The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Kirtland playoff game moved to Chardon
The Kirtland football team is going on the road for its Oct. 24 playoff game against Sandy Valley.
Athletic Director Matt Paul confirmed to The News-Herald the Kirtland-Sandy Valley game will be played at Chardon’s Memorial Field.
Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. Oct. 24. “It’s a bigger venue, and it has turf,” Paul said for reasons to move the game to Chardon.
Persistent rain this week has soaked Kirtland’s Rogers Field — a grass playing surface.
So if the game remained there, it’s highly likely the game would be played in a sloppy, mud mess — even with temperatures climbing and clouds lifting later this week.
Another reason, Paul said, is attendance.
Per the OHSAA’s directives on crowd sizes during this pandemic with the coronavirus, schools are permitted as having 15% of its capacity at its games.
Chardon’s Memorial Field has a much higher capacity than that of Kirtland’s Rogers Field.
“Our seating capacity is 5,025,” Chardon AD Doug Snyder said. “Fifteen percent of that is 757. So we are permitted to sell 757 tickets for outdoor events at Memorial Field. According to Matt, that’s much more than they could hold.”
Snyder said Paul contacted him at the beginning of the week to inquire about an alternative site.
“We didn’t have anything going on Saturday here, so yeah, we were happy to help them out,” Snyder said.
Kirtland moving its game to Chardon for this week’s playoff game means the top-ranked Division III team in Ohio (Chardon) and the top-ranked Division V team in Ohio (Kirtland) will be playing at Memorial Field this weekend.
“It’s going to be an exciting weekend here,” Snyder said. “We’re looking forward to it.”
Kirtland is no stranger to playing on artificial turf, as the Hornets have made deep playoff runs predominantly on turf the past decade-plus.
This year alone, Kirtland has played on artificial turf — and at bigger venues than at Rogers Field — in road games against Lake Catholic, Shaker Heights and Solon.
Kirtland (6-0) enters the game with Sandy Valley with a 36-game winning streak and two straight 15-0 state championship seasons. The Hornets haven’t lost a game since the D-VI state championship game of 2017 against Marion Local.
Sandy Valley (6-2) is the last team to have led Kirtland in a football game. The Cardinals led the Hornets in the second quarter in a D-V playoff opener last season.
The Hornets have since gone 10 games in a row without trailing on the scoreboard.