If you build it, the savings will come. The William Byrd high school baseball team made drastic changes to its field themselves, saving taxpayers money.
They had a licensed and insured contractor overseeing the work and they say all permits were obtained. And you think schools and construction here and you might be weary but one Roanoke County School Board member says they knocked this project out of the park.
Everybody at Terrier Field is looking forward to the next few months. Baseball season is underway. But it's what's been happening in the months before today that is raising eyebrows.
Memebers of the team, parents, even Roanoke County School Board member Mike Stovall built most of a new practice building themselves with the help of a contractor, and say they saved possibly hundreds of thousands of dolalrs.
And some of the grunt work was done by the team, even if they wanted to cry foul.
"In the beginning we might have been, 'hey c'mon, why we gotta do this,'" says senior Chad Hill. "But now seeing the final results of all this, were really glad we did it."
In-kind work is nothing new for Roanoke County, but a project of this size is rare and in a time of budget crunching and cutbacks, the team effort is welcomed.
"It's a village," says Stovall. "It takes a village to raise kids and inside this village were raising kids, it just so happens to be the village of baseball, but it's still like that throughout the county."
There is still more work to be done, they need a new backstop and they have to maintain the turf.
They say they save money doing the work themselves, they also get discounts from vendors when they have to buy materials.
