Great American Ball Park Dugout Roofs, Cincinnati, Ohio
by Kelly O’Brien

When the Cincinnati Reds had to redo two cracked and peeling dugout roofs, they needed a decorative concrete contractor who could not only repair the cracked slabs, but get that Reds red right.

Fortunately, David Stephenson and his company, American Concrete Concepts Inc., are color experts. “We’re really good with color,” says Stephenson. “You want purple concrete, we’re the guys to talk to.”

They were also, evidently, the guys to talk to about red concrete — after some experimentation, Stephenson and his team managed to produce an overlay in the precise shade of the Reds’ logo.

While matching that color was quite a challenge, it was not, by a long shot, the worst obstacle they faced when they were hired to refinish the dugouts at the team’s Great American Ball Park three years ago.

The dugout tops — concrete slabs, roughly 10 feet by 100 feet each — were in bad need of help for a number of reasons. For one thing, they were painted. For another, Cincinnati’s climate is not the most gentle in the country. Between the snow and ice of Ohio winters and the blistering heat of the summers, the paint got a regular beating just from being outside. “It gets real hot in the summer,” says Stephenson. “The paint boils off!”