DAVENPORT, Iowa – Public school officials who make foolish facility design decisions are gambling with student safety and taxpayer dollars.

That was demonstrated once again last week, when a former Iowa high school baseball player was awarded more than $1 million by a jury after being hit in the head by a line drive foul ball while sitting in a school dugout.

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The incident, which occurred in 2011 at Davenport Assumption High School, left Spencer Ludman, a Muscatine High School player, with a fractured skull, swelling of the brain and a stay in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Iowa City, according to a report in the Quad-City Times.

The design of the dugout was clearly the issue in the lawsuit, according to the news report:

Evidence of a poorly engineered dugout placed too close to home plate is what a Scott County jury considered when it awarded more than $1 million to a former high school baseball player who suffered a serious head injury when he was struck by a foul ball.

Steve Crowley, Ludman’s attorney, explained that players in the dugout were extremely vulnerable, a fact that should have occurred to school officials when the baseball field was designed and constructed.

It turned out that Ludman’s own teammate, Brooks Wagner, hit the foul ball into his own dugout, resulting in the frightening injury.

“In a nutshell, the visitors dugout at Assumption High School is very close to home plate,” Crowley was quoted as saying by the Times. “It’s only 35 feet long and sits along the first base line. Only the center of the dugout is guarded by a 25-foot fence. There are two openings, one at the north end and one at the south end, each of which faces onto the playing field.

“We had witnesses say that the pitcher for Assumption threw a blistering ball. Wagner wound up and tried to hit it. He didn’t come around fast enough and he hit the ball foul.

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“I had one witness say the ball was at Spencer in milliseconds while another witness said it only took half a second to reach him.”