Athletic FacilitiesWestern OhioDayton

Beavercreek Press Box Construction 2026

Beavercreek's softball field has a new two-story building: concessions at ground level with a walk-up counter, and a press box above with a full-width row of windows over the field. Prodigy built it from the ground up, including the foundation, framing, siding, roofing, electrical panel, lighting and counters, poured roughly 3,500 square feet of new walkway and concession pad running dugout to dugout, and repainted the block dugouts in Beavercreek black and orange. Permits were carried in Prodigy's scope, and Beavercreek City Schools bought the work pre-bid through the TOP-C cooperative contract.

Beavercreek City Schools is putting a two-story building at its softball field in Greene County: concessions on the ground floor, press box above it. The footprint is 325 square feet — twenty feet wide and about ten and a half deep on each level — and it is built from the ground up, on a post-and-pier foundation, with permits carried in Prodigy's scope rather than the district's.

The concessions level opens to the crowd through two manual overhead doors, one of them set at a 36-inch sill to serve as the counter, with lockable hardware on the inside. It has six receptacles and two vapor-tight LED fixtures, and deliberately no cooking equipment and no water service. Upstairs, three five-by-four vinyl slider windows run the width of the room over a twelve-foot laminate counter, with a wood rail and balusters, four more receptacles and three more fixtures. The building is framed in wood, wrapped in Tyvek, sided in six-inch reveal vinyl, roofed in asphalt shingle with an aluminum gutter, and finished inside in painted plywood. A new single-phase panel serves the lighting and outlet circuits.

Around it goes roughly 3,500 square feet of concrete — a walkway set 24 feet back from the field fence line running dugout to dugout, and a pad behind the building for the concession area. The existing block dugouts are repainted inside and out in black with an orange accent stripe three courses wide, the orange specified down to the number.

Window band and overhead door on the new Beavercreek press box under a summer sky

Beavercreek press box and concessions building with bleachers and the outfield fence beyond

Ground-floor storage bay inside the Beavercreek press box, with a white overhead door, an insulated roll-up shutter over the service window and orange walls

Technical Discussion

Piers instead of a slab under a two-story press box

The obvious foundation for a 20-foot by 10-foot-6 building is a concrete slab. It is one pour, it doubles as the floor, and for a storage shed it is the right answer. This building is not a shed. It is two stories tall on a footprint barely wider than a parking space, it is unheated, and its first floor is mostly door: an 8-foot by 7-foot overhead door and an 8-foot-wide serving door set in the same small walls. Those three facts are why it stands on a post-and-pier foundation.

Section through the two-story Beavercreek press box on a post-and-pier foundation. Concrete piers extend below the frost depth line, the wood-framed floor sits above grade, and the concrete walkway and concession pad sit at grade, separate from the building. — Figure 1 — The piers carry the building below the frost. The walkway and pad can move with the seasons without moving the building.

Frost moves slabs, and doors notice

Water expands about 9 percent when it freezes, and wet soil under an unheated building freezes every winter. A heated building keeps the ground under its slab warm. A press box does not, so a slab at grade rides up and down with the frost, and it never moves evenly. A quarter inch of tilt across a 20-foot wall is invisible in a shed and is enough to rack an overhead door track so the door binds in March. Frost depth in Ohio is set county by county and runs from about 30 inches to more than 36. Piers carry the building's weight to soil below that line, where the ground does not freeze, and the frost above them has nothing to lift.

A tall, light building also has to be held down

A two-story box with 325 square feet of floor is light for the amount of wall it shows the wind. On a slab, resistance to overturning comes from the weight of the concrete and the anchors set in it. A pier embedded below frost resists uplift through its own depth, which is a better match for a building whose height is nearly equal to its width. The second floor, a 3/4-inch tongue-and-groove subfloor on wood framing, ties the walls together at mid-height and keeps the frame square above the door openings.

The concrete people walk on is kept separate

About 3,500 square feet of new concrete surrounds the building: a walkway 24 feet back from the fence line running dugout to dugout, and a pad at the concession window. That flatwork sits at grade and will move a little with the seasons, as all exterior flatwork does. Because the building does not bear on it, the walk can move without the building following, and a cracked panel years from now is a flatwork repair, not a structural one.

For a small unheated building, ask what the foundation does in February. If the answer is that the floor slab is also the foundation, the doors will eventually tell you.

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