Knights may get chance to play on Rawson Field

It might surprise some people to learn that Kalispell has a semiprofessional football team.

The Glacier Knights have been around for eight years. But when they practice outdoors in Evergreen and play home games in Columbia Falls, they don’t always feel like a Kalispell team.

That’s why, for the last four years, the Knights have tried to lease Legends Stadium in Kalispell for home games. And after four years of being turned down, the team will get its chance to play at home in June.

Head coach Steven Biggs attended a Kalispell school board Finance and Operation Committee meeting last week to discuss the Knights’ request to use Legends Stadium.

The committee will recommend to the full board later this month that the Knights be allowed to rent Rawson Field (at Legends Stadium) for their June 11 game against the Missoula Phoenix.

The field will be monitored before and after the game to determine whether any damage occurred.

“If we can get one game, that’s better than nothing,” Biggs said. “We have our foot in the door.”

The Knights proposed four dates, two of which conflicted with high school track and field meets. A third date in April was rejected.

“With the amount of snow we’re having this year, April is probably not going to be the day” the team gets the field, committee member Mary Ruby said. “We said April was probably going to tear up the field more. It would ruin his chance” of ever renting the field again.

“They thought the first game was far too early and the field would be far too mushy,” Biggs said. “I can understand that.”

The full school board still has to approve the committee’s recommendation, and the district’s Legends Stadium lease agreement still has to be reworked, Ruby said.

The existing lease agreement includes options for renting the track with or without the press box, renting the practice fields and track, and a “night use” option that was written specifically for overnight events such as Relay for Life. There is no option for renting Rawson Field.

That was intentional, Superintendent Darlene Schottle said. Coaches and district officials worried that unpredictable weather could create conditions that might tear up the field.

“We didn’t want a regular lease with that expectation,” she said.

When Glacier High School opened, use of Legends Stadium doubled, said Mark Dennehy, Glacier’s athletic director. Overuse now is a concern; the district worries if too many feet are on the field, the turf might be harmed.

“We’ve been fortunate: The last few falls, we haven’t had a muddy contest out there. When we have, it takes a long time for that field to regenerate, a lot of extra fertilizer, extra seed and overseeding,” he said.

“Any time you put more out there, particularly football, it’s particularly bad,” he added.

The district already pays for seeding and top dressing in mid-November after football season ends, Dennehy said. Seeding happens again in the spring, as does fertilizing, and the district might seed again in July depending on how much damage the field sustained the previous fall and winter.

“It depends on how the field’s responding. There are significant costs associated with that,” Dennehy said.

Biggs said the wear-and-tear concern is a new reason from the district for why the Knights haven’t been allowed to rent the field.

“We initially got two years’ worth of denials from the [athletic directors] with the caveat that they’d had a bad experience with the previous owner,” he said. “Last year, this changed to a wear-and-tear issue.”

Dennehy said he was not aware of any previous problems with the Knights’ former owner and that wear-and-tear concerns have always been the reason the district doesn’t lease Rawson Field.

Rawson isn’t the only Montana field shared by two high schools. Great Falls and C.M. Russell high schools share Memorial Stadium. The semi-professional Great Falls Gladiators play home games there in the spring.

Biggs gave Kalispell trustees a copy of an e-mail Knights owner William Wheat received from Gladiators general manager Brad Thurber. According to the e-mail, the Gladiators are responsible for snow removal if they want to play there, and the team tries to schedule games before June, when the district starts to reseed the field.

“So far, it’s worked out great,” Thurber wrote.

But the arrangement hasn’t been great for everyone.

“There [are] constant issues with overuse of the turf and abuse, but our previous superintendent directed me to rent to all on an equal basis if the stadium was available,” Gary DeGooyer, athletic director for the Great Falls School District, said in an e-mail to the Inter Lake.

“Another issue is we have to stripe and set [the] field up, which is additional work for our guys,” he wrote. “We would like not to have the Gladiators use the stadium. I have several other football fields in the city that would work very well and accommodate their crowd.”

Biggs said the Knights would be glad to help avoid similar problems at Legends.

“If they want us to stripe our own field, that’s fine,” he said. “And I’ve got 40 guys to help move anything that needs to be moved.”

One thing could help alleviate concerns in Great Falls and Kalispell.

“If we were ever fortunate to get artificial turf, this would be much easier,” DeGooyer wrote.

Committee members said the same thing, Biggs said.

Terry Pugh, a Flathead alumnus whose company, Virtu Consulting, is donating high-tech LED scoreboards for Legends Stadium and the Flathead and Glacier gymnasiums, has proposed laying artificial turf on Rawson Field. The district decided not to pursue that offer immediately, but it’s not out of the question in the future.

Trustees and district officials have said “if they have [artificial] turf on that field, there’s no problem whatsoever,” Biggs said.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.