GLASGOW — When Little League play resumes in Barren County on Monday, the ballpark at Red Cross Elementary School will have more than just a new coat of paint.

Volunteers from Lowe’s and a Barren County Detention Center road crew were at Red Cross on Friday, finishing the renovations they’ve been making all week to the three baseball fields on the school’s grounds.

Craig Bush, vice president of the Red Cross Youth Sports League, which uses and maintains the baseball fields, said they were in poor shape before the renovations.

“I’ve been on the board for four years and I know they needed (repairs) before then,” he said. 

The Youth Sports League is mostly self-sufficient, operating independently of both Glasgow’s and Barren County’s parks and recreation departments. Red Cross lets the league play on its campus but is otherwise uninvolved, meaning the league must pay its own expenses.   

The league applied to receive aid from Lowe’s Heroes, the home improvement store chain’s volunteer program, Bush said, adding that he’s thrilled to have gotten help from Lowe’s and the jail. 

“They were able to help us out a whole lot on the labor,” he said. “They’ve done an excellent job.”

The Lowe’s volunteers, with the help of two inmates, were putting the batting cage net back over its metal frames, which were recently repainted a bright shade of yellow. The inmates, working under road crew supervisor James Scott, were running lengths of rebar through the chain-link fences surrounding the ballparks. 

Over time, some of the fences had become warped and the bottoms of them had curled upward, according to Stacey Bush, an installed sales coordinator with Lowe’s who is married to Craig Bush. By threading the rebar through the bottoms of the fences to straighten them out, the inmates were making the area safer for children, she said. 

“There’s less chance of them getting caught, getting cut,” she said. 

According to Scott, the inmates also painted the bathroom inside and out, as well as two of the three dugouts.  

Earlier in the week, a Valspar Corp. representative stained the concession stand, three pressboxes and a storage building beside the fields, Stacey said.  

“That probably extended the life of those buildings a good bit just by getting some covering on them,” she said.

With the rebar and the painting finished and the batting cage set back up, the only renovation still to be made is installing some much-needed stronger lights in the bathrooms, which volunteers from the league will do over the weekend.

“The lighting in there’s not good,” she said. “They looked like dungeons. The kids were afraid to go in there at night.”

Stacey Bush said she expects the children who normally use the park to be excited about the changes when they see them.

“They’re going to come back on Monday and it’s going to be like having a whole new park,” she said.     

 — Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.