Staff photo / Dan Hiner DeSalvo Field, the new home for the Liberty baseball team.

For the last decade and a half, the Liberty baseball team has gone without an on-campus home, but the Leopards will soon have their old stomping grounds back and better than ever.

The soon-to-be-known-as Joe DeSalvo Field is just about set for its first game on Tuesday against Brookfield.

Around a year ago, the process started to rehabilitate the old baseball field behind the township library. With help from the Mahoning Valley Spiders AA team, things started progressing quickly.

“Our team had been playing at the Liberty Township Park, and early last year it wasn’t ready to go,” Liberty athletic director Todd Smith said. “We ended up moving all of our games to Cene Park (in Struthers), and in the process, we said, ‘Well, what does the field on our property look like? We have this beautiful space. How much would it take to get it up and running again?’ Really, the skeleton was there. It was a good skeleton. It was a nice, flat field. Our maintenance guys are fantastic. They raked the old infield out, they put a nail drag down and drug the base paths. And really it wasn’t too bad.

At that point, there was a possibility that a AA team was looking for a field a few years ago and wanted our field, but it kind of fell through, so I reached out to Jason Kidd of the Mahoning Valley Spiders, (and he agreed to help fund the infield.) Once that was done, we started thinking about ways we could partner with somebody to get dugouts. And Joe DeSalvo is a graduate of Liberty. He owns a very reputable commercial construction company in Liberty, and he didn’t even hesitate. He’s been extremely gracious, extremely generous in giving back to his alma mater, a place that he’s in the Hall of Fame. And now, we will have a field that hopefully people know by DeSalvo Field, not just Liberty’s baseball field.”

While the weather has been a hindrance for teams to get out on the field, it’s actually helped buy time for construction to wrap up.

“They broke ground March 4 on the dugouts, and we’re talking about playing baseball April 15. I think that’s pretty impressive, given the fact that we’ve had so much rain,” Smith said. “It hurt us in terms of we had to cancel a lot of games, but it kind of helped us in that it bought us time before we had to play our first game on it.”

Liberty has been especially hamstrung by the weather, playing in just one game so far.

Leopards coach Charles Russell and the team are looking forward to not only getting out there to play ball, but to have a place to call home. On the same ground that Russell played on in the early 90s for the Leopards.

“It’s an exciting time,” he said. “Over the last three years, we’ve kind of been road warriors, so it’s nice to have somewhere where we can just plant our feet and say, ‘This is our field.’ It’s exciting, and as an alum, it’s always wonderful, coming back to your stomping grounds, and trying to lead the students that are there now, and not just make them better baseball players, but try to make them better people all around.”

Even though the new field sits on the old location, this is more than just bringing the old field back to life. Liberty has a vision to continue developing the park that extends beyond this season, including raising the left-field wall.

“We’re gonna make some other renovations here in the next couple years,” Russell said. “We’re gonna build up the left-field wall and kind of make it a staple of the field, something to look forward to playing. We’re going to raise it up another 10 feet is the plan and just give it a new look from what was there before, and give us something to be excited about. When other teams come here, they can say, ‘Hey, we’re going to play Liberty. They’ve got that cool left-field wall.’ I think it’s going to be an experience of the past coming and meeting with some new stuff, because the field is gonna have a different look to it, with the new dugouts and different other things that are gonna go on.”

Tuesday’s game against Brookfield is set for a 5 p.m. first pitch. Before the game, a small ceremony will be held to thank everyone involved in the field’s construction.