Longtime Sidney assistant football coach Terry Ward joined the Miami Valley Coaches Association’s Assistant Coach Hall of Fame on Thursday evening.
This fall will be Ward’s 42nd as an assistant. He worked for 11 years at Lehman Catholic before moving to his alma mater.
Ward was honored at the association’s induction ceremony, which took place at the Dayton Mall. The mall is hosting the association’s hall of fame display, which was originally at Welcome Stadium but was displaced due to ongoing renovations there.
The association has separate hall of fames for head coaches and assistants. Former Sidney coach Dave Haines was inducted into the association’s Head Coach Hall of Fame on Thursday.
The association started an Assistant Coach Hall of Fame in 2009, and former Sidney coach Dan Allen was a part of that inaugural class.
Southwest D-IV regional moves back to Springfield
The Southwest Division IV baseball regional is returning to Carleton Davidson Stadium in Springfield this June 1 and 2 after two years at Cincinnati Princeton High School.
It’s a welcome move, as it’s significantly closer than Princeton, which is only a few miles north of the Ohio River on Interstate 75.
The stadium is owned and operated by the city of Springfield’s parks and recreation department. It opened in 2004 and replaced the former Municipal Stadium, which was built on the site in the 1930’s as a WPA project.
I spent many summer nights at the old Municipal Stadium when growing up in Springfield. The place was literally falling apart by the time it was torn down; half the seating had been roped off due to one side being declared unsafe structurally. I remember the article on the stadium’s demolition in the Springfield News-Sun stating it took one swing of a wrecking ball to bring the entire thing crumbling down.
It’s commonly referred to as being owned by Wittenberg, which is inaccurate. Wittenberg has put forward money toward the upkeep of the field, and there is a university logo on the outside of the park, so the confusion is understandable.
Aside from hosting Wittenberg, the stadium now also hosts a summer collegiate baseball team, which has also put a lot of money into the complex. A new video scoreboard, the addition to chairback seats on bleachers and a warning track donated from the Cincinnati Reds are among recent upgrades.
The stadium opened in 2004 and hosted the Division II regional from 2006 to 2008. After Springfield Kenton Ridge earned state berths in 2007 and 2008 there in front of over-capacity crowds that were almost entirely their fans, the D-II regional was moved to a different site.
After one year without a regional, the OHSAA moved the Division IV regional from Wayne High School to Carleton Davidson Stadium in 2010, and it remained there until 2019.
A fiasco in 2019 led to the regional being moved away.
After heavy rains throughout the week, standing water in left field didn’t recede. Semifinals were postponed from Thursday to Friday initially.
On Friday, the semifinals were twice pushed back later in the day (with the second postponement calling for the second of the semis to start at 9 p.m.), but after over an hours’ worth of discussion amongst umpires, participants and host administrators in left field, the field was deemed unplayable.
The regional was moved to Coldwater’s Memorial Park and was played on Saturday and Sunday.
Princeton’s stadium is very nice. But the drive there from Shelby County isn’t as nice, and the amount of seating doesn’t match Carleton Davidson, which has seating for about 1,100, about half of which is covered. The parking situation is also a bit better than at Princeton, though you can still wind up having a long walk, especially if you arrive late.
Hopefully, the drainage issues have been fixed… or the rain will stay away this time.
Billing has been the sports editor of the Sidney Daily News since 2017. He can be reached at [email protected].
