Build A Bocce Court

Highwood Bocce club flies in Italian experts to replace courts

The great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti — while appearing in Chicago — once paid a visit to the squat brown-brick building that butts up against the train tracks running through Highwood.

A few years later in 1996, teams of Italians, Croatians, Brazilians and representatives from a dozen other nations descended upon the same building to compete in a world championship.

And this month, there’s a palpable giddiness at the Highwood Bocce Club — one of the United States’ best-known venues for the traditional Italian bowling game — because Aurelio Colleoni and his team are here from Gorgonzola, Italy, to replace the club’s old (and somewhat lumpy) courts.

“There are only two or three companies in the world that do this,” said club member Paul Giannetti, who came to America in 1967 as a teenager but still has a home in Florence.

The key is making the courts smooth — almost like a billiards table — so that the bocce balls don’t drift when they’re tossed down the lanes, which are about 90 feet long and 10 feet wide.

The work doesn’t come cheap. It’s about $85,000, Giannetti said. Part of the reason is that Colleoni has its special resin shipped over in big metal buckets from Italy. To build a bocce court, workers lay down concrete, top it with blacktop and then lay down the resin to create the smooth surface.

“There are other companies that work with cheap [material], but for quality, we are the best,” said Daniele Colleoni, part of a three-man team completing a project that’s expected to wrap up this month.

Colleoni said the company completes about 70 projects in a year. He then offered an analogy: “Ferrari makes [about] 100 cars a year, not 20 million.”

As the work progressed one morning last week, a host of club members stopped by to check on the progress.

In came Emilio Santi, a retired Lake County judge.

“We would like to think we would be the focal point of bocce in the United States,” Santi said proudly.

And then there was Mario Massa, who is 92 and, until the courts were taken out of service earlier this month, played almost every day. Massa, a native Italian, was one of the original founders of the club in 1969.

Jack Flynn, Guest Author; Bocce

A Christian Brother at Providence’s La Salle Academy once said, “Warren boys are only good for two things, playing sports and quahogging.”  “He may have been correct because we had so many athletes on the Council - Paul Harvey, George “Chico” Andrade, Jimmy Sousa, Alexander “Sam” Vitullo, and  Jack Flynn (the least of the five) – who rose to  local and regional recognition .”?

Chico Andrade and I were appointed to the Council’s recreation sub-committee, soon gaining approval for the creation of a Recreation Board and the use of fire insurance money for the building of an outdoor basketball court in the Laurel Park section of town.

It was then that I convinced Chico that Warren needed another bocce court, since we were restricted in using the private Italo-American Club.  We contacted William “Harpo” Tavares, the town’s highway and parks and recreation commissioner, another great Warren athlete, who said that it was a dumb idea and predicted that few citizens would use the court.  Nonetheless he yielded and we constructed  a new bocce court.

To dedicate the town’s new court, Recreation Director  Pat Abbruzzi , All American halfback with the University of Rhode Island and  MVP in the Canadian Football League, and I chaired Warren’s first – and next to last – bocce tournament.  As you might expect, the Town Council entered a team, and after recording the tourney’s only shutout, we reached the semi-finals.We then met the Italians who had the advantage… five seasoned (by definition and heritage) players, against our one, “Sam” Vitullo.   Our Cinderella run ended when we had the score doubled on us by those “Vets.”.

To quote an esteemed Councilman, not me, “We coulda been champs.

Backyard Recreation Projects, Sports Courts and Outdoor Games - Play Structures and Treehouses - Outdoor Entertainment

A Moveable Thirst, Tales and Tastes from a Season in Napa Wine Country

Sports fields, a manual for design, construction, and maintenance

Always on Sunday

Secrets in high places