Storms force St. Francis to wait another day
After waiting three years for a true home game, what’s another day?
St. Francis’ highly anticipated varsity football home opener Friday against Riverside-Brookfield, which was to include the dedication of the glistening new Kuhn Memorial Stadium and Coach Scott Nelson Track, was postponed until 9 a.m. Saturday in Wheaton. The dedication ceremony has been moved to St. Francis’ homecoming game against Aurora Christian on Sept. 27.
St. Francis wasn’t the only local team to have its game postponed. All across northern Illinois games were switched to Saturday as athletic directors scrambled to secure referees for the rescheduled games.
“It’s pretty disappointing because I’ve waited for this for two years now,” said St. Francis senior running back James Butler, a Division I prospect, as the Spartans varsity filed out of the school library where they’d cooled their jets awaiting a decision. Butler had transferred from Bartlett prior to his junior year, but the Illinois High School Association deemed him ineligible to play last season.
“Everybody’s pretty bummed, but this doesn’t matter,” Butler said. “At least we get to play the game still. We’re still excited.”
For more than two hours after the sophomore game was suspended at 5:47 p.m., still in the third quarter — as rain poured down St. Francis was eventually declared the winner, 21-6 — officials timed the occurrence of thunder and lightning, hoping for the mandated 30-minute all-clear. Without a break in conditions by 8:10 p.m., St. Francis principal Raeann Huhn announced Saturday’s morning kickoff.
St. Francis home games had mainly been played at the College of DuPage from 2010-12 due to flooding problems at its home field.
“We were really excited for tonight, but all that matters is that we’re going to get on the field eventually and we’re going to work really hard together, and we’re going to go out and get the ‘W,’” said Spartans two-way lineman Mike Andelbradt. “Really at the end of the day you’re not going to look back and think about Friday night, you’re going to see the game that you won.”
Despite the lack of varsity football, St. Francis still hosted a major competition. The girls volleyball team hosted Mother McAuley in the Spyglass Athletic Center, a nonconference meeting between PrepVolleyball.com’s Nos. 2 and 6 teams in the country. Higher-ranked Mother McAuley defeated the Spartans in two games, 25-20 and 25-22.
“A great night for St. Francis, fabulous,” said the Spartans’ nine-time state champion coach Peg Kopec. “A lot of electricity on the campus and apparently in the air as well.”
Between those who packed the gym to watch volleyball and people herded from the football field into the school with the onset of lightning, everywhere from the Spyglass gym to the old Slant Dome and all hallways in between held a moving mass of parents, sophomore football players, cheerleaders, students, officials, coaches and busy school administrators.
Many of them will try it again Saturday.
“I’ve learned after 29 years as a head football coach and 47 as a high school football coach that you can’t control things that you can’t control. And the weather is one of them, and life goes on,” said St. Francis head coach Greg Purnell.
“The big thing is, you never let kids know that you’re disappointed and everything. You just say, ‘Hey, see you tomorrow morning.’ That’s all.”