A full home side bleachers is shown during the Le Mars vs Sioux City North football game on Sept. 20, 2019. The game was the first held in Le Mars' renovated stadium.
Tim Hynds, Sioux City Journal
Construction on a $4.6 million project to rebuild and modernize the Le Mars school district's athletic stadium is shown last July.
Tim Hynds, Sioux City Journal
Construction work on a $4.6 million project to rebuild and modernize the Le Mars school district's athletic stadium is shown last July.Â
LE MARS, Iowa -- Le Mars' new athletic stadium was ready for the Bulldogs football team's season opener last fall.
But it was a nail-biter.
Due to an unusually wet spring, work on the remodeled Le Mars Community Stadium wasn't completed until August 2019. That's because crews from L&L Builders were unable to work on certain parts of the stadium because the ground was too wet.
Although he was confident it would be completed that the new turf on Jim Lorenzen Field would be ready when the Bulldogs took on Sioux City North on Sept. 19, 2019, Le Mars Community High School football coach Gabe Tardive couldn't help but sneak a peak every day.
Gehlen Catholic High School football coach Jeremy Schindler was a bit more patient. He only drove past the construction site, two or three times a week.
"We are excited to get the guys out and compete," Tardive said. "It's a great opportunity for the whole community."
Indeed, the whole community had a hand in the project.
The task of remodeling the Le Mars Community Stadium came with a price tag of around $4.6 million. Wells Enterprises, the city's largest employer, picked up around $2 million, while other local businesses helped out with the rest.
The entire football field, track, grandstand and visitors were all replaced.
The drainage system for the field was one of the first things to go in.Â
The biggest project -- as well as one of the last to be completed -- was installing the turf.
The turf was a main concern for Schindler, himself, a former college football player.
"I could always tell which fields had the turf right or not, from having bumps on the field or having a hard playing surface," he said.
"You can tell the good ones from the bad ones," Schindler continued. "Playing on poor turf surface is not fun."
As it turned out, the turf -- and the stadium -- has been to everybody's liking.
"Thanks to a great donation (from Wells Blue Bunny) and the entire community, it's a great reflection of the community," Tardive said. "You look at this stadium that they created, it's a nice complex."
"It's a great situation for everyone to have a chance to be on it from youth football tot eh band program," he added.
A full home side bleachers is shown during the Le Mars vs Sioux City North football game on Sept. 20, 2019. The game was the first held in Le Mars' renovated stadium.
