Camp Hill High School Revitalizes Sports Facilities

CAMP HILL, Pa. — Students, fans and patrons of Camp Hill High School’s sports programs have spent decades rooting for their team within the confines of an outdated stadium with cracked stands, sagging bleachers and sub-par on-field conditions. As a result, the school’s tennis and track and field athletes have long competed on the road or off site, while its football team held halftime meetings on the pool deck rather than in the aging field house, which was designed and built in 1940.

However, the school recently celebrated the first anniversary of its new Christian L. Siebert Park. The school’s new home field reopened in fall 2014 after a $4.7 million facelift ,which included a new artificial turf field, home stadium seating stretching nearly the entire length of the field, an indoor team room, public restrooms and a field house able to accommodate two football teams. New tennis courts, a six-lane track and a softball field also rounded out the overhaul.

“This was an extremely exciting and important project that took nearly three years for Camp Hill to put together,” said Bob Royer of Lemoyne, Pa.-based KS Heagy Contractors Inc., the project’s builder. “This was a much-needed and significant expenditure for a community with a great sense of pride and deep loyalty to its high school sports teams.”

Royer also noted that every dollar had to be maximized. “The specification process had to ensure not only the best value, but also the long-lasting durability of all the products,” he added. “No one expects to go another 75 years before an upgrade, although a decade or two would really help the local budget.”

One of the most significant morale-boosting upgrades to the athletic programs was to the facility’s locker and meeting rooms. Scranton Products, a Scranton, Pa.-based manufacturer of partitions and lockers made with high-density polyethylene (HDPE), supplied all-new bathroom partitions, lockers and athletic storage cubbies. The company worked directly with the project’s contractors and architects to produce the customized, low-maintenance athletic cubbies for the facility’s home and visiting team locker rooms.

In addition, the company also supplied partitions for several of the new restrooms as well as lockers for referee changing rooms. Given the high-impact requirements of the application, the school opted for the non-porous, HDPE surface Hiny Hiders partitions, which are naturally resistant to odors, mold and mildew.

Careful material selection also helped decrease certain health risks, as the HDPE partitions and lockers are resistant to certain strains of bacteria. Gym lockers tend to be dark, moist environments and can serve as an ideal breeding ground for staph infections and new strains of MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium that typically causes skin infections. The Greenguard Gold-certified Tufftec gym lockers were independently tested, and results showed that, after 24 hours, 98.4 percent of the MRSA bacterial died off the surface of HDPE plastic without the use of any cleaning solutions, according to David Casal, national director of sales and marketing for the Scranton Products.