Friday Night Lights Project

It all started back in February when the lions club was approached by the North Central Area School’s Superintendent to help the school with projects outside of the schools budget.  They wanted help with the fixing the bleachers in the gym, resurfacing the football field, new lights and poles on the football field, and a new gym floor.

A few of the club memberd went over and fixed the bleachers in an afternoon and accessed what the field would need to be done.  We got to work on setting up a fundraiser on April 28th  at the local establishment R Place owned by a  couple of Lions Club Members Troy and Amanda Veraghen.  We brought in donations from throughout the community for bucket raffles, gun raffles, and auction items.  We also got support from a local Artist and former NCA football player Leo Gorzinski IV to play music for the day,  lions club members brought in food along with Troy and Amanda donating/cooking pork for the dinner.

Our community showed up in force for the Friday Night Lights Fundraiser.  We partnered with the NCA Sports Boosters, NCA Parent Network for man power.  Within 6 hours we had raised $27,783.93 to start the field project.  Our Club got to work ordering lights, acquiring equipment, and building light brackets.  Lion Matt Bouty brought down his equipment and resurfaced/leveled the whole field.  MJ Electric stepped up and donated poles and a local employee spent a Saturday removing and installing new poles.  Next came Lions members Nathan and Sarah Fleetwood donating time from their employees to build the light brackets and painting them,  this alone saved the project 15,000 verse buying them built.

The weeks moved on and we were finally ready for install.  Again MJ Electric came out and used their crane lift the light brackets and set them on the top of the 55′ poles.  New power wires where put in the ground to power the new lights along with water lines for irrigfation.  Lion Larry Johnson spent 80 hours wiring all the lights to the poles and down to the new power source.  We were able to use ½ as many lights as before with about 1/6 of the power consumption and putting out 2.3 million lumens.  In addition, we have eliminated an additional power service saving the school $600 just in service fees.

At the end of the project we ran over budget to $30,869.79 and a total of 288 Lions club man hours.  The NCA sports boosters stepped up and covered the $3,085.86 difference in funding.  This was a huge community project that was a success and will continue to provide for the school for years to come.  The PS Lions look forward to replacing the gym floor next.  This will take us a few years of fundraising but we welcome the challenge and will continue to look to the future of our community.