Fillmore Central football fans will find things look a lot different when they head out to the home field in Harmony for the season opener on Friday, August 30th, against United South Central. After a couple of years of plans and discussions, as well as several months of hard work, the football facility upgrades all but completed. Falcons’ head coach (and Athletic Director) Chris Mensink said the upgrade idea got started because of very little room on the home sideline.
Falcons didn’t have enough room
“Our home sideline was right on a hillside,” he said, “which meant there were some safety issues. We talked initially about sliding the field away from the hill but were limited because we host junior high baseball on that same field. The question was how do we do that slide things over?
“We ended up moving the baseball field up behind the community center where we practice football,” he said. “The school owns all that practice area up there. Once we found a new place to put the baseball field, that kickstarted the process of putting a football-only facility together.”
He said sliding the field to give the team more room on the sideline, as well as adding in a 500-seat grandstand, eventually led to a larger-scale renovation process. Eventually, the project included new lights, crowning the field, and putting in a new watering system. “We’re now building a structure to hold the concession stand, a ticket area, some new bathrooms, and a locker room for the referees,” he said.
Mensink said the Falcons the kids were “basically standing on a hillside and couldn’t have any benches on their sideline.” Back when the district built the press box, they added a bunch of fill to the area so the fans could see over the top of the kids standing on the sideline.
Safety concerns
“That made the sideline really tight to the hill,” Mensink said. “If we had a player get injured, he wouldn’t be able to sit on a bench along the sideline because of that hill. If they tried to sit on a table so the trainer could look them over, the tables would tip over.
“Also, the area where the old concession stand sat was fenced,” he added. “That fence was a little tight to the back corner of the end zone. If a player went too far out of the back of the end zone, they were running into that fence and we don’t want kids getting hurt.”
When a football field doesn’t have a crown on it, that’s when it can get flooded by heavy rainfall. “The soil contained a lot of clay, which made it really hard,” Mensink said. “We were having a hard time keeping grass on it, so the surface wasn’t what it should be. When we took a hard look at the field, we decided to do this right and crown the field.”
Crowning the field
For those who don’t know, crowning a football field is a lot of work. Workers start the project by removing the topsoil from the field. “They brought in a sandy mixture of soil as soon as we were done playing last fall,” Mensink recalled. “You use that sandy soil to build the crown. After that, workers brought in eight inches of black dirt and piled it on top of the sandier soil last spring. They re-graded everything, slid it over to where it needed to be, and that’s when we put the sod down.”
School officials even talked about flipping the field, so it ran north and south instead of east and west. Mensink said that would have involved a lot of extra work, including moving the crow’s next.
Thanks to everyone who helped
He said they wouldn’t be able to make improvements of this magnitude without the support of the administration. “The district has been putting some money away in their building fund,” Mensink said. “The fund balance helped us make a lot of improvements at the football field and helps with ongoing projects at the school building.”
Falcon fans will be sitting on the other sideline this fall. Mensink said officials put in a 500-foot grandstand that will be “nice and close to the action,” and everyone will have a great view of the game. He said the field has a “nice crown on it” and looks “really nice.”
Mensink thanks everyone who helped out. He says the list of everyone who helped with the project is gigantic. “We put sod down with a great deal of volunteer help,” Mensink recalled. “We put down five semi loads of sod in a day, which was an amazing cost-saving for our district.
“Scheevel and Sons Construction handled all of the gradings on this project,” he said. “Stateline Cement did all the cement work for areas underneath the bleachers, for the sidewalks, and the concession areas. Morem’s Electric handled all the electrical work. VIS Plumbing handled all the plumbing work at the facility.”
Fillmore Central fans will get to enjoy the new facility right away as three of the first four games of the fall season will be on the Falcons’ home field.