Stadium project making steady progress

By Brian Dzenis

bdzenis@vindy.com

BEAVER TOWNSHIP

The fall sports season is only a few weeks old, but already there are folks at South Range looking toward fall 2017.

That’s the time when the school’s new and currently unnamed turf field could be ready for football season. Sitting across the street from the school, the field currently hosts boys and girls soccer games. It’s painted up like a football field and has the goalposts, but currently lacks a scoreboard and enough bleachers to host football game.

“We’re getting there. Everything is coming along right now. It never comes fast enough,” Raiders athletic director Don Feren said. “When you’ve got the turf, you want to go out. You want the bleachers, but everything takes money and money takes time to get.”

Feren wasn’t inclined to guarantee the privately-funded project would be done in time for next fall, but athletic booster club president Randy Dominguez is more optimistic. He said it will take $1 million to get to the bare minimum — a scoreboard, lights and bleachers — to host football games. It will take another million to complete the entire project.

“I’m very confident we can reach our goal for next fall,” Dominguez said. “The biggest question — and I don’t want to jump to that just yet because we haven’t got to our immediate goal of phase two — but the question mark is getting that final million.”

The idea for a new stadium has kicked around since the new school opened in 2010, but the actual planning began last spring. Memorial Field has served as South Range’s home field since 1955 and has undergone various renovations over the years, but having a stadium in North Lima and the school five miles away in Beaver Township wasn’t ideal.

“The school is here. They have soccer and football games over there and basically you have to bus everything over. You have to use vans to take all the equipment over. It’s like going on another away game,” Feren said. “Here, the kids change in their locker rooms. They can drive over, they can walk over and you’re here.”

Some of the hangups with bringing in the funds have been potential donors not reaching out when school was out of session and the South Range community being smaller than other municipalities that raised funds for a stadium, like Boardman.

“It’s not a big community and it’s a privately funded operation. We are limited to some extent as far as how much money is out there that (people) are willing to put into something like this and we understand that,” Dominguez said. “With some of these businesses donating, it takes time and planning between us and them. They have to wait until it’s a good time for them.

“I think the money is there, it’s just a question of how soon it will come into a reality,” he added.

The naming rights to the field, track and scoreboard are being negotiated, Dominguez said. The boosters have reached out to their Boardman counterparts for advice, especially for the early stages of the campaign. With the school year back under way, Dominguez said the project can go back into people’s minds and spur a desire to have the school’s football team to have a modern home-field advantage.

“It is exciting,” Dominguez said of the project. “It’s going to be good for the school. It’s going to be good for the community.”