By Kyle Roberts
While the talk of the town last weekend was the potential consolidation and closure of elementary schools in the Ruston school district of Lincoln Parish, a not-insignificant allotment of the bond that was proposed would have led to new construction and needed repairs to various athletic facilities for Ruston High School.
As previously by the Lincoln Parish Journal, Lincoln Parish Superintendent Ricky Durrett outlined on April 17 how Ruston High would have been able to repair damage to its baseball press box and stands, while also allowing for the construction of a multi-purpose covered facility where the grass “parking lot’ is located right next to Chick Childress Field House adjacent to Hoss Garrett Stadium.
For now, though, all plans have been put on hold as the question of funding these projects must now be answered before anything can move forward.
“We don’t have any plans right now,” Ruston High principal Dan Gressett said. “I’d like to revisit it, because this would be a great benefit for all of our kids. But this is going to have to be on the back burner for now.”
Ruston residents, of course, will remember the EF-3 tornado that tore through town on April 25, 2019 and the damage it wrought throughout areas of downtown as well as Louisiana Tech’s campus. A smaller tornado, however, came a couple of weeks later and damaged Ruston’s baseball field by knocking the outfield fence down and damaging the backstop.
Priority-wise, Ruston head football coach and athletics director Jerrod Baugh acknowledged that finding a way to repair the damage at the baseball field needs to be addressed sooner, rather than later, as fan safety could eventually become an issue.
“That’s something that needs immediate attention,” Baugh said. “There will need to be another plan for that, and it will need to be done soon. And at the end of the day, it’s going to take some money to do it.”
Having had time to process the results, Durrett echoed the importance of prioritizing repairs to the baseball field.
“We’ve got to figure out a way, maybe by doing some small things here and there, to fix the backstop at the baseball field,” Durrett said. “We’ve got a great facility there. We are trying to figure out our best option, and I think that’s going to be (using) some private and public funds together to try to get that done.”
And while the prospect of a multi-purpose covered facility was not quite as pressing as the repairs to the baseball stands, Baugh believes that should Ruston High be able to build one, it will get plenty of mileage from all of the outdoor sports on campus as well as from the spirit squads and band.
“I believe the multi-purpose facility would have been the most used one in the entire district,” Baugh said. “We have multiple coaches that are trying to practice on the field at the same time on any given day, and in the spring, it can rain and mess the field up.”
Still, though, spirits are high for Baugh and Gressett as the two recognize that even with facility construction plans halted for now, school and sports will still move forward as usual.
“Ruston has been an ‘A’ School, and we’ve been a really good school district for a long period of time without those additions,” Baugh said. “And we’ve had a lot of football seasons without these facilities. None of that will change.”
