As we approach the Annual Sidney Town Meeting (March 28th at 9:00am at the James H Bean School!) we would like provide an update on our most recent 2025 results as well as lay out what our plans for 2026 (and beyond!) are. The following is a detailed version of the same presentation we gave to both the Select Board in January and the Select Board/Budget Committee in February. But enough of the preamble – let’s get on with it!
As some of you may know (or may be learning for the first time!) our annual budget proposal is split into two categories – the “Field Committee budget” which is responsible for maintenance and upgrades to the fields, and the “Program budget” which is what we use to actually run the various sports and programs that we offer throughout the year!
We begin by focusing on our Field Committee Budget. We call this the Field “Committee” budget because it is made up of both the SAA and the Select Board. While a typical budget request for us focuses heavily (read solely) on maintenance of the fields, this year we added a second request to address a major pain point. We will however ignore this particular thorn in our side for now as we buttered up-I mean began our presentation to the committees by pointing out what IS working – or what we called “The Good!”
To explain – We place an RFP out annually (around October) for mowing contracts for the facility and this past year our fields were maintained very well! While we received several really good proposals this year we recommended to the Select Board to renew the contract with our existing vendor and they agreed, so we expect that mowing this year to be more of the same (height grass that is!)
We also had a MAJOR influx in kids (more on that below!) which has strained our equipment storage capacity harder than my belt after I gave up on my new years resolution. So as a group we decided to add another notch and voted to purchase a storage container (pictured below) to cram even more stuff into! This was installed last fall near the back of pit four and we have already filled it with the new nets we purchased for our younger soccer teams, the portable baseball mound from pit one, and our world-class batting cage shown casually in the foreground. During our discussion we heavily debated about how we want to “dress it up” so the local hooligans don’t do it for us, so if you know anyone who’d be interested in giving our container a face-lift please let us know! Mural-izing this container would be an excellent opportunity for any highschool art student needing volunteer hours, or a we’d be happy to work with a local artist who would like a fun project to showcase themselves!
Finally we graciously accepted F.W. Webb’s charity in the form of a Blackstone griddle and are in the process of building an extension off the back of the existing Snack Shack to hold it. This along with the addition of a vent hood to bring us up to code with our favorite Fire Chief (no really Richard is great and also on our board!) will be up and running as we head into our spring sports. So please bring your child’s appetites and your wallets to practice!
Now that we warmed ourselves up and had the committees on our good side it was nigh time to shoot ourselves in the foot! So we strayed away from that warm and fuzzy feeling good times give us and decided to dive into our pain head first. And we started with our biggest pain of all:
Many of you likely have at least some first-hand experience with the pain that is parking at the town fields on any given Saturday, Sunday, tournament day, fishing derby day, middle of January day (ok maybe that last one is because Recreation Drive isn’t plowed…) but for those of you who may not be aware of this issue the images above are taken during various weekends we had either SAA recreational events or rented out our fields to external organizations. The keen eye will note the placement of several “No Parking” signs that were ignored, the barn at the top of the hill which belongs to a private party and is not town land (a BIG no-no), and cars parking down West River Road. This last one is extremely dangerous given the corner leading up to our fields and is a major public safety concern we would like to address as soon as possible!
As such, in addition to the $18,057 we requested as our annual field maintenance budget from the town we have requested another $25,000 for general parking improvements as seen below.
This is an initial request and is meant to help us alleviate the immediate pain points of cars parking along the firelane on Recreation Drive, the private property next to town land, and on West River Road. We intend to use this funding to create a curb cut (driveway) off of recreation drive into the upper field and measure/mark out spaces. This is 1,000,000% a short-term solution and the hope is that it will get us through at least this year and maybe the next few depending on our progress towards our overall fields master plan and our ability to attract funding.
But this to me is where the FUN comes in! In addition to our short-term goal, we are also working diligently to plan for a much bigger project which will take care of this issue once and for all. While we have several angles we are viewing this at, the biggest one we are presently researching is to improve the upper field to an actual paved lot with as many spaces as we determine we will need.
This map gives a rough outline of the space that we are considering improving for a parking lot. While it likely would not be necessary to utilize this entire space, even if we only used ~80,000 square feet of it we would minimally be increasing our parking capacity by 200+ spaces, or just enough to ensure you still have to park off to the side on the dirt when your baby decides the last one into the car on the way to soccer practice has to blow out in their diaper.
But two-car trips with 30 minute delays aside, one important point we’d like to make here is the SAA is really only looking for town funding to support our short-term goal of relieving the immediate parking pressure that exists; and are looking to develop, fund, and build out the larger plan with minimal (or NO) town assistance. We are already exploring grant opportunities that we could apply for once we have the basic research done to outline specifically what we will need.
Further, we are going to including this larger plan into a MUCH larger 5 to 10 year “Facilities Master Plan” which will include MANY other ideas that board and community members have proposed to us over the last few years.
Another fun one – depending on the grade of the hill on both the outlined parking lot above and the orange rectangle below (YES still town land!) we may have the potential to make improvements to add more programs to the SAA’s offerings! We of course need to research these parcels and weigh our options, but once we determine how much of this space is actually usable we will determine what additional offerings we could potentially add. At that point we’ll request some public input to see what you all think! We’re game to hear your ideas – but to get the juices flowing I know mine is to build a fenced in set of tennis courts with basketball, pickleball, and lights with a couple of parking spaces next to it. But the sky is the limit! The size of the parcel below is also large enough to hold a full-sized soccer field. Just saying!
As you can see we are very much an organization with our “heads in the clouds”, and along with the parking improvements we desperately need we are looking harder at researching and funding a couple of other “low hanging fruit” enhancements in the short term. These are adding a playground and adding lights to our current fields. Similar to the much larger parking project we are looking to research and fund these entirely ourselves with no assistance required from the town other than approval.
We’ll start with the playground as this is more of a “need” than a “want’. As our town grows in population and we bring more and more young family’s in (Children from 5-19 account for 17% of our town’s population per the most recent census , and I personally have two kids under 5!) we are finding that many of these family’s have one kid playing sports at a time and one which is running around our facility playing with their friends. While parent’s are typically doing a great job watching them, some of their older children can be quite (let’s say adventurous) and demonstrate their prowess at pushing boundaries (of both our fields and their parent’s patience!). As such we have at times needed to herd kids away from the giant hill, request they come down from exploring the top of our existing very tall swingset (how old is that thing anyways?!), or even ask them to not go down the state boat ramp (eeek). We believe that providing kids with a “magnet” would draw them to a centralized location and like a moth to a flame would go a long way towards keeping them entertained and social but in a much safer environment (ok maybe not like a moth to a flame). One bit of great news here is we even have some precedence in that the town of Oakland recently added a playground to their sports fields and those who have children who play sports there have relayed finding it a helpful tool for keeping family’s children entertained while they enjoy their other children’s athletics. That said nobody can seem to tell me where it came from, how much it was, or even how they got it! So if ANYONE reading this has any information I would be forever grateful!
THIS is why we are proposing adding a playground to the facility. There are plenty of grants for this type of request out there and we are actively researching what specific structure(s) we want to add. Like my son with his skeleton toy we are even looking at options of adding “piecemeal” to an overall playground if it gives our children something to keep them occupied in the short term while building out capacity over the next few years. Either way, we are not expecting the town to fund this as this is very much an SAA project, and one which we think would benefit children for decades to come!
Next we move on to the darkest topic we covered during our meetings – Night
Night is super cold
It is very hard to see
cause it’s without light
~Poem not actually given during our presentation
For those of you with children who play SAA sports in early spring or late fall, it will come as little shock to you that the sun does indeed have a pretty big influence over our schedule. Too much of an influence if you ask me and I, for one, am glad that the SAA is taking a stand to do something about the sun ditching us to play with the rest of the world at critical times during our sporting events. We need, nay we DESERVE the right to play whenever we want (within sound ordinances) regardless of whether or not the big fireball in the sky deems us worthy of its divine rays.
As such the board has added researching lighting equipment and potential funding sources to bring lights to at least one if not all three (if the stars align – sorry not sorry) of our ballfields over the next few years. To quote a boring accountant using a boring accounting term (no it was NOT me) “we believe lights could be a very useful asset to our facility”.
With the massive influx of children (more on that later!) and the daylight constraints in early spring and late fall we find that having the ability to at least put SOME lights on the fields would go a long way to extending our playtime into our darkest hours. This does not only need to be a benefit to our recreational sports however as our field rental customers have been pressing us to add lights to our facilities for years, stating that they could bring in more teams, tournaments, and extend THEIR play times.
I’m also personally excited about the potential to add adult recreational leagues so I can laugh at my neigh-I mean so that we can get even more of our town out and playing!
As such by adding lights we have an opportunity to increase our field rental revenue from several angles, potentially allowing us to offset future program funding from the town or lower the costs of participation for our youth in recreational sports!
* Here we broke for a Q&A regarding our field committee budget to much rejoicing and applause!
Ok easy now easy now – that’s enough – settle down now – oh no thank YOU – no really we don’t – oh how sweet! No YOU’RE the best! The key to the city? No really I think you should ha-
*ahem* Ok fine most of that didn’t happen, but YOU stay up all night with baby and then tell me what is real and what I fever-dreamed while bottle-feeding my 9 month old.
Moving on –
Next we presented our program budget. For those of you who have read this far – thanks for sticking with us! We know this is a bit of a book but we have a lot going on and want to share with you! For your reward you can find our contact information on this website so you can reach out and sign up with us to volunteer! You know you want to!
And as a reminder – the program budget is what we use to actually fund our various sports offerings. With that we began by highlighting some of the high points we had with our program in 2025!
As you can see from the slide above, we had 347 registrations (a RECORD!) for fiscal year 2025! This was comprised of 14 baseball/softball teams and (ANOTHER RECORD!) 17 soccer teams. Our soccer teams included (Do I need to say it? Yes I do – ANOTHER RECORD!!) 8 Pre-K/Kindergarten soccer teams this past fall! We also rented our fields for 6/10 of the summer weeks we do not have recreational sports, making the most of the facility we call home and adding to what was a banner year for the SAA indeed!
We further demonstrated our considerable youth sports growth by presenting the chart above, displaying that for 6 of the last 7 years (*cough* Covid *cough*) we grew, and since 2022 at an extremely fast rate! In fact, our membership has grown 170% since 2018 – and just like my belly since children – almost tripling in size!
Yet with (what has to be some kind of record! Anyone know the Guinness’?) growth also comes increased expenses (booooooo!). We offset some of these outlays with our town sponsorship, but our organization has ALSO increased our sponsorships and fundraising considerably the last few years, growing fundraising alone by 370% since 2022! Unfortunately these dollars do not come easily and are only thanks to all of the hard work and dedication put into our fundraising efforts by various members of the SAA board, volunteers such as the Fire Department during our annual events like the Spaghetti Dinner, and the many many many hours and contributions by many of you who are reading this post! We cannot overstate how thankful we are for all of your efforts and without your support we would not survive as an organization let alone thrive under all of this awesome growth!! THANK YOU!
Now that we were riding high on our own (*cough* record-breaking *cough*) success we decided it safe to offer our proposal to the Sidney Select board and budget committees. While we had a banner year in 2025 it was primarily due to some very aggressive fundraising efforts, and while we would LOVE to see that level of fundraising capacity again it is not something we are willing to consistently count on, and without sustained levels of fundraising from 2025, without town funding, and with increased inflation-driven expenses we found we would not break even for 2026. Thus we submitted the budget proposal outlined below.
This budget proposal calls for an $8,000 sponsorship from the town, giving us a buffer for increased or unexpected expenses. We are thankful to both committees for agreeing to propose this number at the town meeting, and as such would like to be fully transparent as to where that money is going. Town proposed and (hopefully voter approved!) funding will go towards these line-items, leaving our ultimate bottom-line and safety net in the place it always has been – the SAA fundraising efforts!
If you have made it this far – thank you for your commitment and interest in our organization! I promise that not all blog posts will be this long (this is the first in a while and covers quite a bit of subject matter) but I hope that you have found it educational and fun (something my students at the community college almost never say about my classes)! That said if you have any interest in learning more about our organization or have any questions for us about anything SAA related (not just this blog post) you can find our contact information under the “About” -> “Contact Us” menu on this page. We’d love to hear from you!
And to the whole point of this blog post – just because we have requested both $43,057 for our field committee and $8,000 for our program that doesn’t mean they have been approved by the town. We need dedicated citizens (such as yourself – really kudos to you for making it to the end!) to show up to the town meeting at the Bean School on March 28th at 9:00AM to make your voice heard!
Thank you for reading and it’s my pleasure to serve you as the Treasurer of the Sidney Athletic Association
– Brett Bisesti