LOCKPORT – Wet grounds at Wrigley Field? Not so good.

A wet landing area for Wrigley Fields? An absolute necessity.

Fields, a Lockport sophomore, won the diving competition Saturday in the boys sectional swimming and diving meet that Lockport hosted. That earned him a berth, along with 47 other divers from around Illinois, in the state meet Friday and Saturday at New Trier in Winnetka.

That means another group of kids who will have an opportunity to ask him about his name.

“I don’t mind at all,” Fields said. “My name is very accepted. Having people ask about it and comment on it never gets old. It’s unique. It gets me a lot of attention.

“I love it.”

Fields grew up in Lockport, in the shadow of Lockport East. He said his dad, Jerry, is a huge Cubs fan, and his mom, Kathy, also roots for the reigning World Series champions.

“Yeah, I’m a Cubs fan, too,” Fields said.

His diving coach with the Porters, Angie Arnold, said she also loves the Cubs.

“I felt like I had to get Wrigley a good-luck thing for state,” she said. “So I gave him a Cubs shirt.”

Fields, who will make his first state appearance, would like nothing better than to feed off the success the Cubs enjoyed last baseball season. But if it doesn’t happen this weekend, it might later.

“I always try to do my best under pressure,” he said. “But if it doesn’t work out the way I’d like, I still have two years left.”

The only Joliet-area diver who qualified for state, Fields ranked 30th in sectional points (with 423.10) from among the 48 who qualified.

“We pick his five best dives for state and hope he can hit those,” Arnold said. “They cut to 16 after five rounds. He would have to hit every one of his dives to make that cut. Then after rounds six, seven and eight, they cut to the top 12 for Saturday’s finals.”

Arnold is in her first year coaching diving at Lockport, where Jason Ozbolt is the boys swimming coach.

“Wrigley trains pretty hard,” she said. “He’s worked a lot on mental focus and fundamentals. We have done a lot of dry-land work and a lot of repetition so he can hit his dives at the meets.

“He’s happy to get to state, and I’m happy he’s going.”

“To be in the state meet is really big,” Fields said. “That was my big goal this year. I beat one of the school’s records, too, the six-dive, frosh-soph record.

“I was seeded first going into the sectional, but the seeding doesn’t matter. One bad day can knock you out, and any diver can have a bad day. I did OK, but I feel I could have done a lot better. Two dives that could have been better got me.”

Although Fields did not dive until last year, his freshman year, he showed the assets of a diver early on. The Fields family had a backyard pool when Wrigley was growing up.

“My dad used to throw me up in the air when I was real little, and I would practice gymnastic flips and land in the pool,” he said.

Gymnastics always has been a favorite.

“I played baseball for three years when I was younger and liked it, and I played some basketball, too,” Fields said. “But I fell in love with gymnastics.

“The problem was I was getting hurt too much and was costing my parents too much in medical bills. So I got out of it and started cheerleading. Our middle school won state cheerleading when I was in eighth grade.”

Meanwhile, he had a sister who was in diving, and Fields decided to give that a try.

“I saw right away that I had a knack for it,” he said. “I’ve always been able to flip, but the board work in diving is the big thing. I’m still working on that.”

If he masters the board work and makes a splash at this weekend’s state meet, there is no problem with declaring the Cubs’ magic is at work for the kid named Wrigley Fields.