80-Yard Football Field In Bronx Renovated…Now Is Still 80 Yards

June 17, 2011 / Football

For decades it has been an inconvenience bordering on embarrassment. Herbert H. Lehman High School, with an enrollment of more than 4,000 students in the Bronx, has never played a home football game simply because its field, at 80 yards, is too short for regulation contests.

The result, over the years, has been extra travel for student-athletes — the team plays all of its games on the fields of other schools — and an understandable difficulty in building school spirit and support.

An end to the problem seemed to be at hand several years ago when the New York City Department of Education granted the financing for renovations of athletic facilities at a number of high schools, including what would become nearly $5 million to overhaul Lehman’s multipurpose athletic complex.

When the work is done — the renovations began in earnest last fall and are set to be finished this September — there will be new bleachers for fans, lights for night games, a new artificial turf field and the school’s first new softball diamond.

But there is a hitch: the refurbished multipurpose field will remain 80 yards long, 20 yards shy of full size. And so, 38 years after Lehman first began its football program, there will still be no such thing as a home game. Same for the soccer and lacrosse teams.

Officials with the city agency in charge of the renovation insist they have an explanation: to expand the field to regulation length, they would have had to buy land adjacent to the school property, land that was apparently owned by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

A spokeswoman for the Corps said she had little idea what the city was talking about. The Corps owns no land near the high school, she said. The Corps had sent a letter to school construction officials in November telling them as much.

Meanwhile, the football coaches, players and parents at Lehman are furious, and have been working with lawyers in a last-ditch effort to have the city alter the renovation plans, with the possibility that they will file a lawsuit in the next week.

“I’m really shocked that they would really say, ‘All right, we gave them $5 million to redo their field and there’s absolutely no way any of that money can be used to make sure that every sports team can use the field,’ ” said Michael Saunds, the coach of Lehman’s football team. “That’s shocking.”

Lehman’s football program has traditionally been among the city’s elite. It has sent players to a number of Division I colleges. Some of its alumni have made it to the N.F.L. One of them, Doug Marrone, is the football coach at Syracuse University.

But Marrone and the thousands of other young men who suited up for Lehman never played a home game in a Lions uniform. Their field was big enough to practice on; it was big enough to accommodate the baseball team; but it could not host a regulation football game.

“It’s hard to explain the feeling of having your own home,” Saunds said. “You have a sense of people have to come to you. Your fans are able to know you’re in one central location. Kids in the neighborhood can look at the field and say, ‘I want to play there; I want to play for a Lehman team.’ ”

Instead, year in and year out, administrators have had to scramble to find a field to book Lehman’s “home” games. In recent years, the football team played those games at DeWitt Clinton High School, a Bronx rival. But last season Clinton’s field underwent renovations, and Lehman played at Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, also in the Bronx.

Neither school is exactly nearby. The notion of home-field advantage was a pipe dream. And the costs were not insignificant: the extra bus rides cost money, all of which the team and school must pay for, according to the school’s athletic director, Diane Hamilton.

It seemed that the problem would be addressed about seven years ago, when the city’s education department granted financing for renovations of athletic facilities at Lehman. Lehman representatives said finding a way to incorporate a regulation field was always part of the plan.

The city, according to Hamilton, pledged to investigate how a regulation field could fit on school property.

According to documents, the city contracted with Blumberg & Butter, P.C., an architectural firm in Manhattan, to draw up a blueprint for the work. Minutes of a meeting the firm held with school officials and a representative of the agency in charge of the project — the School Construction Authority — showed the issue was front and center in December 2007.

“At present, there are several areas adjacent to the field which might be available to expand the existing field,” the minutes show.

But a spokeswoman for the Department of Education would not say whether the city investigated the adjacent land or learned how much it might cost to purchase.

Instead, the spokeswoman, Marge Feinberg, insisted the land belonged to the Army Corps of Engineers, and said that had been made clear to school officials years ago.

“The S.C.A. had reached out to the Army Corp prior to start of the rehabilitation plans for the field,” Feinberg wrote. “The adjacent property is under the Army Corp’s control. The Lehman High School Field had been a practice field and is being renovated as a practice field. The current rehabilitation project is in construction.”

Saunds, the Lehman coach, said he, parents and players contacted elected officials to enlist their support beginning in July 2010. Saunds met with State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, a Bronx Democrat.

Klein’s office researched the situation and, to the surprise of Lehman officials, found that the Corps no longer owned the land around Lehman, if it ever did, and certainly had no interest in it.

Saunds took the information to Lorraine Grillo, then the acting president and chief executive of the School Construction Authority. But Grillo, according to Saunds, sent a letter stating that money was not available to acquire any additional land or rethink the plan. The letter went on to state that “a considerable amount of time would be needed to evaluate and negotiate the acquisition of additional property.”

Less than a month later, the Army Corps of Engineers sought to clarify the situation for the city. Noreen Dresser, the New York district chief of real estate for the Corps, sent a letter to the school construction authority project officer Norberto Negron confirming that the Army Corps of Engineers “did not own land on Herbert H. Lehman’s property.”

Dresser, interviewed this week, reiterated that the Army Corps of Engineers did not own land on or near the high school’s property.

“We don’t own property out there,” Dresser said in a telephone interview. “I don’t know how that got out there. Have the city call me because it’s news to me.”


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