EAST BRUNSWICK — The baseball field on the East Brunswick campus of the Middlesex County Vocational and Technical Schools (MCVTS) has been named Field of the Year in New Jersey by a field managers’ group.
The field, renamed earlier this year to honor the late MCVTS Athletic Director Raymond Cipperly, was honored by the Sports Field Managers Association, which also gave honorable mention to the fields on the MCVTS Piscataway and Perth Amboy campuses.
The awards were accepted by MCVTS Grounds Foreman Ryan Radcliffe on Dec. 7 at the New Jersey Turf and Landscape Expo in Atlantic City, according to a statement prepared by MCVTS.
The group praised the East Brunswick field as an “exemplary contribution to improving the safety, playability and appearance of sports fields.”
“All three of our fields are top-notch compared to a lot of high schools and even colleges,” said Radcliffe, a Spotswood resident who has been with the district for three years after working for the Lakewood Blue Claws professional baseball team for 10 years. “I’d put our field up against Princeton and Rutgers.”
“I am extremely privileged to have a grounds crew that is capable of maintaining an award-winning baseball field like Cipperly Field,” said Michael Pede, MCVTS director of athletics, health and physical education. “There is so much behind-the-scenes work that is involved in a baseball field. Ryan Radcliffe and his crew do an outstanding job.”
Pede pointed out that the Middlesex County baseball championship will be played at Cipperly Field in May.
The fields were constructed during the tenure of Cipperly, a Monroe resident who died in 2015 at the age of 66. He was an MCVTS employee for 45 years, starting as a physical education teacher and varsity baseball coach in East Brunswick and then serving as athletic director for the district for almost 20 years. He also was the head groundskeeper for the Somerset Patriots professional baseball team from 1999 to 2010, according to the statement.
For more information, visit www.mcvts.net.