LIGHT THE NIGHT
After a 3-year hiatus, community-funded lights herald return of Friday night football
POTTSTOWN » In the end, the return of Friday night football to Grigg Memorial Stadium was less about the return of the lights, and more about what they showed.
After three years of waiting, Pottstown residents showed up in force to cheer their Pottstown Trojans certainly, but even more, they showed up to be cheered by the return of something the town had lost.
Pottstown had lost that sense of all coming together on select Fridays, in the same place, on a cool evening, for a common purpose.
Jennifer Jones has not been back in the stadium since the lights were taken down three years ago.
“It was heart-breaking. It just wasn’t the same,” said Jones, whose son Terrence Shawell was the Trojan’s star quarterback in 2003 and who has returned to work for the school district.
Now she’s back too, and with two grandsons — sophomore Juelz Allen, and senior Francisco Cuascut — who were playing their first game beneath the lights.
“I’m so excited,” Jones said. So was their father and her son-in-law Lonnell Allen, himself an alum of the Pottstown Football program, who said his sons were thrilled to be playing under the lights.
“This reminds me of years
ago,” he said.
“It’s such a great way to start off the school year,” said Danielle McCoy, Pottstown High School principal and herself an alum of Pottstown High School as well.
“There’s a lot of alumni here tonight,” she said.
McCoy tightly gripped one of the shirts the cheerleading squad printed up for the occasion and which were sold out before kickoff.
Those weren’t the only things in short supply.
As the crowd packed the home side, it was immediately evident that this was no Saturday afternoon game. Both snack bars struggled to keep up with the increased demand.
On the visitor side, Pottstown Schools Music Association President Kevin Owens said by half time, the visitor-side snack bar had already run through 15 pizzas, 256 hot dogs, 100 soft pretzels, 15 pounds of ground beef and 150 bags of Doritos for their famous “Walking Tacos,” seven cases of water, four cases of Gatorade and more.
On the other side of the field, the school’s service club and student government had teamed up to sell lollipops to raise money for victims of Hurricane Harvey. It didn’t take long. All 100 were sold in less than an hour, said Jordan Thomas who, with Dee Pettine, were just a few of the dozens of school district teachers spotted in the stands — many wearing the ubiquitous “Proud to be From Pottstown” blue T-shirts which seemed to give off an extra glow on this particular Friday.
“The kids always perform better under the lights,” said High School Marching Band Director Mike Vought as he watched his squad perform their first show of the year in uniform.
“There’s a certain electricity, and I mean from the kids not on the poles,” he joked.
Police Officer Nik Stoltzfus felt it too.
He was one of two borough officers on hand and he smiled as he looked out over the scene from the top level of the home stands.
“This is what Friday night football is all about,” he said. “The kids playing in the grass on the hill. The middle school kids huddled together, trying to get the hang of things, the parents keeping an eye out. Everyone’s here.”
As much about coming together, this Friday night was also about accomplishment said Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez. “It’s one more reason to feel good about our school, our district and our community.”
That’s because it took the whole community — with a little help from Harrisburg and a few other deeppocket donors — to make it happen.
When it was determined four years ago that the poles on which the aging lights were posted were failing structurally, the school board made a fateful decision — spending $300,000 or more to replace them was an unjustifiable expense in a district shorted by as much as $5 million a year by Pennsylvania’s uneven funding system.
That left it to the community.
School board member Polly Weand picked up the ball and ran with it. But we had to go the distance, taking three years and all manner of fundraising schemes to finally reach the well-lit end zone.
There were T-shirts, yard signs, casual Fridays, donations from the music association, the teachers union, the Foundation for Pottstown Education, appeals to the NFL. Few avenues with any potential to provide funding went unexplored.
As the start of this school inched closer, and the goal inched closer, State Sen. Robert Mensch, R-24th Dist., showed up with a clutch state grant, closing the gap and then some.
“You really have reason to be proud of what you’ve done here,” Mensch told the crowd during the 30-minute half-time ceremony. “Until I came here, I really didn’t understand how important this was to this community.”
Weand, who thanked a list of donors and volunteers too long to reproduce here, put it together when she asked everyone on the home side to turn and say “thank you neighbor” for bringing the lights back to Pottstown.
“From now on, when you look at these lights, look at them as a symbol for what good things can happen when people get together, work together to make good things come true,” she said. “Pottstown, let’s keep the good things going.”