RYAN S. CLARK Published 12:00 am, Monday, July 6, 2009
Artificial turf isn’t real grass, but that did not stop the Vidor football team from taking a grassroots approach to have its own indoor athletic facility.
The team raised nearly $15,000 through cookie dough sales and other fundraisers to purchase the artificial turf and install it inside the school’s old basketball gymnasium. Vidor practiced inside the facility for the first time on Monday, making it the only area school with an indoor football facility.
The facility, which will also be used for other sports, is 60 yards long and 35 yards wide.
“Well, we have a limited amount of practice fields at the high school and one of the things we tried to do is create land,” said Vidor football coach Jeff Mathews. “We thought about this old gym and we started talking to some people.”
The project cost $16,000 as the rest of the money was donated by Vidor boosters, Mathews said. Mathews said the idea for an indoor facility was discussed 10 years ago by Kenneth Butch “Ivan” Croak.
Croak, a former Vidor ISD school board member, died in August 2006 and had the football field named in his honor a month later.
Mathews said the indoor facility was recently brought up again by a Vidor alumnus.
The old gym was only being used by physical education classes as Vidor built a new gym for its basketball and volleyball teams in 2005.
Mathews said the school’s band director let the athletic program use the band field to practice, but there was only one true practice field on campus.
“The field that we and soccer use is in front of the school and it’s about regulation size believe it or not,” Mathews said. “We will continue to use that field, but there are going to be days where because of dew and rain we will go inside.”
Mathews said his players were extremely receptive about having an indoor facility and started raising money in March 2008.
Junior Matt Knesel, who plays football and soccer, said the facility was a good idea because it would raise morale across the school’s athletic programs.
“We did whatever we could to raise money,” Knesel said. “We sold everything from having fish fries to selling cookie dough. It wasn’t hard to sell the cookie dough. That stuff is good straight from the box. You don’t even have to cook it.”
Unless other area schools happen to have an old gym lying around, it would take selling a lot of cookie dough to build an indoor facility.
Port Neches-Groves football coach Brandon Faircloth said when he was coaching at Odessa Permian, it cost the school $1 million to build a facility.
“There are a lot of programs that have one and you want to keep up with the Joneses and not put your kids at a disadvantage,” said Faircloth, who is entering his first season at PN-G. “It’s probably not common, but a lot of the top programs had them. It’s something I’d like to work on (at PN-G) sooner or later.”
Faircloth, who also coached at Austin Westlake and Highland Park, estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the state’s Class 5A and 4A schools have indoor facilities.
But one thing Faircloth does have is Field Turf at the recently renovated Indian Stadium.
Mathews said Vidor looked at replacing the football stadium’s natural grass with artificial turf, but it just wasn’t cost efficient.
“When I first got this job, this was something Ivan and I talked about,” Mathews said. “Even though Ivan won’t be here to see it, his grandson will have a chance to play and practice on it in a few years.”
