After 34 years at Edwin Moak Field, the Oxford baseball and soft- ball teams will now play their first season at a new location and field.

The new complex is located on the northeast side of Oxford High School. The project began in October of 2019 and was completed in August 2022, allowing the teams to practice and adjust before beginning the 2023 season in the spring.

OSD Athletic Director Chris Baughman touched on all the arrangements and adjustments that were made throughout the process of constructing the new complex.

“We started meeting a year before Covid and actually longer than that,” Baughman said. “The last bond referendum was passed, this was part of that bond referendum, but because of cost and priorities with educational facilities, those had to come first.”

Baughman continued to explain the new atmosphere that Charger fans can be looking forward to next spring.

The new complex features chairback seats behind home plate, a jumbotron in right field, as well as brand new LED flickering lights.

“The whole atmosphere is going to be a little different,” Baughman said. “The new technology that’s there in the new field is gonna create a cool atmosphere.”

Head coach of the Oxford baseball team, Cade Hoggard, is excited and looking forward to moving into the new facilities.

“Going to a new facility, we are going to have the luxury of having a turf field. We’re gonna be able to have an indoor, a weight room, and a locker room that’s all accessible, and right there on site,” Hoggard said.

The Charger baseball and softball teams will be able to have access to not only a first class field, but also first class equipment.

“That field is top notch, it’s first class with what they’ve done in de- signing it but also everything that’s going into it,” Hoggard said. “Some of the things equipment wise we will bring over from the old field, but as far as screens and nets and you know everything else, it’s all brand new.”

The fields will feature turf infields instead of the traditional dirt infield. This will allow for unprecedented weather conditions to not play a big factor.

“Those pop up showers with the old field held water pretty well. We will be able to get in the indoor, but also get on the infield which is turf,” Hoggard said.

J.D. Poss, an assistant baseball coach for the Chargers, also looks forward to being able to develop players with new access to turf fields.

“The feature for me that’s gonna be the best is gonna be the turf in- field,” Poss said. “That’s gonna give us the ability to practice when other teams probably don’t have that ability.”

The coaching staff is also looking forward to using the open indoor facility to expand the team’s practice capability.

“It gives us a lot of room to do different things that we haven’t been able to do in the past,” Poss said. “You know, being able to fold the nets back and open it up, really making it a big square cage. We can have live at bats and anything like that. I think we are going to have the access to do a lot of different things that we haven’t been able to do in the past.”

The baseball and softball teams both look forward to moving fulltime into the new facilities hopefully by the end of August.

“I just think about the trajectory of where we are going, and the guys that we got,” Poss said. “I think the expectation of this program continues to get higher.”