Sands New York donates lawn equipment to East Meadow Baseball Softball Association

The East Meadow Baseball Softball Association received some exciting upgrades last week, including a new ride-on lawn mower, a hand mower, two weed whackers and a leaf blower, thanks to a donation by Sands New York.

The new equipment will allow the association to perform routine maintenance to the league’s fields, located at 30 Merrick Ave., in East Meadow, and help keep them clean, safe, and ready to play ball on.

Steve LaSala, the association’s commissioner, said its an entirely volunteer-run organization.

“Everything we do — if we’re purchasing, we’re painting, we’re cleaning — that’s all of what the volunteers do,” he told the Herald. “When it got to the point where we were having difficulties with the equipment we had to maintain the lawns on the nine fields, we started looking at different ways to supplement that.”

LaSala said the association considered a sponsorship program, where local lawn care companies could “adopt a field,” but many of them didn’t have the right type of equipment needed to maintain such large areas of grass.

“We started to price lawn mowers, figuring out how we were going to do a fundraiser to raise money to purchase this,” he said.

LaSala connected with Norma Gonsalves, who’s a former Nassau County legislator in East Meadow, that has often been able to provide valuable insight to the association, he said. She told him she’d think about it, and a day or two later, LaSala said he received a call from Lauren Corcoran-Doolin of Sands New York. Sands is in the midst of developing a multi-billion-dollar hospitality, entertainment and casino project in Uniondale, just down the road from the ball fields.

Corcoran-Doolin offered to meet with the association, and see if Sands could help. LaSala later met with Ron Reese, a senior vice president at Sands, who toured the baseball-softball facility. Not long after, LaSala received word that Sands would like to donate the necessary lawn equipment to the association.

“They’ve been a great savior for us,” LaSala said. “The money that we were going to allocate to that, there are some other projects on the complex that we will be able to do now.”

To celebrate the new lawn care additions, Sands held a free barbecue for volunteers, baseball and softball players, parents and board members of the baseball and softball association on Aug. 1. LaSala was joined by Nassau County Legislator Tom McKevitt and Reese from Sands, along with several other community members and leaders in East Meadow.

LaSala, who’s also part of the East Meadow Chamber of Commerce, said Sands has been great to work with thus far in East Meadow.

“They have been wonderful,” he said. “They are actually going above and beyond to be a good neighbor. I think it’s great they’re taking a very strong interest in the community and surrounding communities, and trying to make a very good effort to be a very good neighbor.”