This is absolutley no surprise, but Winston-Salem Dash spokesman Kevin Mortensen concedes that the taxpayer-funded downtown stadium won’t be ready in time for the season-opening homestand, creating a nightmare of scheduling conflicts with Wake Forest’s baseball team as they compete for time at Ernie Shore Field:
Season-ticket holders will not have automatic tickets to games at the Wake Forest field, Mortesen said. He said that season-ticket packages will apply only to games played at the new stadium. He said that the team has not yet figured out prices for games to be played at Wake Forest.
Two Dash home games — on April 28, a Tuesday, and May 14, a Thursday — are scheduled on the same days as Wake Forest home games. The Wake Forest team will finish its home season May 16.
Steve Shutt, an assistant athletics director at Wake Forest, said he did not know whether Wake Forest or the Dash would switch game times, but he said that the ACC has rules in place that govern college start times.
“There are some ACC regulations that we would have to follow,” Shutt said. “As a general rule it would probably be better if the Dash played earlier.”
Mortensen says that the Dash will have to play at least one homestand at Ernie Shore. Now, baseball fans know that road trips can be long, but not that long. A look at the Dash schedule shows that after the April 23-30 homestand, the team goes back on the road for seven games before returning home. Considering “clear visibility of a half-finished stadium off Business 40,” I’d say the Dash will be playing more than one homestand at Ernie Shore.
The real bad news is for season ticket holders: the Dash hasn’t figured out how to compensate them, considering the fact that “season-ticket holders will not have automatic tickets to games at the Wake Forest field.”
