Mike Fields might be slightly afraid to walk on a high school campus these days.

Somebody might want to name something after him.

Fields, 57, the only baseball coach that Harmony High School has had in six seasons, was the longtime coach at rival St. Cloud High School (1980-95, 1997-98 and 2003-04) and also taught and served as athletic director in his 25 years there.

He led the Bulldogs to district baseball championships in 1985 and 1994 (They haven't won since). To honor Fields, who has amassed more than 500 career coaching victories in Florida and in his native Indiana, the school dedicated its locker room as the Mike Fields Clubhouse during what the honoree thought was just a gathering and informal game of Bulldog alumni on Jan. 29 at the school's Burke Chisholm Field.

“I feel very fortunate. I was very surprised,” he said. “The best part was that a lot of my older players were there to share it with.”

What makes the honor more special is that it's becoming a habit. Near the end of last baseball season, Harmony High named the Mike Fields Baseball Complex in his honor. The Longhorns were district champions in 2008, in just the program's fourth season.

A sign was commissioned and put in place over the St. Cloud High School baseball clubhouse door at the alumni gathering. The bestowal of history was the brainchild of Bulldogs' Athletic Director Chad Ansbaugh, who said he hopes it will be the first of a handful of such honors.

Ansbaugh, Fields' son-in-law and a 1992 St. Cloud alumnus himself, said this was completely done with the school's history in mind.

“He's one of a handful of coaches I'd like to see honored. It's sort of on my, 'AD bucket list,'” he said. “It wasn't done just to make me or my family happy. You look around and there's no ties around here to the people who make up our athletic past, I just wanted to reconnect to that.

“The strength of St. Cloud was some of these faces like Mike who coached here and was an AD here. And you want to do things for the people when they are still able to enjoy it.”

Current Bulldogs Coach Jim Moran will be in St. Cloud's dugout for the first time when the season starts later this month after spending 2003-09 guiding Poinciana's program. He thinks of Fields less as a competitor and more as a fellow member of the county's coaching community.

So how does he feel having a rival's name sitting atop his team's locker room door?

“I liked the idea. I bought the sign,” he said.

Some may see the move as odd, considering how the St. Cloud-Harmony rivalry has become hotly-contested in every sport since Harmony opened in 2004. But Ansbaugh said that much of that is something that gives the athletes a higher sense of something to play for.

“Underneath everything most people see, we're a tight group in this county,” he said. “I must talk to Debbie (Remsberg, Harmony's former athletic secretary) two or three times a week.

Fields' sons Trent, a junior at Harmony, and Chase, an eighth-grader, are coming of age, and he's said he would like to coach them through their high school careers.

“I just don't want to be turning up on any postage stamps soon,” Fields said.