Centennial Park in Chassell received a major upgrade Wednesday and Thursday in the form of brand new ADA accessible playground equipment.

“What you have here is a new playground coming in here for Chassell. We’ve been working with Sinclair Recreation from downstate. They’ve been supervising the project for us,” said Keith Meyers with the Chassell Township Planning Commission.

The new playground equipment was made possible by many donations and grant funding, as well as local volunteers.

“This is a project that’s been made possible by a $20,000 grant from the Portage Health Foundation and $10,000 from the Chassell Lions Club, as well as smaller contributions from the Chassell Women’s Group. We got a grant from the equipment manufacturer, Play Time, which is based out of Alabama. They gave us about $20,000 in grants as well. And then about $20,000 came out of the Chassell recreation millage for this project,” Meyers explained.

Funding for the project came in from multiple angles, as did the labor that went into the playground.

“I think one of the things that has been really impressive about this project is the assistance that we’ve been getting in terms of volunteer effort from the athletes at Michigan Tech University. So, what you see out here is a number of athletes from the soccer team and we’ve had others from basketball, track and field, and cross country. I think we may have even had a hockey player out here, and then we had football players out here yesterday,” Meyers said.

Meyers, Sinclair Recreation, and their troop of volunteers have made quick work of the project.

“We basically have been able to put this in in a day and a half. If you were to come out here yesterday, this would have been nothing but a sand field.”

Installing the new equipment was no light task, however.

“We took some measurements across the field, and then once we established the single point on the field, we ran a line of horizontally across it to triangulate to the location of all the posts that you see out here; think there’s like 40 some odd posts that we dug holes for.

“Our Chassell Department of Public Works (DPW) staff was out here; Craig Austin was operating the Bobcat yesterday, and we had someone operating the driller, so that got the hole started. We had people working shovels and everything else to dig out the holes, and then they had a laser device out here to make sure that we had all the holes the same depth. This is just real,” Meyers said.

The playground equipment is more than a simple upgrade, Meyers explained.

“We had some really outstanding playground equipment for years out here on this site that was made possible by funders in the community and it had served its useful life, and so what this gives us is a playground which is a little more accessible to individuals who wouldn’t have been able to use the old equipment, so that’s a really cool aspect of it.” The equipment was designed by Sinclair Recreation, who specializes in ADA (Americans with Disabilities) accessible playground equipment.

Meyers hopes the playground will get local children to play outside more and influence healthier activity.

“Most importantly, it’s a way that we can get kids more active in the community, or in terms of their own physical well being instead of just playing on their devices all day. They can come out here and get some physical activity which gets them on a pathway to making better choices about their physical activities moving forward.”

The playground is a fun asset for Chassell as well as any visitors.

“It’s not just about Chassell Township; this is meant to be a regional kind of thing, too. We hope that folks from throughout the area will come down to Chassell and make use of this really cool playground. And of course, we already have the beach here, there’s a beautiful pavilion. We’re getting it in just in time for Strawberry Festival, which you know, we’re really excited about that because there’s so many kids who come down to Strawberry Festival, and they have this available to them when they come out,” Meyers said.

Meyers showed great appreciation for the volunteer effort that went into the project.

“Getting this project done was made possible by the volunteer effort both of Michigan Tech students and a lot of local volunteers from Chassell and surrounding communities that came out to help us. We had the Lions Club helping out as well as students from the high school, and just interested members from the community.

“When you can get these kinds of in-kind resources for a project like that, it makes it more affordable, especially if you think about what this would cost for all this labor to do it. It would have been a real expensive project, but to have everybody rolling up their sleeves, it makes it more affordable for a small community like ours to do something like this. It just makes Chassell an even better place. We’ve been doing a lot of things we feel are making Chassell a great place to live, work, and play for our citizens.”

Despite a tight work schedule, Rich Sinclair of Sinclair Restoration, was pleased to squeeze in the playground project. Sinclair had the project in Lansing the next day.

“Sinclair Recreation is the gametime playground equipment distributor for the states of Michigan and Indiana. We’ve been in business for over 30 years and have built 1000s of playgrounds across the state of Michigan in that time. We are blessed to be the largest playground contractor in the state of Michigan,” Sinclair said.

“We specialize in ADA adaptive playgrounds, and it was really cool to see this community go to these ends to put a safe and compliant playground in the park for their people.”

Sinclair also had praise for the local helping hands.

“The local residents have been excellent and generous with their time, and highly skilled in their ability. I’ve been particularly impressed with the students and athletes from Michigan Tech who gave of their time. They’ve been very willin, very generous, and really worked their rear ends off the past two days. I was very impressed with that. It’s amazing what a community can do over the course of two days when you get a bunch of willing people to come together,” Sinclair said.