Every so often a project comes along that the whole town ends up being proud of, and the Billy Hitchcock Miracle Field is one of them.
On January 12, 2009, I posted a handful of ribbon-cutting pictures from the new Miracle Field here in Opelika — a rubberized, barrier-free ball field built so kids and adults with disabilities could play baseball without a wheelchair getting stuck in the infield dirt. I confess I got stuck at work that week and missed the ceremony myself; Gary, John and Jan at the City sent me the photos so we could still tell the story.
Seventeen years later the field is still one of the best things we did. It carries the name of Billy Hitchcock, the Opelika native who played and managed in the majors and later ran the Southern League, and it turned into the anchor for a whole corner of the Sportsplex complex. What looked like a nice little ribbon cutting in 2009 has given a lot of families their only chance to sit in bleachers and watch their own kid round the bases.
Read the original January 12, 2009 post »
