Ocean Breeze track a testament of will, patience 

By Brian Towey for DyeStat

When athletes from St. Anthony’s High School of South Huntington, N.Y. arrived on Staten Island to compete at the Catholic High School Athletic Association’s Intersectional Championships last February, they were impressed with New York City’s newest indoor track and field facility.

Visible from Ocean Breeze’s hydraulically banked, 200-meter track is a bank of windows revealing the Staten Island coastline.

“I immediately thought it was a big, bright, open place with all of the windows,” St. Anthony’s coach Tim Dearie said. “In terms of week-to-week meets, we really enjoyed the atmosphere at Ocean Breeze.”

After 20 years of planning, untimely setbacks and uncertainty about funding, the Ocean Breeze track opened Nov. 15, 2015.

The Bishop Loughlin Games kicked off the second season Dec. 17 at the new facility, the first in its “Big 4” schedule of marquee invitationals that also includes Friday’s competition at the Ocean Breeze Holiday Festival.

“It’s having an unbelievable impact on high school track and field,” said Louis Vasquez, who was hired as Director of Special Events at Ocean Breeze after serving as Director of Icahn Stadium in New York.

“Number one, you have a state-of-the-art facility that’s super-fast. It’s an option. You have two very good facilities in New York City (along with The Armory).”

In March 1996, about 60 members of the track and field community on Staten Island met at Moore Catholic High School.

They included coaches, parents of athletes and locals connected with Catholic Youth Organization track. They called themselves SITRAC, The Staten Island Track and Field, Road Running and Community. They included current SITRAC President Lorraine Lettieri and Bob Orazem, a long-time road runner on Staten Island.

The purpose of the meeting was simple: the members of tightly knit Staten Island, numbering over 400,000 people, wanted an indoor track.

“We were just trying to develop a plan to give our kids a place to run and to keep them out of the cold during the winter,” said Peter Whitehouse, the former acting President of SITRAC, who coached track and field and cross country for decades at Tottenville and St. Peter’s high schools.

The group had a strong rapport with Tom Paulo, the Staten Island Parks Commissioner for NYC Parks, and approached him with a plan.

“We’re not architects, so the plan was at best schematics,” Whitehouse said. “We talked about a cinder-block wall and an inflatable bubble that would cost anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 dollars.”

“I brought Paulo our plan, and he said, ‘Think bigger. The mayor (Rudy Giuliani) wants an indoor track.’ So I added basketball courts and tennis courts and brought the plan back.”

Even more modifications were required to proceed.

 “‘No, this is not what the mayor wants,’” Paulo told Whitehouse.  “‘Give me a plan for a track with all the bells and whistles.’”

Giuliani had a bigger vision for the venue.

“The mayor didn't want an arena with a basketball court and a track, he wanted a track (specific) arena,” Whitehouse said.

Whitehouse is a track and field lifer who was a hurdler at Notre Dame in the 1960s. He was a successful cross country and track coach at St. Peter’s and later at Tottenville, where his boys cross country team had a record string of Public Schools Athletic League championships.

Whitehouse desired a design that could accommodate up to eight regulated lanes for competition, an unusual feature for an indoor facility.

“What I wanted was a track that had banks that went up and down – a six-lane banked track that becomes an eight-lane flat track,” Whitehouse said. “The advantage of a flat track (is that) the final can be run with two additional people. In a high school meet, you can reduce the time of the meet by a third by having two extra lanes.”

Ed Gorman, the Chairman on the Men’s Track and Field Committee for USA Track and Field’s High Performance Division and a SITRAC member, gave Whitehouse the original idea for the hydraulically banked track.

“We said, ‘What do you want to do with the track?’” said Gorman, a Staten Island native who has coached at Manhattan College and Arizona State.

“Do you want a community center mentality? Do you want a competitive track? That’s how (the idea) started.”

Jim Grogan was also involved in the original thought process behind the track. Grogan is a salesman for M-F Athletic & Perform Better, a track and field equipment company, and a former member of the SITRAC Board of Directors. Grogan also coached track and field and cross country at Columbia, Wagner College, and Moore Catholic High on Staten Island.

“Knowing that the city was interested in funding the track as a world-class facility, at the time, hydraulic-banked tracks were coming into vogue,” Grogan said. “It made sense to go in that direction.  There were a few out there, but it was something not a lot of people had.”

The Giuliani administration allocated $12 million for the track.

Then came the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which brought the track plans to a halt.

“Your heart wasn’t into it,” Lettieri said. “(Also) with 9/11, no politician wanted to talk to us about our indoor track.”

The city was swept up in an effort to rebuild after the terrorist attacks. Funding for the indoor track went elsewhere.

For about a year, the track project went dormant. In 2002, Lettieri took over as SITRAC president, moving over from treasurer, and began another push.

SITRAC decided to galvanize support within the community, targeting civic groups and businesses, hospitals and non-profit organizations – anyone who could benefit from an indoor track in the community.

“All we needed was the community support,” Lettieri said. “We needed to make sure we had the voice of every person and organization that would touch this track.”

SITRAC went to the local community board to “allay their fears” about the project, she said. Then they went to hotel owners seeking support. They received the backing of local politicians, like State Assemblyman Mike Cusick and former City Councilman and current Staten Island Borough President Jim Oddo.

Lettieri saw this as a critical juncture in SITRAC’s pursuit of an indoor track.

“The cause became more than just SITRAC,” Lettieri said. “It became more (about) the Staten Island community and how can we all benefit from this.”

Staten Island stands alone in New York City, a place that functions more like one single neighborhood, rather than just a massive borough.

“Staten Island is a unique place,” Lettieri said. “It has 400,000 people, but everyone knows each other.”

In 2002, Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City. SITRAC discovered that it had an ally in Bloomberg’s NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

“He was the one who really pushed Bloomberg,” Lettieri said. “He was a track guy and he wanted this for New York City.”

Benepe, the NYC Parks Commissioner from 2002-12, ran sprints and hurdles at Horace Mann School in the Bronx and at Middlebury College in Vermont.

During his tenure, Benepe helped renovate many of the city’s aging tracks with state-of-the-art Mondo surfaces. One of his first acts as NYC Parks Commissioner was to secure the final $10 million donation from Carl Icahn to build the grandstand and the roof for Icahn Stadium.

“The reality is, without the big sustainable development plan called PlaNYC, this never would have happened,” said Benepe, who currently serves as Senior Vice President and Director of City Park Development for The Trust for Public Land, a non-profit that conserves and creates parkland.

“PlaNYC was a sustainable development plan for the city to support one million more residents.”

One goal of PlaNYC 2030 was to beautify the city by improving parks and creating more open, green spaces, and increasing options for competitive athletics.

As a result, Bloomberg allotted $400 million for eight park sites for development, one of them being the Ocean Breeze site.

In addition to PlaNYC, another development was crucial for Ocean Breeze.

“There was a project to design really good architecture called the Design (and Construction) Excellence program,” Benepe said. “The Design Excellence Program selected high-end, world-class architects to design municipal projects in the city, like firehouses and schools.”

Ocean Breeze was designed through the Design Excellence program, which was administered by the New York City Department of Design and Construction. The architectural firm of Sage and Coombe was selected to design the facility.

“SITRAC and the Parks Department were really the catalysts for this project,” said Sage and Coombe principal architect Peter Coombe, whose design of Ocean Breeze won the firm a Jury Award at the Architizer A+ Awards for architecture in the category of stadiums and arenas.

“I think SITRAC was able to get the political will in place to (build Ocean Breeze track).They were very important in getting this project done.”

Those involved felt the track served a long overdue need.

“Staten Island has long been a hotbed for track and field and cross country,” Benepe said. “And yet it completely lacked any (indoor) facility. The closest facility was in Washington Heights, The Armory.”

 

SECURING FUNDING

 

It was a “perfect storm” of factors, according to Lettieri, that brought Staten Island a world-class track.

The idea spanned the administrations of three different mayors, Guiliani, Bloomberg and Bill De Blasio, gaining traction through Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 plan, coupled with a one-time bid for New York City to host the 2012 Olympics.

Lettieri is also the President of the Americas for Global Cloud XChange, a telecommunications company, and counts Bloomberg as one of her clients. In 2002, shortly before the city’s budget passed, she called on Bloomberg to fund SITRAC’s plan.

“After years and years of doing this, I called (Bloomberg) and I said, ‘Can you please allocate money for this?’” Lettieri said. “He finally gave us $70 million. It was probably one of the greatest days of my life.”

SITRAC received final approval for the funding in 2006. Yet, one final hurdle arose during the bidding process.

“When the bids came in to hire engineers, they were all $20 million above the allotted budget,” Benepe said. “That could have been a stake in the heart of this project. But the mayor said, ‘No, this is a very important project,’ and came up with the money.”

 

HURRICANE SANDY

 

Nature posed the next challenge in the construction of Ocean Breeze. When Hurricane Sandy struck Oct. 29, 2012, the building’s design protected it against serious flood damage.

“Raising the building made the project more difficult, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do,” Coombe said.

The building sits 16 feet above the ground. Although the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy swept away some construction materials, the building itself was spared from storm damage.

 

A SUCCESSFUL OPENING SEASON

 

During its inaugural season, Ocean Breeze hosted several major high school track and field meets, starting with the Bishop Loughlin Games – one of the country's biggest pre-holiday invitationals – as teams from New York City, New Jersey, upstate New York and Philadelphia regularly came to Staten Island for meets.

In addition to the eight regulated lanes for racing, the facility features two high jump pits, two long jump pits, two pole vault pits and two throws cages, one for girls and novices, the other for open throwers.

“Almost everyone I spoke with had something positive to say about Ocean Breeze,” said Grogan, who attended most of the major meets for M-F Athletic.

To conclude its first season in March, Ocean Breeze hosted the USATF Hershey Youth National Championships.

“We wanted the USATF to have a presence (at Ocean Breeze) in our first season,” Ocean Breeze park administrator Lauren Primerano said. “We’re looking toward bringing the national championships here.”

Ocean Breeze will take another step toward doing so by hosting the New York State Public High School Athletic Association’s Indoor Championships from 2017-19, according to Vasquez. Since the track can be lowered, the facility is capable of running three simultaneous 60-meter dash heats.

“I don’t think there’s another track like it in the world,” Whitehouse said.

For athletes, Ocean Breeze represents an incredible boon. And they have the ingenuity of one small community, plus one very large city, to thank.

“This was a dream of ours,” Lettieri said. “From 20 years ago, we never gave up.”