After a tornado damaged the football scoreboard, soccer locker rooms, ticket booths, gym floor, baseball scoreboard, soccer equipment and the tennis storage shed on Thursday, May 20, the district spent the summer scheduling repairs. Estimated cost for the repairs, paid for by insurance, will be 1.4 million dollars.

While most damages have been fixed, the soccer locker rooms have not and the football scoreboard wasn’t fixed until after the first game.

Chief of Operations Brian Schwanz created plans to fix these damages.

“About 5:30 [that morning] we started getting phone calls that there was damage to Mill Valley,” Schwanz said. “We immediately came over to Mill Valley and started assessing the damage and figuring out what we needed to fix [right away].”

Throughout the summer, Schwanz has been working to coordinate the fix of most of the damages.

“It’s time-consuming, you have to work with our insurance company and vendors to get quotes on and you have to [prioritize] what needs to be fixed first,” Schwanz said.

While most of the damages have been fixed, the soccer locker rooms are still destroyed. Junior Cayden Rotich, on the varsity soccer team, details how using B-123 as their locker room has affected their practices.

“It’s a lot different because we’re carrying our practice stuff all the time, so that’s a hassle,” Rotich said. “There’s less room for us to mess around because that’s what we did in the locker room for the most part. Now we change and get right to practice.”

Not only does not having a locker room affect practices, but it also changes how games are. Rotich explains how the chemistry between the team has changed.

“To pregame, everybody would go to the locker room, turn off the lights and turn up the speakers and just mess around,” Rotich said. “After home wins, there’s a World Cup trophy that we have, and we’d throw it in the air and scream.”

The damage to the soccer locker rooms will not be fixed for at least a couple more months, according to Schwanz.

“[Fixing the locker rooms] is a quite a process, we have to work with the city of Shawnee on building permits and special inspections,” Schwanz said. “It is like a big jigsaw puzzle that we’re putting together.”