MADISON TOWNSHIP — The home field advantage Grant Milliron once enjoyed no longer exists, not that the 1953 Madison graduate is complaining.
Standing near midfield on a sun-slashed Wednesday afternoon, Milliron fondly recalled his playing days as he admired Ram Field at STARTEK Stadium during the facility’s official ribbon-cutting ceremony. The oversized block ‘M’ centered on the 50 yard line glimmered in the midday sun and provided a fitting backdrop for Milliron, who was a fleet-footed wingback for the Rams long before he was president of Milliron Industries.
“We played down at the bottom of the Route 42 hill (at the site of the former Madison Junior High),” Milliron said. “The grade differential from one end of the field to the other was probably four or five feet, so it was kind of important for us to be running down hill in the fourth quarter.
“We’ve come a long way since then.”
Wednesday wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of Milliron and others like him, including STARTEK Inc. Like Milliron, STARTEK site director Tom Luther marveled at the state-of-the-art complex, which cost an estimated $730,000. No public funds were used to finance the project.
“To see this come to fruition and to see a facility that can rival any facility in the state at the high school level, it’s just awesome to know that STARTEK could help out,” Luther said. “The stadiums that I grew up in were nothing like this. They were natural grass or they had AstroTurf and you’d get carpet burn if you landed on it.
“Kids today are so fortunate to be able to play in a facility that, quite frankly, is probably nicer than a lot of Division III college stadiums.”
The genesis of the project could be traced to early November of 2012, when Madison lost a second-round playoff game to eventual state champ Toledo Central Catholic at Sandusky’s Perkins’ Firelands Regional Medical Center Stadium. After the game, athletic director Doug Rickert and Jayson Stone talked about the possibility of Madison installing a synthetic playing surface.
“After that conversation with Doug, I thought it was far-fetched,” said Stone, who established the Madison Stadium Improvements Committee in January of 2013. “It’s pretty phenomenal to be standing here, just a year-and-a-half later, looking at a brand new stadium.
“The process was much quicker than I anticipated. It all started with the support of the athletic booster club.”
The athletic booster club paid for more than half of the project. Stone and booster club president Joe Klupp did a bulk of the fund raising
“When we were first approached about the possibility of installing turf, we said, ‘We will do what we can,’ ” said athletic booster vice president Jeff Stiteler, a 1985 Madison grad. “The booster club contributed a little over $400,000. We consider it a great investment in the young people in our community.”
Rickert, a Madison product who took over as AD over the summer, said Ram Field at STARTEK Stadium was a remarkable collaborative effort.
“We have a great booster club and then you had a lot of people who contributed,” he said. “We had teachers in the school district who donated. You had people giving what they could give. Some people gave us a couple hundred dollars, but all those donations add up.”
Madison’s academic standing played an important role in drumming up support for the facility, Rickert said. The district’s performance index, as determined by the Ohio Department of Educiation, was 94.1 in 2011, 97.0 in 2012 and 98.3 in 2013.
“The community sees that we are doing really well in the classroom so they can get behind something like this,” Rickert said. “Educationally, we are right there with anybody. It’s easy to support a project like this when our kids are having so much academic success.”
Football coach Sean Conway has played an important role, too.
“Sean truly cares about these kids,” Rickert said. “People know he’s not a phony and he really wants to see our kids succeed.
“That is what this is all about.”
“We have a great booster club and then you had a lot of people who contributed,” Rickert said. “We had teachers in the school district who donated. You had people giving what they could give. Some people gave us a couple hundred dollars, but all those donations add up.”
