Thursday, October 1, 2026
Rockville Centre Mayor Francis Murray announced on Sept. 4 that the proposal to upgrade the Centennial Park athletic fields in partnership with Molloy College has been canceled due to unanticipated additional construction costs.
Under the terms of a revised agreement, Molloy will spend $1.6 million on the construction of an NCAA-regulation, synthetic-turf women’s softball field at the Skelos Sports Complex on Peninsula Boulevard. The new field, and a tee-ball field, will be available to local sports organizations.
“We are disappointed that we cannot proceed with the full plan,” Murray said, “but we are very happy about our continuing partnership with Molloy and with [its] president, Drew Bogner.
“Dr. Bogner is a great neighbor, and through his efforts, Molloy is becoming more integrated into the life of our community,” Murray added. “We are exceedingly grateful for this investment in the youth of our village.”
Structural deficiencies in the ground beneath Centennial Park forced the village and college to cancel plans to build NCAA-regulation field hockey and baseball fields — which also would have accommodated local soccer and Little League games. “The subsurface soil is structurally unable to support new synthetic-turf fields and the associated drainage system,” said John Cameron of Cameron Engineering, the village’s engineer on the project, who completed the evaluation.
Test borings of the area — some as deep as 35 feet — revealed “a high variability of materials buried beneath the surface,” according to the engineering report, “confirming the fact that the site had historically been filled for many years with rubble, wood, concrete and silty soils over an underlying bog layer.”
Without significant soil replacement and extensive structural improvements — which would cost millions of dollars more than a typical installation — the fields would not remain flat and level, Cameron explained.
“After the engineering report, Molloy told us they couldn’t justify the expense of the Centennial Park portion of the project,” Murray said.
Cameron assured the village that the fields are acceptable for natural turf. “If and when any uneven settlement takes place, the costs of repairs are much less than for a synthetic-turf installation,” he said. “Regular play can be conducted on the natural-turf fields as normal.”
At the Sept. 4 village board meeting, the mayor also announced that bids for the Klein Field improvements at the Skelos complex had come in lower than expected, leaving some funds available for upgrading the fields at Centennial Park. Murray said that the Board of Trustees would meet with local sports organizations before deciding how to proceed with those improvements.
