In Boardman, athletic complex is taking shape

By Rick Rouan

BOARDMAN — Wrestlers grappling in a warehouse might sound like a movie montage, but it has been reality in Boardman.

The Boardman High School wrestling team rented a warehouse on McClurg Road to train about 25 wrestlers. Though the thought might inspire visions of Rocky Balboa punching a hunk of meat, the conditions were far from Hollywood glamour.

The warehouse was small and poorly ventilated, leaving wrestlers susceptible to fungal diseases that already are common in the sport.

“Those small rooms with lack of ventilation; we used to get a lot of ringworm and injuries because everyone was running into each other,” said Dom Mancini, Boardman’s head wrestling coach.

Now the district is set to open a 6,500-square-foot, $481,000 sports complex behind Glenwood Middle School in the fall. The wrestling team primarily will use the complex, which will have room for two full mats, but baseball and softball teams will use it, too.

“If you’re going to have a varsity sport, you should provide proper facilites for it,” said Frank Lazzeri, the district’s superintendent.

Voters rejected a $51.5 million bond issue that would have upgraded all the district’s schools and built a bigger sports complex and new football stadium three years ago, Lazzeri said. Instead, the school took out a 30-year, $6 million loan to pay for the complex and improvements to two elementary schools.

The district plans to repay the loan with the lion’s share of its permanent improvement levy, which generates about $900,000 a year, Lazzeri said.

“The board still has responsibility of making sure we have proper facilities,” he said.

In 2003, state inspectors told the district that five of its seven buildings needed to be replaced, said Jim Massey, the district’s director of operations. He said the high school is the newest building in the district, and it was erected 40 years ago.

Both Massey and Lazzeri lamented that voters did not want to help pay for new athletics facilities.

“People aren’t real comfortable passing millage for athletic facilities,” Lazerri said. “People feel education is about keeping those ‘Excellent’ report cards coming in.”

Massey said the district needed to focus on classrooms, but “on the same note, you can’t have wrestlers renting space at the mall and places on McClurg road and that.”

The district is putting in some classrooms, too. The trailers that have handled the overflow of students from Stadium Drive Elementary and Robinwood Lane Elementary since 1964 will disappear when the district completes additions to both schools in 2010.

The additions, which will cost $2.8 million and $2.6 million respectively, will eliminate the need for transporting students from the elementary schools to the trailers.

Bids for the additions were due Tuesday, and the district likely will award contracts at the next board meeting July 27, Massey said.

Lazzeri said crews probably would break ground before the end of summer.

“Forty-five years later, we’re finally addressing this,” Lazzeri said.

rrouan@vindy.com