I was down in Chillicothe a couple weeks ago and went over to the V.A. Memorial Stadium. I got a tour of the facility, met with some of the stadium personnel and talked with some of the players for the Paints.
All in all, it’s a decent little facility for the MAC Tournament. While it was obviously an advantage for the #1 seed to host the event, it’ll be nice to move to a neutral site like the MAC has done in some other sports.
This was my first trip to Chillicothe. It’s sort of a remote place. While it’s actually a bigger town that I expected it to be, it’s also a little more isolated than I expected it to be as well. As for the stadium itself, it sits off the beaten path a little bit. After leaving town, you passing by the Chillicothe Correctional Facility (thought I got lost) before you eventually come to a golf course and the road for the stadium. The road up to the facility is a nice mature tree-lined road up a hill that runs to the hospital. The stadium is right near it, but it’s pretty much surrounded by trees which gives it a nice setting. There’s even a nice view of the start of the southern Ohio foothills over the right field corner. The grandstand itself is pretty weathered and dated. It has a worn brick facade with a wooden roof canopy that covers the seating area that has seen better days. The pressbox is a glorified plywood box with windows atop of the seating, but they were actually doing some work on it while I was there. It looked like they were adding new windows and actually building an extension to the existing pressbox.
The grandstand seats are wooden bleachers with bleacher-back seats in the bottom half. There are some aluminum bleachers down the lines just beyond the dugouts that are out from under the cover of the grandstand roof. The entire playing field is FieldTurf. And when I say entire playing field, I mean the whole thing. The field, base paths, pitchers mound, batters box and warning tracks, it’s all turf. The base paths, warning track, pitchers mound and batters box are a reddish-colored turf that looks like dirt from a distance. The warning track actually has some cinder mixed into the turf so when you’re tracking a ball, you can actually feel and hear the footing change which was cool. I thought the field was great and the players I talked to said nearly all the position players and pitchers actually preferred it over the old grass they replaced it with. There’s a party deck in the left field corner and a bunch of picnic benches down the left field line including a small pavilion over there. It all sits under some trees. The scoreboard was a mix of old and new, with digital bulbs for the scoreboard and it looks like they change the inning runs by hand as there was a wooden platform that leads to that part of the scoreboard. Like any minor league facility, the outfield wall is plastered with ads.
I think the actual venue will be fine for the event. The first question I thought of after seeing the place in person and without seeing how the event actually does here is how many people will attend the event. Many of the MAC Tournament games I’ve attended have been small to decent-sized crowds, and that was on campus sites and usually relatively close to a few of the other participating schools. This site will clearly give Ohio the best “advantage” of any other team playing in the event (if OU makes it) for several reasons, the first being it’s by far the closest school to the venue, and second, Ohio has already played in the facility a half dozen times this year (four times vs. Purdue and once vs. Cincinnati and Ohio Wesleyan). From what I was told, OU coach Joe Carbone has a very good relationship with some of the Paints staff. But, I was also told the community does a good job supporting the Paints and from what I gathered, the vibe was they felt the community would be coming out to support the MAC Tournament as well. So while it might be harder for some people to make the trek there, there could actually be a better turnout through the community compared to what on campus sites tend to attract. I was told by some personnel there they were going to do as good of a job as possible hosting the event and they want it to remain there for future years.
I took a bunch of pictures of the facility, even some from right on the field. If anyone is interested in any images, send me a PM with your email and I can send some to you.
