Club Installs New Used-Ball Drop
Plywood board drilled with two-and-a-half-inch hole, zip-tied to Court Three post, lettered USED / BALLS ONLY; prior milk-crate contents unconfirmed
Capital-projects subcommittee calls it a facilities upgrade; president declines to say what crates held
Three older crates elsewhere on property remain untouched, unlabeled
By Anita Bath·Staff Reporter
Mr. Griggs tightens the fourth zip tie on the Court Three drop Tuesday, a number chosen, he said, so the job would never recur.
“Two would have held. We used four because this is not a project we intend to revisit.”
ROWAYTON, Conn., Oct. 2 —The Rowayton Paddle Club this week retired the pair of milk crates that have served, informally and without signage, as the courts' used-ball receptacles for the better part of a decade, replacing them with a single plywood board drilled with a two-and-a-half-inch hole, zip-tied to the post at Court Three and lettered by hand, "USED / BALLS ONLY."
The board was installed Tuesday afternoon and secured with four zip ties, a figure the club's assistant grounds chair, Brian Griggs, confirmed personally after being asked twice. "Two would have held," Mr. Griggs said. "We used four because this is not a project we intend to revisit."
The change followed a letter from a club member asking, in part, whether the new drop was necessary and what, specifically, had previously gone into the milk crates. The letter set a deadline of twelve hours for a published response and warned that failure to meet it would result in the member going, in his words, "Goodspeed." The club did not confirm what that would entail.
Mr. Griggs said the crates had been in place since at least 2019 and that their contents were, to his knowledge, exclusively dead balls, though he acknowledged he had not personally inspected either crate since taking the grounds post in March. "I inherited the crates," he said. "I did not inherit an inventory."
The RPTA's capital-projects subcommittee, which approved the board at a meeting lasting forty-one minutes, categorized the expenditure as a facilities upgrade rather than routine maintenance, a distinction that under club bylaws exempts it from a membership vote but entitles it to a line item in the annual report.
Skip Dunphy, who captains Rowayton B and serves as the club's president, called the board "a straightforward improvement to ball-disposal infrastructure" and said he saw no reason to characterize it otherwise. Asked directly what had been in the milk crates before this week, Mr. Dunphy said the matter was "not something I'm prepared to get into right now" and referred further questions to Mr. Griggs, who referred them back.
No member has come forward to claim knowledge of the crates' prior contents, and the club's by-laws contain no provision requiring one to. The capital-projects subcommittee's minutes, reviewed by this paper, list the crates' disposition as "retired, contents N/A."
The board at Court Three is the fourth used-ball receptacle the club has installed since 2019; the other three remain milk crates, untouched and unlabeled.
