The only game in town Friday night when local high school football teams engage in first round of the playoffs is at Menard.
The history of Menard’s stadium, which has gotten distorted a bit over the years, is worth telling, not only to set the record straight but because it is a testament to what can be done on a minimum budget with wave after wave of bighearted volunteers.
Retired engineer Wilson Cedars, the brainchild for the idea of building the stadium, said Monday it came around 1995, when morale was sinking and enrollment (grades 7-12) was skidding. Some feared the school might close.
A graduate of old Natchitoches High School, Cedars had a daughter who was a junior high cheerleader at Menard at the time. One day he was walking on the old practice field, and he began thinking about the idea that had come up from time to time for 30 years that Menard should build a football stadium. Throughout its football history, Menard had always played its “home” football games at another school’s stadium. At the time, it was playing its home games at Pineville High School at a rental price of $500 a game.
“As an engineer, I visualize things to draw,” said Cedars, “and as I walked, I noticed they have lights here, and a small scoreboard and some wooden bleachers.” Meanwhile, he saw discarded bricks from an abandoned house, tall weeds all over and bushes tangled in the surrounding fence.
“I started to visualize a press box behind the stands. We went to a game at Montgomery High School, and I studied their stadium, which wasn’t fancy, and some of us parents talked and thought we can build something like that.”
The day after the last game of the 1995 season, a Saturday in November, Cedars and volunteer Paul Squyres started plowing the field. A group of volunteers spruced up the field for junior high games that in ’96 began attracting crowds, such that with concession and gate fees, revenue started coming in, along with a soaring spirit of students attending the games.
That was enough to sway Bobby Distefano, a 1964 Menard grad and business manager for Menard at the time. He reminisced in a Town Talk story after his retirement that he was initially against the idea. He said the school had plans to play football in ’96 at the old England Air Force Base. “No, Bobby,” Cedars said, “they want to play here. The guys on the varsity see the junior high games and are asking, ‘Why can’t we play here?’”
Cedars sought and received a grant of $12,000 from the Huie-Dellmon Trust to fund the project. Cleco donated creosote poles for stadium lights, and Menard grad Red Simpson installed the poles at no cost.
“More and more volunteers kept showing up,” said Cedars. “We’d all work on Saturdays and sometimes on weekdays after work. Different people took charge of different projects, whether it be the scoreboard, a sprinkler system, improved drainage, whatever.”
Cedars and Martin Lyons were the co-chairmen of the project, dubbed “Project: Home Field Advantage,” and they kept reminding themselves and anyone else who volunteered to work: “It’s not our property, it’s Menard’s, and it’s not ‘I,’ it’s ‘we.’ It’s not about any individual, it’s all of us working together.”
Bishop Sam Jacobs called Cedars and Lyons to his office to talk about the project.
“He asked, ‘How much is it going to cost me?’” Cedars said. “I did this (holding his finger and thumb to make a 0 sign) and said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘Now, that’s what I like to hear.’
“I told him the idea was to keep it simple: ‘We’re going to build what we can afford, not Tiger Stadium.’”
He drew up a plan for a baseball field and football field and showed it to then head football coach Tim Tharp and Barbara Trotter, then president of the Menard Athletic Association, and they “went nuts” with excitement.
The project moved forward, thanks to a can-do attitude and a relentless work ethic and some good connections. About 40 businesses donated equipment or services to the project. A core group of close to 20 men did the brunt of the volunteer work but hundreds of others showed up to help from time to time.
“And anytime there was a problem,” Cedars said, “somebody always knew somebody who could take care of it.”
When they decided to paint the unvarnished wooden bleachers, a tractor supply business donated 25 1-gallon buckets of green paint (Menard’s color).
“Martin said, ‘We can’t use that, it’s automotive paint!’,” said Cedars. “I said, it’s free and it’s green, we’re going to use it.” And grandparents, parents and children painted the bleachers.
“We’re undertaking a project that should probably take a year and a half,” Cedars said at the November, 1996 groundbreaking ceremony, attended by Bishop Jacobs, “and we’re going to hopefully do it in nine months.”
Cedars, amazingly, was right on target. The field was ready in nine months — August, 1997 — and the first game was played that September, and more than 2,500 people attended.
“The message that went out to the community,” said Distefano, “was Menard was certainly not closing if they’re building their own stadium.”
Over the next three years after it was built, the Eagles’ Nest had record attendance, and enrollment increased to just under 500 students.
Bishop Jacobs was impressed.
“Before he left (the Alexandria diocese),” said Cedars, tearing up with a catch in his throat, “Bishop Sam told me, ‘Wilson, that stadium saved Menard.’
“People have asked me why I’d do something like that, since I wasn’t a graduate and I didn’t have a son on the football team,” said Cedars. “I just tell them, because it was the right thing to do.’”
