Ridgewood excited for new field house
Ridgewood High School athletes started off their fall seasons with a brand-new field house.
The building, which took about eight months to construct, features a weight room, locker room for the football teams and office for the football coaches and will have an indoor batting cage with turf.
“This isn’t just for football,” superintendent Mike Masloski said. “All of our groups are using it. It’s the best locker room I’ve seen.”
Athletic director Matt Colvin agreed the kids are enjoying the new facility. “They love it,” he said. “Every time they walk in here they are in awe. Any athlete in high school would love this. If we were going to do something, we were going to do it right, and that’s the impression we want to make on these kids.”
In addition to helping the athletes train, the new field house also celebrates the football team’s history of success and the school’s philosophies of pride and loyalty.
“All of these pictures in here, Justin Seibert, our photographer and one of our teachers, looked for,” Colvin said. “He did a tremendous job, and we have headlines from articles mixed in with the pictures.”
Above the door to the weight room also is a count for how many IVC championships the football team has won. The number is displayed on a flip chart so more can easily be added.
“We are big on preserving our past,” Colvin said. “The kids learn to live up to it and appreciate it.”
In the weight room there are pictures of each of the IVC championship football teams and more photos of Generals in action. The new equipment also has reinforced flooring around it so dropping weights won’t ruin the floor, and Crozier Welding created unique Ridgewood-themed hooks for weight belts.
“Our Block ‘R’ Foundation was huge with all this,” Colvin said. “They did a lot of the work for fundraising. We also got donations from Jeff Drennen, the Coshocton Foundation and from some other local people. All of our contractors were local people. Everything we could get done locally we did.”
The new facility also helps with scheduling places for teams to practice and change.
“For the longest time we had to do a lot of shuffling with the middle school,” Colvin said. “Now our kids can dress in here, and the old weight room will be the visiting locker room. Our high school (football) kids never had their own locker room before. When they built the new high school, the locker room there wasn’t practical for football.”
The football team has 70 students grade 9-12, but only 59 lockers were able to fit in the new facility. Freshmen have a designated spot for their equipment in the area housing the batting cage. The older kids have lockers designed to hold valuables and all their equipment. The area also features special flooring with the Ridgewood block “R.”
“The company who did that for us also did LSU’s locker room,” Colvin said.
“Typically, our kids dressed in the parking lot before practice,” said Chris Cabot, offensive coordinator for the football team and president of the Block “R” Foundation. “One of the nice things this has done for us is it gives our staff a central location for everything. The weight room, the locker room, our equipment storage is all here. Prior to building this, we were in three or four different locations throughout the week. On game nights we’d use the junior high locker room, during the week we’d be at the high school, and the weight room was also in a different location. The kids had to be mobile with their equipment, and they were good about it, but now they can have everything in the same spot, and it’s easier to keep track of.”
Like Colvin and Masloski, Cabot also is very appreciative of all those who made this project happen.
“The Block ‘R’ Foundation started raising money around five or six years ago with the hopes and dreams of building something like this someday,” Cabot said. “We are just really thankful for the school board, the community, local businesses, coaches and players. It’s a very nice building. We didn’t have a bad facility before, but we thought the kids deserved as nice as other schools around. When this started to become a reality, we wanted to make sure we had top-notch lockers and flooring. I’ve been around football for a good 20-25 years of my life, and this is as nice as any facility I’ve seen. Our kids are fortunate, and our staff is blessed to be in this community. We have great support, and that shines through in this facility.”
Category: High School, Multimedia, Photo Galleries, Sports
