They hosted the Ninth Region soccer championship here at St. Henry District High School last fall and “There was some backlash,” Principal Grant Brannen was saying Wednesday evening, “about the (grass) field.”
No artificial turf. Too many games. Weather and wear and tear issues. But did the folks at St. Henry get all huffy about their critics?
Nope, they got busy.
Like really busy. And in less than a year – “10 months, actually,” Brannen says, here they were, dedicating and blessing and ribbon-cutting a beautiful artificial turf field and upgraded athletic complex.
It took some 150 donors and right around $1 million to make the project happen. But to do it this fast, well, that’s another story.
“Normally a field like this takes three to four years,” Brannen said as he stepped in for Athletic Director Matt Schneider, whose wife went into labor earlier in the day and he had to miss the festivities. “And here we are.”
Then-principal Dave Gish, who got this all going when an original donor stepped up, did the ribbon-cutting honors. And in their places of honor were a number of boosters who did the weekly Zoom calls and delivered the fundraising packets to prospects and came up with the dollars.
Gish thought it would take two years, putting the finishing date in the fall of 2023. And yet, as Brannen said, here they were, between the JV and varsity girls’ soccer games featuring “the Cru,” as they call the Crusaders, and Highlands.
Schneider, in his prepared remarks read by Brannen, said he “thought they were crazy . . . it took an army to accomplish.”
Fr. Kevin Kahmann did the honors, blessing the field to get things going. And now for the students, alumni and parents who have spent the last couple of years dealing with COVID, they’re welcome to enjoy this place the community came together to build.
As far as raising the money, it happened “over six months,” Brannen said. Bishop John Iffert gave them the go-ahead and just like that, St. Henry also had a new pavilion, entry way, and parking tying this field to the baseball and softball field complexes.
And now they were christening this perfect turf playing surface for a soccer field – wait a minute, are those football yard lines and markers? Hey, is football happening here?
“We get that question all the time,” Brannen said with a grin. “We’re not there yet.” But they’re not all that far away, either, Brannen admits. “We’d have to start with a committee to consider it. It will take some time.”
But considering how it took a mere 10 months to get this done, time is something that moves pretty fast for the folks here on Donaldson Highway heading out to the airport.
Looking at the numbers, St. Henry, with 228 boys on the latest KHSAA enrollment report from 2020, had more boys than seven Northern Kentucky schools that now have football – Bellevue (111), Newport Central Catholic (131), Dayton (133), Ludlow (138), Bishop Brossart (142), Holy Cross (179), and Newport (200).
