Jacob Minter
Reporting I Student
The Butler Community College softball team is more than just an ordinary junior college softball team.
Just on their home page on the Butler Athletics website, their exclusiveness shows. Headlines scroll across the page listing all sorts of different achievements and stories just from the past year.
Despite many of these accomplishments, the Butler softball team does not have a field on campus for the team to practice and host games on and off season. They play games and practice at East Park in El Dorado.
Head Coach Doug Chance and Assistant Coach Zack Sigler made improvements to the field, BCTV station manager Matt Jacobs, by improving the playing surface, dugouts, audience seating and warmup areas. Jacobs used to be assistant athletic director at Butler.
“We built two different temporary press boxes, the second of which I was pretty proud of,” Jacobs said.
The field also had money donated by The Jacobs Fund, an athletics fundraising source, to install a sound system, Jacobs said. While many improvements have been made, the current field has problems.
“I think the biggest issue with the current field is lack of a locker room and the condition of the public restrooms,” Jacobs said.
Chance is also familiar with the problems that come from Butler Community College not having its own field on campus.
“We can’t limit the number of people that get on the field,” Chance said. “A lot of times we’ll leave the field in good condition and come back, and it’s tore up.”
Not only can it hinder practice by having a field that is hard to play on, but it also limits the player’s potential.
“It would be nice if we had a field on campus that our players could go out to the batting cage on the field and hit or take ground balls,” Chance said. “It would be right here.”
The only talks that he has heard about a potential field was in a project plan at a school-wide meeting, according to Chance.
With Coach Chance alone, who is starting his 16th season, the softball record is outstanding. As a coach, Chance has an amazing .803 winning percentage and 660-162 record.
The team has been to 11 conference championships since 2006, had nine JUCO World Series appearances since that year and they have been in the top 10 ranking eight times since 2006. Chance has coach 26 All-Americans in the past 15 seasons.
The team won nationals in 2016 and 2017 and placed third in nationals in 2018. Twenty-four players were named All-American Scholar-Athletes. This is a ranking of the players based on their grades in college. The entire team was ranked second in the nation with a GPA of 3.650 during the 2018-2019 academic year.
Jordan Carlson, a former Butler Grizzly, donated a kidney to the father of softball player Meghan Gutierrez over the summer.
The Grizzly softball team even sends many of its players to Division 1 and Division 2 colleges. Just in the 2019 season, the team had three players sign with NCAA Division 1 schools like Syracuse, Liberty and UMKC. Six players signed with NCAA Division 2 schools like Pittsburg State, Midwestern State and Oklahoma Christian.
While Butler may not have an on-campus softball stadium, Associate Athletic Director Tyler Nordman said, Butler’s athletic facilities are on the upper end. Butler boasts things like the long-time McDonald Stadium baseball field or the $12 million BG Products Veterans Sports Complex football stadium. There are currently no talks of building a new softball field on campus that Nordman has heard from reliable sources.
The problem with building a softball field is the cost and trying to get support from different groups of people, Nordman said. Butler has a large athletic program, but the college also has to contribute to its other sports and many other academic programs that it offers to students. According to Nordman, colleges have to prioritize their spending for the entire school while trying to provide a good experience for coaches and athletes.
Though Butler has good athletics programs compared to other community colleges in the area, there is always room to expand.
“I would love to continue to build and grow not only softball, but all of our sports programs,” Nordman said.
Athletics facilities are especially a significant part of these programs. In order to stay competitive with other schools, Butler needs to stay on the cutting edge, Nordman said. He also explained that athletics is a race between facilities amongst colleges.
There is one clear advantage to adding a softball field to the Butler campus besides just being closer to campus.
“[It would] give you a leg up in recruiting when students visit campus and see a beautiful field on our beautiful campus and know that they have something of their own,” Nordman said.
Smaller towns experience sharing facilities frequently. USD 490, the El Dorado school district, Butler and the City of El Dorado even share the BG Products Veterans Sports Complex, according to the 2018-2019 Annual Report on the sports complex.
In junior college athletics, there are very limited funds to spread across many sports and programs which leads to having to share facilities.
“There are no programs that actually make money, unless you’re a Division 1 in a Power Five conference getting TV contracts, you’re not making money,” Chance said.
Even without a field on campus, the Butler Community College softball team does a great job bringing recognition to the college by going to nationals and receiving other awards. With that, they are able to send students on the larger four-year universities that can use their basketball and football revenue to supplement their other sports.