It’s also the home of the Traverse City Beach Bums, one of the newest minor league baseball franchises in the independent Frontier League. The Beach Bums recently completed their first season in their new home, the 3500-seat Wuerfel Park, drawing a full house of close to a quarter million dedicated fans and a steady stream of major league talent scouts.
Team owners John and Leslye Wuerfel have a long history in the hospitality industry, and bring a unique perspective to the design of Wuerfel Park, which more closely resembles a luxury resort than a typical concrete and steel stadium. It’s a setting ideally suited for the casual, family-oriented environment that is minor league baseball. More than just a stepping stone to the majors, minor league ball represents a sense of community rarely found in the big leagues. “These people are here for a family-friendly, social recreational experience where baseball is the centerpiece, but not the sole focus,” observes Mark Simoni of Simoni Systems, the company behind the park’s highly-acclaimed sound system.
“In Minor League baseball, the sound is a very important part of the whole experience,” Simoni explains. “A minor league game is made up of so many more activities than just the game itself – things like field hosts who entertain the crowds, pre- and post-game promotions, music and more. We make full use of the sound system, probably to an even greater extent than in a major league game.”
The park’s sound system features 17 Community R.5-94x loudspeakers, arranged in a somewhat unique time-aligned configuration. “We really wanted to stay away from the semi-distributed system configuration found in most of these parks,” Simoni explains. “Most parks are designed with speakers mounted on the structure, along the first and third base lines and behind home plate, and all pointed toward the field. You inevitably end up with multiple arrival times, and designers try all sorts of tricks to align them. You essentially end up depending on the speaker you’re hearing being louder than any of the others.”
Beginning with a detailed EASE modeling of the venue, Simoni created a time-aligned system that complements the park’s intimate feel. “I aimed all the speakers directly perpendicular to the line between home plate and second base, pointing at the outfield. Using a Lectrosonics DM1624, I programmed every speaker with the appropriate delays to create a coherent wave front. It’s almost like a distributed horizontal line array, in essence. Compared to lots of stadiums, there’s virtually no echo. Every speaker is pointed in the same direction, rather than at a reflective surface.” The system is powered by Crown amplification.
As Simoni notes, the Wuerfels were clear from the outset that everything about the stadium be conducive to an intimate, welcoming environment. “John and Leslye are warm, wonderful folks, very straight-ahead, and a joy to work with,” he reflects. “They’re not necessarily the most technically-minded people, but they knew exactly what they wanted to hear. It pretty much goes without saying that the R-series is the gold standard for stand-alone speaker systems in outdoor venues, so during the park’s planning stages I went up to Traverse City with a single R-series, a power amp and a portable CD player. We set up the speaker on a second-story porch to simulate the stadium placement, turned it on, and within minutes they said ‘that’s the sound we want.’”
