Our Town: Gates’ keeper

By Mark Dittmer
Sports Editor
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 1:37 PM PDT

It sits at the northwest corner of the San Marin High School campus. It is just a field, but yet to those who have seen it grow from an idea into a reality, it is more than that.

It is the only lighted softball field in Marin County, and its construction was funded almost entirely by donations made by the community. For those throughout the county who have their own ideas about building new and better sports complexes, it stands as a model. And as proof that it can be done.

The photos fill nearly three albums, stored together at the Spilman household. Taken together, they help tell the story of a field that Jim Spilman helped build.

The construction of a softball field is not often memorialized in such detail. But then San Marin High School’s Gary Gates Field isn’t just another softball field. Especially not for Spilman.

The building of the softball field has been a community effort, and Spilman has been at the center of that effort from the beginning. The result has been the construction of one of the finest softball fields in the Bay Area.

“He’s been the driving force for all these years,” said Randy Willis, who himself has been the San Marin High softball coach since 1997. “Getting Rotary behind it, spreading the word and getting local merchants behind it. Now, if you go to most Division II colleges, they don’t have fields as nice as this one.”

“When we first started, it was a grass field that slanted from where the tennis courts are down to the outfield,” Spilman said. “It was just a grass field with a wire-fence backstop.”

The photo albums tell what happened next:

The sign went up in 1992. Standing at the field’s southwest corner (near left field today; closer to home plate back then), the sign announced the coming project: “Site of Gary Gates Memorial Softball Field,” it said.

The scoreboard went up a year later. and not long after that came earth-moving machines to level the ground. By early 1994, the field had been re-oriented and flattened. San Marin High School played there, for the first time, that year.

In 1998, the lights were installed. By 1999, work had begun in earnest on the snack shack, a two-story building with an announcer’s booth upstairs.

“Sometimes we made great strides,” Spilman said. “Then there were years when we didn’t have much happen at all.”

But throughout the years, the project moved forward thanks to the work of Spilman and eight or nine others who sat on the board of the Gary Gates Foundation. The foundation was formed in 1990 with the aim of building a lighted softball field to honor the recently-deceased local softball coach.

According to his wife Diane, Spilman still gets emotional on the subject of Gary Gates.

“He’s very emotional about this,” Diane Spilman said. “He cannot get up on stage and talk about Gary. Once a year, the foundation gives out a scholarship, and he can’t make the speech presenting it, Every time he tries to talk about Gary he breaks down.”

DROP CAP HERE PLEASE

When Gary Gates passed away, Emily Gates asked fellow mourners, in lieu of flowers, “to give money to someone that’s going to make a lighted softball field for girls.”

“(I wasn’t even) thinking that’s necessarily going to happen in Novato or anywhere else,” Gates said 18 years later. “But I knew he wanted girls to have some equality, something special that was for the girls.”

Not long after that, the Gates Foundation formed. Spilman remembers Roger Thompson estimating that the foundation might be able to build the lighted field for $20,000. And so they set out to raise that money.

How have they done it?

“It’s a lot of hard work,” Jim Spilman said. “For us, with Gary’s passing, that gave us some passion to go ahead. Gary was such a great coach, and people wanted to do this in memory of him.”

In the end, Spilman’s passion proved essential. Along with Emily Gates and other Gates Foundation members, he spent afternoons by the field hammering nails and tying rebar. Sometimes evenings, too.

Diane Spilman tells of a night when, finding Jim hadn’t come home until late, she found him out at the field working by himself at 10:30 at night, his work lit up only by the headlights of his van.

“I would start to get irritated because every weekend he was at that field,” Diane Spilman said. “I said, ‘You could get hurt! Why isn’t anybody helping you? But later that night, I went to bed and had a dream.

“I’m sitting in the dugout at the field, still irritated. I looked across the dugout and there’s Gary Gates on the other end of the dugout. He was just smiling.”

Ever since that dream, Diane Spilman has been a 100 percent supporter of the project.

“Thank God for those dreams,” Jim Spilman said