Building on tradition: Aquinas to overhaul athletic facilities by fall 2024
A new era for Aquinas High School is on the horizon.
Wednesday evening principal Maureen Lewis and director of advancement Kaci Johson, along with many alumni and key players in the Aquinas community, announced the Building on Tradition campaign.
Lewis and Johnson lined out what will be a $12 million project to renovate the school’s athletic facilities. Of that total. $8.6 million will go toward modernizing the football stadium, updating the baseball field, creating a practice field and building a new multi-purpose facility that can house concessions, storage space and a weight room.
The other 3.4 million will go toward the school’s endowment and will be used for financial aid for Aquinas students.
“We are so excited to finally launch the public campaign and to share with everybody the full scope of the plan and project and to thank those people that have come alongside us and help us get to where we are today,” Johnson said. “You don’t raise $8 million overnight.”
The project began as a feasibility study in the spring of 2022. It is completely funded by donors, which more than 80 families have been involved up to this point. As of Wednesday, the campaign had raised just over $9.4 million (about 80 percent of its goal).
As things currently sit, the baseball and football fields overlap as left field runs to about the 30-yard line. For now, soccer and baseball games cannot happen at the same time, so the biggest part of the project is maneuvering those fields so they can be independent of one another.
The upgrades are expected to begin in August, with the groundbreaking event being held at Aquinas’ home-opening football game against Jefferson County on the 18th. The schedule for the football stadium includes adding an artificial playing surface, much like the Columbia County schools had done two years back. They expect everything to be operational by the fall of 2024.
For the baseball field, the upgrades may be more significant. Not only are batting cages, bleachers, dugouts and bullpens on the list to be updated, but the field will also have new lights. The first night baseball game will be held at Aquinas in 2025.
“(The builders) have given us great confidence,” Johnson said. “We’ll begin in August, so it should be done in the summertime to give us a little bit of leeway and let our kids get used to the new facility, the fields the turf, because we’ve never had it. It’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve.”
For the time being, that means schedules will be abnormal for the 2023-24 school year. Following its home-opener against Jefferson County, the Aquinas football team will play the remainder of its home games at Greenbrier High School.
While it’s a temporary inconvenience, football coach James Leonard knows what’s waiting on the other end.
“It makes it worth it,” he said. “Our kids know it’s worth it and with all the hard work Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Lewis have put into this campaign, all the people who have already donated, I think the kids see how much has gone into this and I think they understand everybody in our community is very excited.”
An institution’s athletic programs often carry the weight of representing every aspect of the school, because that’s generally where people form their first impressions. Lewis even said in her opening remarks Wednesday that athletics are the “front porch of the school.”
Athletics may be the attention-grabber, but it’s really just the first step in this ambitious campaign. The crux comes with the endowment portion, which is about widening the availability of access to Aquinas High School in the community.
“It would not make sense for us to make this type of investment in our facility without putting forth the effort to fill the financial need that our students and families need and desire,” Johnson said. “Our endowment is for financial aid. We offer a great deal of aid for our kids. We do not want finances to get in the way of children being able to receive an Aquinas education and experience. It’s both.”
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Aquinas focuses on athletic, academic growth with campaign
