Facelift for Everett Memorial

EVERETT – Everett Memorial Stadium will be a friendlier place this season – for both the fans and the players.

The Everett AquaSox’s home stadium went through some major renovations during the offseason, renovations that will benefit everyone involved.

Everett owner Mark Sperandio infused $135,000 to upgrade the Everett School District-owned stadium.

“My relationship with the Everett School District is the most important relationship I have,” Sperandio said of his reasons for funding the project. “It’s an area that we felt strongly about in that they didn’t have the money to fix it, because it doesn’t really benefit education and the budget is very tight for the school district. So we saw an opportunity to make the facility better, and because they own it, they benefit as well.”

For the fans, the main change concerns the seating behind home plate and the foul lines. One-thousand seats that were originally built in 1989 during a previous renovation, were replaced in the Diamond Club and field-box sections. The replacement of the seats did not change Everett’s seating capacity of 3,750.

“The brand new seats, I think a lot of fans will be pleased with that, and that will be our season-ticket holders and mini-plan holders,” Sperandio said. “Those are the seats they sit in and they’re going to be jazzed up and excited about that. We’ve already gotten a lot of great comments from a lot of our season-ticket holders who have gone out and seen their new seats.”

Also new for the fans will be a concessions menu that’s friendly to the current Adkins Diet craze, with the addition of several options low in carbohydrates.

As for the players, they’ll notice that the outfield grass does something different this year – it remains green instead of fading to a deathly brown.

Last summer, because of the two-month-long drought, the outfield grass received no rainfall. That in turn exposed faults in the sprinkler system, which the AquaSox fixed during the offseason, replacing several of the sprinkler heads and increasing the water pressure. The team also replaced 10,000 square feet of sod in the outfield – sod that was damaged the previous season by the water issues. Minor repairs also were made to the drainage system.

“The people who are excited about this are the Mariners, the Everett High School baseball program, the American Legion program, the community college program and the Everett Merchants program,” Sperandio said. “All the players are going to have a better playing surface than they did last year. And these are problems we’ve identified and will know how to fix if they come up again.”