ST. PETERSBURG — Friday nights at Northeast High have begun in the gym.
The Vikings have dressed in the gymnasium locker room, across campus from the football facilities, and boarded buses at 5:30 for games that were supposed to be theirs to host. They have not played on their own field this season.
That ends Sept. 18, when Northeast is scheduled to host Lakewood — the same day Pinellas County Schools plans to inspect the final phase of the stadium project that set the whole thing in motion.
The work began in June. Contractor WTI was hired to strip and replace the stadium’s traffic coatings and sealants, make concrete repairs, fix railing posts and reinstall the bleachers. On July 9, a Northeast assistant principal reported water getting in. The district required WTI to assess the damage, clean it up and change its methods so it would not happen again.
After heavy rain over the weekend of July 18, it happened again.
The district’s industrial hygienist collected samples July 22. Air Quality Environmental, Inc. returned results July 28 showing a high spore count, and the hygienist closed Building 18 — the locker room and weight room spaces — at the end of July, days before fall camp.
“It has been a rough year,” coach Auggie Sanchez said.
The team moved to the gym locker room and stayed there. The leaks destroyed football equipment, Sanchez said, and fundraising for the program expanded out of necessity to replace it. He has not been critical of the district.
“County has been great and has been making sure that we are fixing the problem and replacing what was lost,” he said.
WTI is paying for the cleaning, the remediation and the air quality testing, according to the district. The work involved cleaning all surfaces and replacing ceiling tiles and soaked drywall. Air Quality Environmental sampled again Sept. 2 and cleared the space Sept. 4.
The field itself was never closed, the district said, and parts of the stadium have been available since late August as the bleacher and coating work moved in phases. The decision to move home games was made by the school in consultation with Sanchez, based on what came out of weekly construction meetings.
Northeast opened the regular season at Dunedin on Aug. 20, then played at Largo on Aug. 28 and at Indian Rocks Christian on Sept. 4. Two of those three were scheduled Vikings home dates. So was a preseason game.
Because this is the first year of a two-year scheduling cycle, the district said, Northeast will have more home games than away games next season.
No other Pinellas County school is operating under a similar closure.
The facilities are only half of what Sanchez has absorbed since taking over his alma mater. He had about 25 players on the field for spring practice. By June, eight were gone, most of them starters picked off by other programs. Sanchez, who has been outspoken about Florida’s new transfer rules and what he sees as their lack of enforcement, said he does not believe the buildings drove those departures.
“I don’t think the facility was an issue for the kids that left,” he said, “but in today’s football economy, all of that matters.”
The Vikings have been dressing 25 to 27 players on Friday nights.
Sanchez, a former Northeast and University of South Florida linebacker, left Seminole after building the Warhawks to their best season in more than two decades to come back to the school where he played. It is the second Pinellas County program he has taken on as a rebuild.
He is not interested in framing this season as a loss.
“I believe things happen for a reason, and dwelling on the circumstances doesn’t do anything for progress,” he said. “We’ve been hit by the storm of adversity, and had the options of do we throw in the towel or keep building? With all the issues we faced, we have continued to build.”
The upside, he said, is a group of teenagers learning to adapt when a plan collapses, and a neighborhood that has noticed them.
“Football is a microcosm of life,” Sanchez said. “We’re learning valuable life lessons this year.”