Harding High football wants equity from CMS and is tired of its unsafe facilities
Harding High School’s football players and supporters don’t feel they get the same treatment as everyone else in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
This year, they want to use their play to bring attention to it.
After winning the 2017 N.C. 4A state championship, its first since the 1950s, Harding dipped to 2-9 last season.
The Rams want to prove that’s a fluke. Harding is 3-2 this season heading into Friday’s game with Olympic. And the players say they are using that early momentum to bring attention to what they feel is their inadequate, rundown and unsafe facilities.
“We’re just focused. We’re zoomed,” Harding star Maliek Faust said. “We had to make a statement that we’re going to be better than last year. That we’ve got something to prove this year. That we’re not just going to be a team to be run over, or just be last. We deserve to be put in the (Observer’s) Sweet 16 (high school football poll). We deserve to have a practice field. We deserve to have a new game field.
“We really put in work.”
Harding’s facilities have long been an issue. The school was supposed to host Hopewell to start the season last month, but heavy rains and lightning in the area forced postponement of that game and several others within CMS. It also highlighted a few ongoing concerns at the school.
Harding’s field, despite recent repairs by CMS, is still in bad shape. The Rams eventually had to play Hopewell on West Meck’s artificial turf field three days later because it wanted to limit risk of player injury and ruining its own field for the season by playing on it after the storm. Harding’s field, despite the repairs, doesn’t drain well. There is sand poured into bare spots, and it’s deep and soft in others, even on drier days.
And that’s just one of the issues. Like Independence and Myers Park, Harding doesn’t have a field house, but the distance between Harding’s field and locker rooms is much greater. Harding’s locker rooms are also in bad shape. Handrails on the visitors’ side bleachers don’t run the length of the stands, and those bleachers don’t allow visitors to rest their feet in front of them in some places — they’re too narrow. Instead, fans have to sit with their feet on the seats in front of them, legs slightly raised. It reduces the capacity, and it’s not comfortable.
“We have to stay off the field as much as possible,” Rams football coach Van Smith said. “One bad-weather game will tear it up, and it’ll be done for the rest of the year. The sidelines flood when it rains, and you’re just standing in a huge puddle. We get a shop vac and a push broom and try to move it out. We lay sod down, but the surface is not very good at all.”
Without a field house, Harding’s team stays on the field at halftime. Its small locker room is attached to the gym, a five-minute walk away. And when the Rams travel, Smith can always tell the differences between facilities.
“You see the disparity,” he said. “For us, we use it like a chip on our shoulder, but at times it’s hard to prepare because we’re on a softball field (for practice), and it’s not in the best shape, so sometimes we have to practice in the gym, and that’s a waste of practice, in my opinion.”
Harding senior Dekerius Thompson put his team’s situation a little more bluntly: “We need a remodel. Just a little something would be better than what is now.”
These issues, however, are not solely at Harding.
East Mecklenburg recently postponed a football game because of poor drainage on its field where its sidelines contained standing water. Last year, CMS forced Vance High to move a state semifinal game with Myers Park to Mallard Creek because of poor field conditions. That was one of two home playoff games Vance was forced to move to a neutral site.
Vance’s field, like Harding’s, is grass, and was soft and mushy after a few days of rain. Mallard Creek has artificial turf.
And last March, when West Charlotte was readying to host Ardrey Kell in a state quarterfinal basketball game, state officials asked the Lions to move the game to Vance, which has a gym more than twice the size as West Charlotte’s. The move was made to accommodate an anticipated huge crowd.
Some West Charlotte fans felt that Ardrey Kell supporters had called state and local officials asking for the game to be moved to avoid coming onto West Charlotte’s campus, which sits in a lower-income westside neighborhood.
The game sparked a citywide debate on race and class.
These moves, though often controversial, have become common in CMS, which struggles with what County Commissioner Vilma Leake described to the Observer in March as a two-tier school system: the haves and the have nots.
Leake says certain schools are better taken care of than others.
“We are more segregated today than we’ve ever been,” she said. “There’s a white system and a black system.”
CMS says it covers the same things for all 19 high schools that field teams with the N.C. High School Athletic Association. Those items include start-up funds, coaching stipends, game assigners/booking agents, game officials, ambulances at football games, plus most police and game management personnel. CMS didn’t provide details on the numbers.
CMS’ athletic budget is nearly $3.7 million annually. Each school receives $6,400 in start-up funds for equipment needs. The remaining funds cover the other expenses.
The schools, according to the district, cover their remaining expenses from revenue generated through ticket sales, community partnerships, fundraising and booster clubs.
CMS athletic director Sue Doran declined comment for this story.
CMS spokesperson Renee McCoy said booster clubs are not restricted from helping to pay for facility improvements. So while an affluent school like Providence can build a new baseball press box or help provide a scoreboard at the football stadium with video replay, a poorer school such as Harding — which went years without a booster club — doesn’t have that additional revenue.
“In a community like Ardrey Kell, if it was not good, then they would complain and then figure out a way to fund raise and do it themselves,” said former Harding football coach Sam Greiner, who led the Rams to their 2017 state title. “The problem is at Harding, we’re relying on state funds alone.”
CMS reports putting more than $500,000 into renovations at the school, via bond funds, in the past two years, including repairs of the track that surrounds the football field, adding a new irrigation system on the field, along with paint and fencing. CMS also recently “top dressed” the football field, a process, CMS says “is the application of a uniform thin layer of soil with organic materials applied over the turf surface.”
But Matt Morrow, Harding’s booster club president, doesn’t think it’s nearly enough.
“I don’t know how people can safely get up (in the visitors’ bleachers) and enjoy a game,” he said. “I don’t know how they pass inspection. We had to move a game to West Mecklenburg because of field conditions. No one else had to do that, even with schools with a grass field.”
Morrow notes that, in addition to the lack of a field house, Harding had been outfitting its junior varsity in uniforms that were at least 10 years old. And he believes these issues can have consequences. He cities the lightning storm that hit on Aug. 23 before the school’s game with Hopewell.
“Hopewell had to put their guys back on the buses, which is not a good idea,” Morrow said. “Our guys have to walk five minutes back to school, all because we don’t have that field house, and we’re not safe with lightning all over the place and guys walking with their equipment on. That illustrates the need right there. Most other schools have facilities much closer to the stadium.”
Harding junior Tabby Dunlap said the team has learned to look past a lot, including having to sit outside during halftime, but that lack of a field house, he said, is the biggest issue.
“It’s challenging,” he said, “because after games, if somebody has a hurt ankle or something, it’s a long walk back to the locker room. Our AD tries to get everything we need, and I really appreciate him for that. But our facilities could be better. I kind of feel like they don’t care about us. We’ve been here longer than some of (the other CMS schools), and I feel like we should have some of the things other schools have.”
West Mecklenburg and Olympic, nearby westside schools, have gotten turf fields and major stadium renovations. Berry High School opened in 2003 with a new grass field. Last summer, CMS reported that it spent more than $3 million in renovations there. Among them: a new eight-lane synthetic track and a turf football field.
Before that happened, Berry students told school board members some visiting teams wouldn’t play key players for fear they might get injured on the Berry field, which was often soft and squishy and would have standing water on it for days after storms.
“It’s unfortunate that you have to fight so hard to get things done for the school system,” former Phillip O. Berry Academy Booster Club President Sharon Greene told WBTV, the Observer’s news partner, in November 2018.
Morrow can relate to those issues, but watching the other schools get what he believes Harding needs just makes him angry — and sad.
“They’re putting Band-Aids on major problems, and Band-Aids aren’t fixing any issues,” Morrow said.
But more than anything, Morrow said, he’s digging in for the fight.
“There just haven’t been a lot of people advocating for Harding,” he said. “For the booster club, this is the second year we’re back and we’re trying to say, ‘We want to be equitable.’ CMS talks about equity and that’s one of the big tenets they have, and it should not only be applied in the classroom but also in athletics. We’re not asking for anything outrageous. We’re just asking for what everyone else has.
“It’s the only fair thing to do.”
CMS Athletic Construction Plans
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools detailed planned athletic construction plans for the Observer
2017 bond projects that specifically address high school gyms are:
▪ Harding High: construct new gym and existing gym will become an auxiliary gym —scheduled to deliver August 2020
▪ West Mecklenburg High: construct new gym and existing gym will become an auxiliary gym — scheduled to deliver August 2021
▪ West Charlotte High: new construction (replacement school) — scheduled to deliver August 2022
▪ Olympic Relief High: new construction — scheduled to deliver August 2022
▪ South Charlotte Relief High: new construction — scheduled to deliver August 2023
This story was originally published September 26, 2019 at 3:53 PM.