The Winthrop High School girls softball team’s search for a field of its own may have come to an end, though its battle for equitable facilities and treatment persists.

After a fight spanning years, and especially the past few months, the team can now call Ingleside Park its home, complete with a team logo displayed on the diamond’s bleachers.

But Ingleside lacks locker and bathroom facilities for the girls, sufficient equipment storage space, and standard-size dugouts. Located in the center of Winthrop, Ingleside requires the softball players to get a car ride or to walk about 15 minutes from their school for practices and games. Ingleside also brings known flooding risks, especially during the team’s season in the spring.

Clear inequalities

The boys’ baseball field, directly alongside the high school building, scores better on all those measures.

“The inequalities – they are perceivable,” said Erin Vercruysse, the head coach of the softball team. “It’s not anything necessarily that isn’t out in the open.”

Yet she feels confident that the team will overcome the obstacles. “This is the first year I can start by saying ‘OK, we have a home,’” Ms Vercruysse said. “And that’s a really good feeling.”

A main source of her confidence is the fact that the Winthrop Foundation, funded by the Massachusetts Port Authority, awarded $81,500 to renovate the Ingleside field – a project that got a push forward from a Town Council meeting in April when the softball team members called attention to the persistent disparities in conditions between the girls’ and boys’ teams. The town also hired a maintenance person to give added attention to the chronic flooding at Ingleside – a problem renewed by the Nor’easter late last month.

Design suggestions

Some still feel less than optimistic. They include Brianna Rizzotto, a Winthrop High senior who represented the varsity team at the Town Council meeting and has advocated for gender equality in sports during her high school career. Addressing the council and its president, Jim Letterie, Ms Rizzotto described the team’s struggles as a violation of the federal Title IX law.

After that council meeting, Ms Rizzotto was assigned by her coach, Ms Vercruysse, to work with the Winthrop Parks and Recreation Department to design the new dugouts and storage facilities.

In that role, she put particular emphasis on the team’s need for storage. The players wanted a metal structure to protect their equipment from the weather, along with bat racks, helmet and softball bag hangers, and locking closets for storing equipment.

After she sent her recommendations to the parks department, Ms Rizzotto said the team was told that the high school’s athletic director would oversee the construction. And Ms Rizzotto said team members were then shocked to see open wooden structures with benches and a closet that’s approximately 4 feet by 4 feet.

Insufficient results

“That’s just frustrating, knowing that I was asked [for] my opinion and it wasn’t taken into account at all,” Ms Rizzotto said.

She said the team was told that a storage shed would be built to hold the large portable fence that they are required to use to mark their outfield.

“That in itself, with all of its posts, will probably take up all of the space in the storage shed, so no other equipment will be able to fit,” she said.

“So this is what $30,000 got us: some wooden structures that are not enclosed at all and some benches basically,” she added, referring to the portion of the grant awarded by the Winthrop Foundation that was used on the structures. “We just feel like we’re being overlooked by the contractors who are doing the dugouts,” she said.

Past comparisons

And the team continues to struggle to get information on the project, having been told that the work at Ingleside will not be completed until the next softball season approaches in the spring, Ms Rizzotto said.

“Now that the season’s been done with, we haven’t gotten any updates” on the town’s full plan for that work, she said. “What we see is not anything like what we wanted.”

Mr Letterie, in response to questions on the matter this past week, focused on the Ingleside field as representing an improvement from the softball team’s previous two locations at Fort Banks Playground, where it also had to install its own outfield fence each game, while sharing field space with soccer teams; and the town-owned softball-sized field near the high school, which the town makes primarily available to Little League teams.

“I always believe that there should be equity for boys and girls participating in the sport,” Mr Letterie said on the WCAT program Winthrop and the World. “I think that field is a huge upgrade to where they were,” he said of Ingleside.

No timeline

Mr Letterie said he still hopes the softball team will get proper locker and bathroom facilities in a future reconstruction of the existing complex alongside Ingleside park that houses the town’s hockey rink and a basketball court. But the Town Council president said he could offer no estimate or promise of when that work would be started or completed.

As for whether the girls’ softball team is satisfied with its circumstances, Mr Letterie answered: “Nobody has called me and complained about it.”

Despite the challenges it faces, Ms Rizzotto said, the team is encouraged by signs of support from town residents. After she gave her presentation to the town, she noticed some residents beginning to question the council’s lack of action, and urging the town to give the team a facility that meets their needs.

“They aren’t everything that we asked for, but not everything’s going to be perfect,” Ms Rizzotto added. “So we’re just grateful we’re getting something.”

This article is part of a partnership between the Winthrop Pilot and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program