.

Around that time, as Foster tells it, since they were already building a baseball complex, they decided to make it accessible to anyone who wanted to use it.

"I would think by the time we’re finished, it will [cost] closer to a million dollars," Foster explains, "because we’ve added things. The elevator itself is going to be $35,000. The dugouts were $8,000 apiece and they would have been $5,000 if we had gone with a regular dugout."

Despite the added cost -- the project was paid for through fundraising, casinos, donations and volunteer labour -- Foster is obviously proud of the results.

"We have score booths that can accommodate a wheelchair if we have an adult in a wheelchair wanting to keep score," she says. "The countertop for the score booth is situated so a wheelchair can fit underneath it. We have a washroom upstairs that can be used as an umpire’s change room. It’s big enough that we could have four wheelchairs in there [one for each umpire], easy."

But she says it’s still a work in progress. Four dugouts are still being completed, and there’s still the not-so-small matters of paving and the elevator.

Once it’s done, Foster says, they’re going to show it off to anyone who wants to see.

"Hopefully one year we’ll have a Challenger jamboree where we can invite teams from across the country," Foster says, "and they can
travel here and have a real old-fashioned good time." Creelman says she’s already had other Challenger leagues express interest in such an event. "It’s fairly close to reality," Creelman says. "If the park is finished next year, I could see it happening next year. We’ve even had interest in teams coming out to play on our existing fields."

Near the end of the movie "Field of Dreams," Ray Liotta’s character asks Kevin Costner’s character: "Is this Heaven?"

If Heaven’s a place where there are no problems with accessibility and there’s a reasonably high level of independence, then Shawn Creelman might be willing to argue that Heaven has just located to Prince George.

"To be able to see the kids have freedom like that," she says, "that’s pretty impressive."

LITTLE LEAGUE’S CHALLENGER PROGRAM

With a slowly growing national program, baseball is available to kids with disabilities.

Under the Challenger program -- an arm of Little League Canada -- players are offered whatever assistance they need to play the game.

Shawn Creelman, who heads up the Challenger program in Prince George, B.C., has a son with autism playing the game.

"After three years, he hits the ball independently and runs the bases independently," she says. "We’ve seen a lot of improvement in a lot of kids."

The Challenger program breaks down barriers, she says.

"There’s a few kids that might be in a wheelchair, but they like baseball, they know baseball. With just a minor bit of assistance, even something like picking the ball up off the ground and giving it to them, then they are perfectly capable of playing the game all on their own."

In many cases, players are paired with a "baseball buddy," an able-bodied player their age, a parent, a friend or a sibling. The baseball buddies are there to offer whatever assistance is needed.

"There are some teams that we have that are higher-functioning," Creelman says. "So there’ll be three or four kids out there playing independently, with another player standing off to the side as backup."

The Challenger program has not hit every community in Canada. Creelman says Prince George’s was the seventh league when it was
founded in 1997.

For more information about the Challenger program, contact Little League Canada, (613) 731-3301; e-mail: canada@littleleague.org;
or check out the website: www.littleleague.ca.

(Tim Renneberg is a freelance writer living in Prince George, B.C.)