The playoffs for spring sports are heating up and this year there has been a renewed focus on the safety of student-athletes. It’s how one Lewis County company got its start.

“So here's the model that we built in 2009, and this was presented to the Beaver River School Board,” Grand Slam Safety president Bob Lyndaker said while showing off a model of a high school baseball field.

What You Need To Know

  • Hard outfield fences can be dangerous for not only professional athletes, but especially youths

  • Grand Slam Safety in Croghan has created a fencing that is safe for all

  • The fences can be used in baseball, but as boundaries in other sports and to create different stations inside gymnasiums

It started as a simple idea.

“The president of the Beaver River School Booster Club had approached me regarding the idea of putting an outfield fence up for the baseball field at Beaver River,” Lyndaker remembered.

But Lyndaker had a vision -- a vision where something like players crashing into hard outfield walls would never happen.

“That was one of the things that we were concerned about, was the safety aspect of it,” Lyndaker said.

So the goal was to find and buy a fence with nothing hard in it.

“I couldn't find anything that I felt was safe,” he said.

It was a search that included the U.S. Patent Office. So then an idea and a business were born.

“We presented this model that you're seeing here to the school board and told them that what we would do is we would provide them on a free outfield fence, but that this would be a prototype,” he said of the time 14 years ago.

For more than a decade -- out of an old paper mill it brought back to life — Grand Slam Safety in Croghan has been hand-making soft fabric outfield fences for athletic fields across the country.

“But I think one of the main motivations of the four original partners were we just wanted to create a business in Croghan to hire local people” Grand Slam Safety director of sales and marketing Bob Chamberlain said, after the mill had closed and took 70 or so jobs with it.

And now with 37 employees, they've seen not only the success of that original idea, but growth into creating safety netting, screens and more.

“Not being boastful, but I think we might be the biggest employer in Croghan right now as far as number of people, probably so,” Chamberlain said. “I think it's very important to this area.” 

With new forward thinking and innovation, Grand Slam Safety’s future plan is to never hit a wall.

“Whenever facilities want to be able to subdivide different areas of their sports field or courts, curtains are involved. There always is a hole at the end or a gap at the end of the curtain,” Lyndaker said, showing off the company’s latest innovation.

There are gaps that make it very easy for balls to escape. So another study session on the U.S. patents website led to an application for a drop-down subdivision for a gym or an athletic field that can fully close off four different areas.

“Typically, they also have to have multiple curtains to do that,” Lyndaker added. “Our system allows for one motor, one system that operates as a unit.”

Which is exactly what the folks here do and hope to do for a very long time.

The company also got some help from an employee’s son, who is an engineering student at Clarkson University. For a school project, he created an automated fabric cutter for the company, which would have normally cost it $150,000.