Sartell's St. Cloud Orthopedics Field named best in state amidst improvements

SARTELL – The microbe health in St. Cloud Orthopedic Field’s soil is okay, but could be better.

That’s according to Brian Deyak, owner of Pro Fields which has managed turf and field work at the baseball diamond in Sartell’s Northside Park for nearly a decade. Soil microorganisms aside, St. Cloud Orthopedic Field won the most recent Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association's Tink Larson Field of the Year award.

“(St. Cloud Orthopedics Field) is definitely one of the jewels of our parks department, no question about it,” Parks Supervisor Tony Krueger said. “Several different teams call that their home base: certainly, the high school team but also the (Minnesota Amateur Baseball Association) Stone Poneys and Muskies and we also play VFW (Post 6992), Legion (Post 277) and the Sartell Baseball Association utilizes that field for some of their 14U games.”

In recent years there have been significant changes to what used to be known as Champion Field. In 2018, $550,000 was raised by the Central Park Association, the city of Sartell, the Sartell-St. Stephen School District, the Sartell Baseball Association and St. Cloud Orthopedics to add a new drainage system, build new light fixtures, add batting cages, bullpens and a scoreboard, and level the surface including dumping and grading several thousand cubic yards of soil.

Most recently, the Muskies and Stone Poneys raised money and secured material and labor donations to build a deck above the field’s third base dugout. The deck opened in the middle of the summer season.

In operation since 1981, the city took over the park in 2022 from the Pinecone Central Park Association. This year was the first time St. Cloud Orthopedics Field won the MSHSBCA's field of the year award but it was Deyak’s second – he won it for the St. Cloud Municipal Athletic Complex’s Dick Putz Field in 1993 while managing the MAC. Later that year Putz Field and Deyak won the National High School Baseball Coaches Association’s national field and groundskeeper of the year. He retired from the MAC in 2015 to create his own business.

Seven days a week during the summer, Deyak has in his head a list of upkeep tasks that need to be done day-to-day, month-to-month or seasonally all around Sartell’s parks. He’d like to trim the infield lip and aerate and dethatch grass on yearly basis, but most of his hours are spent mowing or managing an estimated 300 sprinkler zones.

“It takes a lot of knowledge, it takes a lot of specialized equipment that I have to make this work,” Deyak said. “I’m trying to maintain this more like Target Field than the local park and that doesn’t just magically happen.”

He said the science of turf management has changed “tremendously” over the past 40 years.

A St. Cloud Apollo High School and St. Cloud State graduate, Deyak started in 1983 at the MAC as a part-time groundskeeper. He didn’t think he’d be doing the job forever but enjoyed hockey and being outside around baseball during the summer. Now, it consumes more hours in a week than a full-time job, but Deyak takes pride in providing a safe surface and in hearing from athletes about the level of play. Receiving awards is another great feeling.

“I have a passion for maintaining natural turf athletic field to a high-level,” Deyak said.

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Besides St. Cloud Orthopedics Field, Pro Fields has worked on fields all around the St. Cloud area. It currently manages the athletic fields at Pinecone Central Park and the Sartell-St. Stephen School District’s baseball, softball, soccer/lacrosse and practice fields between Sartell High School and Oak Ridge Early Learning Center. The youth diamonds at Pinecone Central Park host baseball and softball tournaments in the ten summer weekends. Deyak said the Pinecone Central Park Association’s original vision was "to elevate the playing conditions at both fields to become destination fields.”

Contact reporter Reid Glenn at rglenn@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Sartell's St. Cloud Orthopedics Field named best in state amidst improvements