Last week, the Boston Planning and Development Agency’s board of directors approved a plan to build a new $50 million fieldhouse in Dorchester’s Columbia Point neighborhood. The vote was unanimous, and for good reason: This project, once completed, will be a game-changer for the kids in our city who deserve the sort of state-of-the-art, indoor facility that will be built along Mt. Vernon Street.

The fieldhouse project is special, in part, because of the team that has been planning it for the last several years: The Boys and Girls of Dorchester and the Martin Richard Foundation. (Full disclosure: My son, John Forry, served on a city-led committee that gave oversight to the project; my wife, Linda, serves on the BGCD board.)

Once built out, the Dorchester Fieldhouse will offer year-round recreational opportunities for city kids, with a particular emphasis on the students next door at the McCormack Middle School. It will also welcome youth from across the city, many of whom have had to travel far outside Boston limits to find facilities like this one in which to compete or practice.

There’s plenty left to do to get this facility built, including an ambitious fundraising effort by the BGCD and the Richard Foundation. But it will succeed. And when it opens, our kids and teens will get a world-class facility in their own backyard, one that they richly deserve. – Bill Forry

Personnel File
The Dorchester Reporter is pleased to welcome Seth Daniel to our full-time staff in the role of news editor this month. Seth has lived in the Four Corners area of Dorchester with his wife and children since 2003. He and his family are deeply rooted in our neighborhood’s social, school, sports, and civic circles.

After growing up in the Ozarks area of rural Missouri, Daniel attended Ohio Wesleyan University and graduated with a degree in journalism and a concentration in fine arts photography while also serving as the editor-in- chief of the campus newspaper. He worked as an intern and apprentice reporter at the Akron Beacon Journal before coming to Boston in the mid-1990s, where he first wrote for the Jamaica Plain and Mission Hill Gazettes.

He later began a career with the Independent News Group as a partner in 2000, covering beats in Charlestown, the South End, Jamaica Plain, Everett, Revere, and Chelsea. He has acted as a contributor to the Reporter since last fall before becoming news editor this month.

Seth joins an editorial staff that includes Ed Forry, our co-founder and publisher emeritus; Tom Mulvoy, associate editor; Bill Forry, the executive editor, and Gintautas (Gin) Dumcius, our managing editor, who returned to his reporting roots here in Dorchester in 2021.

Gin and his wife Amy welcomed their first child, Emily, in December. As such, Gin will be on paternity leave effective March 16 through the end of May. While he is away from the Reporter attending to far more important matters, he will not be available to cover stories. Fortunately, the newsroom will get some welcome help from one of our esteemed former editors and reporters, Jennifer Smith. Jenn, who is a co-host of the weekly Massachusetts political podcast The Horse Race, will be keeping a close watch on Dorchester development, Boston City Hall, and the comings-and-goings in her corner of the neighborhood, Columbia-Savin Hill.

Readers and sources who have information to pass along or story ideas can reach us by sending an e-mail to newseditor@dotnews.com.
-B.F.