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The bleachers and pressbox at Minster's Memorial Stadium are ready for Saturday's JV football game.
MINSTER - The new bleachers and press box at Memorial Stadium are substantially completed while work continues on the athletic boosters-led facelift of the stadium entrance and ticket booths.
School board members at a special meeting on Monday night approved a guaranteed maximum price of $447,736 from Baumer Construction of Minster for electrical, technology, concrete, fencing, asphalt, sanitary and seeding work.
"It will be usable for Saturday's JV game," superintendent Josh Meyer said of Memorial Stadium. "Now, we might have to walk around different entryways and stuff like that."
The Minster Athletic Boosters are spearheading a separate project involving substantial upgrades to the stadium.That work should be finished in time for the varsity football team's home opener against the Parkway Panthers on Sept. 13, according to Meyer.
The district-helmed project saw the demolition and replacement of aging wooden bleachers that were becoming a safety concern and an outdated press box.
"Within the last couple years, we've also had boards break while people were in the stands," Meyer had said. "Obviously once that starts to happen … that starts drawing my attention. We're talking about safety. So quite frankly, it was time."
Board members in April approved a guaranteed maximum proposal of $170,224 from Baumer Construction to raze the bleachers and press box. The work was completed in the spring.
The demolition cleared the way for the construction of a new press box and installation of new bleachers. The board awarded a $1.25 million contract to the Southern Bleacher Co. of Graham, Texas, to replace the old press box and bleachers, which date back to the construction of the stadium in 1976.
But the bleachers were used to begin with.
"The old bleachers served their purpose. They did a wonderful job. They actually came from the University of Dayton back in 1976," board member Ted Oldiges told the newspaper ahead of the special meeting. "One of the local businessmen knew that they were getting rid of them."
A bunch of men drove their trucks to Dayton, loaded up the bleachers and assembled them over a weekend at the then new stadium, Oldiges said.
"We were creating Memorial Field at that time for the eight students that had passed away in a car accident," he said.
The stadium was built in 1976 to honor the eight students - Kenneth Sommer, Scott Westerheide, Joy Brandewie, Rebecca Moorman, Lester Ranly, Barbara Olding, Michael Kemper and Anthony Kemper.
The entrance and ticket booths at Memorial Stadium in Minster are still under construction.
The athletic boosters are undertaking their own project at Memorial Stadium, building an illuminated archway entrance with brick columns on either side. The entrance will lead to a brick ticket booth with two windows.
Just beyond the ticket booth will stand a brick memorial wall that will tell the story of Memorial Stadium, according to booster president Matthew Quinter.
The athletic boosters have worked closely with the families of the eight students who died to ensure the new entrance properly recounts the stadium history, Quinter had said at a project information session in late March.
"The hope is that the story gets reinvigorated to the point where students today have the same feel from Memorial Field as what people before this (did)," Quinter said.
The athletic boosters rolled out a campaign to raise $500,000 for the project.
