News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Monterey High School will be getting new scoreboards for its baseball and softball fields, with installation planned before the season.
The new scoreboards will be purple and outlined in white with decorative toppers representing the two sports. Athletic Director Ben Novak said the high school received funding from the Putnam County School System to improve its athletic facilities.
“The scoreboards for baseball and softball, they’re just at the top of the list,” Novak said. “There’s been a lot of issues we’ve had just mechanically in the past. The scoreboards are fairly old. They were original to the previous building that had since been demolished. So it’s time to update.”
Novak said the new scoreboards will cost about $25,000.
“The scoreboards that baseball and softball had, again, were original to the previous building, so there long before my time here at Monterey,” Novak said. “So they sat unused for about five or six years while the new building was built.”
Novak said the scoreboards will have several new features including a digital name display that will show who is playing on the field. He said they are expected to be installed by the second week of March.
“I just signed off on the designs at the beginning of December and they look fantastic,” Novak said.
Novak said the county was able to pay for the scoreboards due to an agreement with Cookeville Regional that allows Putnam County schools to access athletic trainers through the hospital at a much cheaper rate.
“Athletic teams, they do a lot of fundraising,” Novak said. “You know, gate money that comes in from games. But a lot of that is spent on cost of referees and officials, maintenance of fields or courts, new uniforms every few years for students. So there’s not really a great opportunity to have a large, I guess, pot of money that we can make some of these vast improvements with. So this money allows us as schools with a team, with a committee, to make certain purchases allocated towards those athletic teams.”
With the season approaching, Novak said the new feature much needed.
“It’s one of those things where use over time, those are things you have to maintain and keep up, and those scoreboards were just to a point where we were having too many issues, just light bulbs going out, power issues, things like that. So it was time to, time to update, time to upgrade.”
