Some high school football players dream of playing in college under the lights on Saturday night and for the Greene County Rams part of that dream will come true this week.

Greene County will open the 2022 regular season with the Adair-Casey/Guthrie Center Charges and instead of playing this Friday night, they’ll play Saturday and at a neutral field. Activities Director Dave Wright says there were renovations done to Linduska Field, including reducing the crown at the middle of the field and re-sodding all of it, which was mostly done in June.

“There became concerns about, part of it not the whole thing, but there’s part of it that just wasn’t taking root. So they (Iowa Athletic Field Construction) came back, re-sodded part of that, then we’ve done some other things. There’s a corner of it in the playing surface that ‘A’ probably wouldn’t have been safe for participants and ‘B’ would maybe get torn up and just didn’t want to have to battle that.”    

The School Board approved in January a $98,170 bid from Iowa Athletic Field Construction Company to do the work. The project started before Wright took over as AD in July and he had the understanding the delay in doing the project was because of the high school graduation ceremony this past May. 

So instead the football game will be played at Ogden High School and Wright explains the reasons why their game will be on the Bulldog field.

“Ogden, obviously location wise right down the road. And then there’s rental costs that go to it. They (Ogden) were obviously economically the best fit for us. I really want to commend them. They’ve been just absolutely outstanding working with us, said, ‘Hey, we want to make this work. We want to work with you guys, and we want to be neighborly.’ and stuff like that.”      

Wright is hoping Linduska Field will be ready by the next home football game on September 16th, which is homecoming. Because Ogden has a home game this Friday, the Rams will be playing on Saturday, slated for 7pm which will be broadcast live on KGRA 98.9FM and streamed on raccoonvalleyradio.com.