From the Racetrack to the Trails: CGR Gives Back on Green Sports Day

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INDIANAPOLIS — Chip Ganassi Racing employees traded race cars for paint brushes Tuesday, spending three hours at Eagle Creek Park as part of the team’s second consecutive Green Sports Day volunteer effort.

About two dozen CGR employees spent Oct. 6 scraping and painting the EagleCreek Trail headquarters and its surrounding fence, tackling a project park officials said had been waiting years for attention.

For CGR, the work was part of a broader commitment to sustainability that extends beyond the racetrack and into the communities where the team lives and races.

“This is our second year coming out on October 6th. It is Green Sports Day, and we are doing our part to be good neighbors as part of Green Sports Alliance,” said Kate Wickwire, who leads CGR’s sustainability program. “We come out, we ask what they need the most help with in the moment.”

Last year, that meant getting dirty.

CGR employees helped restore an educational reflecting pond near Eagle Creek Park’s ornithology center, hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of accumulated material from the site. This year, park officials pointed the group toward a different need: restoring the trail headquarters used by the volunteers who maintain Eagle Creek’s roughly 20 miles of trails across more than 3,300 acres.

“This year we are helping paint both the building and the fence and just trying to make things look fresh and clean for the volunteers and the staff here at Eagle Creek,” Wickwire said. “This also ties into our sustainability goals and our efforts. We always want to give back to our community, both our local community here in Indy and the communities in which we race.”

For Indianapolis Parks, groups such as CGR can make an immediate difference.

Amy Anderson, senior manager of community partnerships for Indy Parks, helps coordinate volunteer groups across the system’s 218 parks in Marion County. With limited staff and resources, Anderson said projects that can be completed by a volunteer group in an afternoon might otherwise take park employees weeks to finish.

“What you guys can do with a group this size in three hours, our staff with just a couple people here, it might take a month to get done,” Anderson said. “So really, the impact is immediate.”

Indy Parks works with more than 100 volunteer groups throughout the year, with projects selected based on the park’s greatest needs and the season. Some groups handle landscaping or trail cleanup. The CGR group took on the more labor-intensive work of scraping and painting the trail headquarters.

Anderson said having CGR return for a second year is particularly valuable.

“We’re really excited that your group is a recurring group because every spring or fall it helps us out,” she said.

The relationship began last year when Wickwire contacted the park as part of CGR’s efforts to become more involved in community green spaces.

That first visit produced a sizable result.

Park volunteer Jack Patterson said approximately 100 cubic yards of material ultimately had to be removed from the reflecting pond project. CGR employees removed roughly one-third of it — about 33 cubic yards — during their three-hour shift.

“It was incredible,” Patterson said. “They did it in three hours.”

Patterson knows how much volunteer labor matters at Eagle Creek.

He contributes between 400 and 500 volunteer hours each year and said he and his wife, Katie, hike at Eagle Creek every day, rain or shine. Their grandsons also consider the park their favorite place, giving Patterson a personal stake in keeping it maintained.

“I’m passionate about the park,” Patterson said. “We’re here every day, so it’s in our personal interest — and our grandsons, because this is their favorite place in the world — to make it shine.”

That is why seeing a group of roughly two dozen people arrive and complete in hours what a small group of regular volunteers might struggle to accomplish was significant.

Patterson said six to 12 regular trail volunteers typically meet on Wednesdays. The trail headquarters had needed the work for years, he said, and those volunteers were going to see a dramatically different building when they arrived the following day.

“They won’t believe it when they really show up,” Patterson said.

The CGR employees brought a little of their racing mentality to last year’s project, too. While hauling material from the reflecting pond, they split into teams and competed to see which group could move the most wheelbarrows per hour — turning a park cleanup into another kind of competition.

For Wickwire, getting employees to volunteer has rarely been difficult. She said CGR employees have consistently responded to community initiatives, from the Eagle Creek projects to previous food and toy drives.

“Any time I ever try and get volunteers for anything community-related, everyone just really steps up,” Wickwire said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Sure. How can I help? What do you need?’”

And while Green Sports Day provided the occasion, Wickwire said Indianapolis itself provides the motivation.

“Indianapolis is obviously very important to us,” she said. “We wouldn’t be here without all of our fans and our local support of Indianapolis. That’s sports, right? So anything we can do to help Indy, we will do it.”