By John Raffel
Football has a new look in Mount Pleasant this season for both the public school and for Sacred Heart Academy.
On the field, that is.
Synthetic turf was installed in the stadium that houses both football teams. The turf was purchased by local fund-raising efforts at a cost of around $580,000.
The project has plenty of people excited, including Rick Roberts, the football coach and athletic director at Sacred Heart.
It’s the 50th anniversary season of Community Memorial Stadium, which is on Mount Pleasant High School property, but which has been shared by both schools since 1965, Roberts said.
“It’s special that this is the 50th year of it. What we decided to do is on opening night, Aug. 28, a Friday, is have a doubleheader that night,” Roberts said.
Sacred Heart plays its traditional opener against Beal City at 5 p.m. Mount Pleasant plays Midland Dow at 8 p.m. A dedication ceremony is set for the previous evening.
“Over the years I’ve been at Sacred Heart, my 23rd year, and at the end of the year, if we have some bad weather along week seven, eight, and nine and you make the playoffs, and get to host a game, the field has not been in that great of shape,” Roberts said. “We have quite often played at [Central Michigan University] as our home field and had to pay rent for that. You’re not guaranteed you’ll be hosting a playoff game.
“But it does make it possible for both teams to host playoff games. It makes it possible for youngsters that watch the football program and play Rocket football to play more games than they’ve had before. They play on Saturdays. For Mount Pleasant High School, it opens up the opportunity to play soccer games. You can play on that field and you’re not going to beat it up. The band can practice on it, you name it. It can be used nightly. As long as it’s maintained, and we have a groomer and been shown how to use it…”
At a preseason workout, Sacred Heart’s players had a chance to use the field. “They just love it,” Roberts said. “It’s a fast surface. You don’t have holes, you don’t have divits. I think it’s outstanding. It’s grass-like in nature, so kids can wear regular football cleats. You’re never going to have a bad night on that stuff. It drains fantastic. It was 2009 when we played Fulton-Middleton at CMU in a playoff game. It was raining cats and dogs, but nobody was slipping. Imagine playing a football game during a downpour on grass. Nobody does anything. You get on turf, you can still have a 35-30 game in the rain.”
Josh Wheaton is the chairman of the Mount Pleasant Pillars of the Community, which led the fund-raising for the project It’s a committee of 10 that’s in the process of getting non-profit status and operates through the sports boosters.
“We’ll continue to fund-raise for future improvements for the stadium,” Wheaton said.
“We’re a different group of community members that raise funds for improvements for Community Memorial Stadium,” he said. “It was built by a group of people from both schools.”
The committee, which has members representing both schools, was formed in late September 2014 with the idea of raising enough money to put artificial turf in the stadium and to add a decorative donor wall within the stadium built by bricks purchased by community members.
Pillarsforturf.com is the website at which one can purchase a brick or make a monetary donation to the project.
“There’s two different size bricks they can purchase,” Wheaton said. “An 8 inch by 8 inch was $1,000 and a smaller brick was $250. Then we had a 5½ foot pillar, a column, that one could purchase for $10,000 and a [larger] pillar one could purchase for $25,000. We sold 18 pillars. He had seven large pillars for $175,000 and 11 small ones.”
There was a monetary donation of $200,000 from the Morey Foundation.
The installation started in June, and the field was ready to go by the third week in July. The turf was installed by Pro Grass Turf from Pennsylvania. The committee’s cost was $580,000, which included $250,000 of in-kind work done by several contractors in the area.
“We saved quite a bit of money by local businesses doing the work,” Wheaton said. “We reworked the entrance. We have a new entrance to the stadium, which is very nice. We’ve raised enough money to pay for the entire project, plus we have $35,000 in reserve that we’ll start to use toward the next phase. There’s other things we’d like to do.”
Future improvements include renovating the pressbox and the fencing around the stadium. A new scoreboard, donated by Isabella Bank, is also set to be installed next year.