University of Georgia Athletics
Stinson Heavily Involved In Foley Field Project
February 20, 2025 | Baseball, The Frierson Files
By John Frierson
Staff Writer
Over his five years with the Georgia baseball team, Josh Stinson probably learned every square inch of Foley Field. Now, as a field engineer with Turner Construction, the firm that has done the $45 million renovation of Foley, the 2023 UGA graduate with a degree in Mechanical Engineering knows all there is about the new-look stadium, too.
"Coming in and knowing more about the facility than my project managers or other people on my construction team, it honestly felt good, because they're always asking me questions about, Oh, where is this at? Or where is this? Or what do the players like more?" Stinson said Wednesday, two days before the No. 8 Bulldogs kick off their home schedule against the University of Illinois-Chicago with a Friday doubleheader.
"So it kind of helped us out, because I had the ideas of a baseball player and the experience, so I was able to help the team out in multiple ways."
Stinson took the field for the Bulldogs for the last time on June 8, when Georgia came up just short of reaching the College World Series. By August, Stinson was working full-time on the Foley improvements for Turner, one of the largest contractors in the United States. Stinson had interned for Turner the summer before, when the Bulldogs' locker room got a big upgrade.
"My role is kind of to help everybody out in the trailer and help all the project managers, all the field engineers, all the superintendents, and kind of bring everybody together," Stinson said, "There's a lot of coordination that goes on in building a project of this scale. So having people work together is essential and vital to getting the project done on time."
What's essential for making the Turner crew effective is the same thing that every good team has: people working hard together toward a common goal. And that work has been relentless, with construction and renovations going on virtually every day since last summer.
"The people who worked on this project put in a lot of hard hours, working seven days a week, working late nights, early mornings," Stinson said, adding that he was "proud to have worked with those individuals," some of whom regularly wore their Georgia gear to work. "They're really hard-working, they didn't complain too much, they understood the task, and they hunkered down and got it done."
It was a tight finish, with the finishing touches being put on different aspects of the expansive project right up to the last minute. Among the many additions to Foley Field are a state-of-the-art pitching lab, hitting tunnels, a players' lounge, coaches' offices and more. Stinson got to enjoy the new locker room last season, but is there something new he wishes he could have had when he played?
"I would say definitely the hitting lab or the players' lounge — the players' lounge is really cool," he said. "Just having that hangout spot where you can just come and hang out with the team and get to know each other and relax before games and practices, that's going to be a cool area to kind of bring the team closer."
"We're all in the team lounge hanging out," said junior shortstop Kolby Branch, who hit 17 homers and drove in 58 runs last season. Branch said some guys will be playing video games, others will be watching random stuff on YouTube, but the important thing is that the guys are spending time together.
The biggest change to Foley Field is the field itself. The infield dirt is no longer dirt. The batters in the batter's box will no longer be digging into dirt, either. And the pitcher's mound, like the rest of the playing surface, is also now covered in AstroTurf.
According to the AstroTurf website, the synthetic turf was designed to "play like clay where they're supposed to and like grass where they should." Nylon is used in the base paths to create "realistic sliding distances" and for added durability in high-use areas.
"I think it's good either way," Branch said of AstroTurf versus grass and dirt. "We've played a couple of (intrasquad) games on it, and it's been real smooth — it's been nice."
As a shortstop who fields a lot of ground balls, Branch said he appreciates the consistency of the bounces on the turf, rather than the unpredictability of the dirt infield.
"I know exactly how it's going to bounce," he said.
As for the all-turf pitcher's mound, junior right-hander Kolten Smith said "I actually love this mound," and he cited the consistency of it. "You're going to be pitching on the same mound every time," he said.
Smith also likes all of the high-tech pitching analysis tools that Georgia now has. "We've got Hawkeye, we've got motion capture, we've got all the tools we need to be the best pitching team in the country."
For Stinson, this will be his first spring not playing baseball since he was young. "I miss it every day," he said. But he's not fully removed from the game. Along with the months of work he's done at Foley Field, he's also doing some youth coaching. After learning so much from his coaches when he was young, Stinson is happy to share what he's learned.
"For me to be able to pass it down, that's something I kind of live by," he said, "to keep inspiring the younger generation and keep pushing them to become the best version of themselves."
Georgia's upgrades are in large part about the same thing, helping the Bulldogs' players, coaches and staff be at their best every time they run onto the turf. A new era of Bulldog baseball at Foley Field starts Friday.
Assistant Sports Communications Director John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files.
