Community project: players, supporters gather to resod practice field

A crowd of football players, parents and volunteers lined up on the Neosho High School practice field on Thursday evening, pulling fresh sod into place.

Planning for the overnight transformation started early this week. The school district had the area graded and seeded, but any other improvements were not included in this year’s budget.

That all changed with a little community help.

After visiting the school for a meeting Tuesday evening, a few community members started talking. By 11 p.m. that night they had a plan, and by 10 a.m. Wednesday morning they had scheduled the sod delivery and secured approval from the school district.

Mike Spiva and Brett Day helped plan the project.

“This area has been known for 20-plus years as the ‘rock garden,’” Spiva said.

Rocks and broken glass filled the practice field. The grass seed, he added was a Band-Aid solution. Football players have volunteered delivering food baskets, and cleaning Hickory Creek.

“The least they deserve is grass to play on,” Spiva said.

Between youth and high school football, the field receives almost daily use, Day said.

“The youth coaches have made a lot of fans here in town for the work they’ve done,” Day said. “They’ve inspired us.”

The field improvement will be good for the school and good for the community, he added.

As the sod was rolled out, youth football, high school football team members and friends of the program helped tug it into place.

A few calls the night before resulted in almost 50 young people to help with the sod installation.

“We’ve got youth football players, we’ve got high school players, we’ve got coaches, we’ve got parents, we’ve got boosters – a great effort, said Shawn Flannigan, head football coach.

In summer school classes earlier in the day, he recruited some of the youth players.

“I said, ‘Guys, this is your future field, why don’t some of you come out and help a little bit?’” Flannigan said.

He hopes for a new name for the now grassy field and said the school will take more ownership of the field to make sure it stays in good shape.

“I think what needs to be known is that there are people spending a lot of money to put this sod down on the field so that the football team can have a quality surface and a safe surface,”

Flannigan said. “People need to understand that it’s not for everybody to come out and use, it’s not the community playground.”

For every group who uses the field it will be a vast improvement.

“It’s going be a good situation for everyone involved who uses the field associated with the school,” he said.

Volunteers started arriving early Thursday afternoon and they expected to be done by midnight.

“A landscaping crew doing this would have taken two or three days,” Spiva said.

The plan initially was to blanket the graded center field with the sod, but at 5 p.m. most of the graded dirt was covered and organizers has a second truck of sod on the way from Mt. Vernon.

“I think we’re going to have a whole field when we’re done,” Spiva said as the “all-volunteer army” worked to lay the 30,000-square-feet of sod.

Day said the way the project came together demonstrates the strength of community in Neosho. Some donated labor, some time, some money.

“It’s a community project,” Day said.

Daily News Publisher Rick Rogers contributed to this report.