Copper theft at Kaminski Park cripples Highlands Little League lights and scoreboards

Copper thieves left Kaminski Park in the dark over Mother’s Day weekend, cutting power to the fields, scoreboards and press box at Highlands Little League’s home in Highlands, Texas, and forcing night games off the schedule.

Austin Moore said he got the call on Mother’s Day morning and found the gate open with wires scattered across the park. The damage was more than a nuisance. Moore estimated repairs would run about $8,000, a heavy hit for a volunteer-run youth nonprofit that exists to keep kids on the field in east Harris County.

The outage shut down the park’s electrical system, taking out the lights that make evening games possible. Highlands Little League said the immediate loss was clear: no power for the fields, no working scoreboards and no press box service until repairs could be made. The league found a temporary fix through lights donated by Sunbelt Rentals in Crosby, allowing the season to continue for now, but the long-term cost and security needs remain unresolved.

The theft also landed with the sting of familiarity. Kaminski Park has been targeted before. In 2015, thieves reportedly stole about 2,500 feet of copper wiring from the park, leaving two of the league’s four fields without electricity. One report that year said copper thieves hit the Highlands Little League field three times. More recently, the league said tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment was stolen over several days in December 2024, with thefts reported on Dec. 7 and again on Dec. 9.

That pattern has made the latest break-in more than a one-night setback. It has become part of a recurring burden for a league that was started in 1963 and remains a volunteer-operated nonprofit chartered with Little League International. At 925 E Canal Rd in Highlands, the park depends on donated labor, local support and the kind of patchwork fixes that can keep youth baseball going after repeated damage.

For families, the loss reaches beyond copper and wiring. It means canceled games, dark fields and more pressure on parents, coaches and volunteers to cover costs and preserve a season built around neighborhood kids. The thieves may have taken only a few scraps of metal, but the disruption hit a community gathering place that has spent years trying to recover from the same kind of theft over and over again.