Ryan Hanchett - rhanchett@highlandsnews.com
Athletics was the theme of the night during the Macon County Board of Education meeting at Highlands School on Monday, March 24.
The first presentation of the evening came from Macon Early College Principal Caleb Parham, who requested the approval of $1,000 to cover the cost of applying to the N.C. High School Athletic Association to make MEC an athletics member.
“This is something we have been talking about, and after gauging the interest of the students we feel like we are ready to play sports as MEC,” Parham said. “We would become an NCHSAA independent team because we would not be in a conference in our first year. The reason I’m here tonight, is the application deadline is April 1.”
Parham noted that roughly 45 students at MEC expressed an interest in playing sports if those opportunities became available. He noted that the focus in the near term would be on sports that do not require a large number of participants.
“We have students who want to play volleyball, tennis, track, and of course the big one is basketball,” Parham said. “There is also some interest in golf, which players can take part in as individuals, and possibly wrestling.”
Parham compared what MEC is trying to kick start to the athletics program that Tri-County Early College in Murphy already has in place.
He noted that if MEC is accepted as a member of the NCHSAA, they would immediately begin looking to schedule fall sports. The most logical route would be for MEC to compete against teams in the current Smoky Mountain 1-A Conference.
“That’s the good news, we have a lot of schools around here that are 1-A and we should be able to find games,” Parham said. “With Highlands, Nantahala, Blue Ridge, Tri-County – teams that would be of similar size.”
Board member Stephanie Laseter asked if MEC had the foundation in place to make fall sports a reality this year, including busses and uniforms. Macon County athletic director Todd Gibbs said bussing may require some creative solutions in the early stages, but it can be done.
“We may have a situation where an MEC team and a middle school team are going to road games at schools that are close together, so they share a bus that day,” Gibbs said. “It’s not a simple thing to schedule additional activity buses and drivers, but we can make it happen.”
Parham added that uniforms and equipment would be purchased as soon as administrators knew what teams would be fielded in the fall.
A motion to approve that $1,000 for the NCHSAA application fee passed unanimously.
Highlands soccer field
Following Parham’s presentation, the board’s attention turned to the ongoing saga of Highlands’ soccer field.
For years the field has suffered from standing water that makes the playing surface unusable after a heavy rain, sometimes for days. More than a year ago the board began looking at possible solutions – including potentially replacing the playing surface with a synthetic alternative.
“We recently put out a request for proposals to companies that do that type of work and we received one partial bid back,” Gibbs said. “It was from the Astroturf Corporation, and they priced the cost of installing the base and then a new playing surface, but they would not price any site work without having an environmental study done first.”
Highlands school board representative Hilary Wilkes asked why the company couldn’t use the results of a site study that the school board commissioned in 2024.
“They won’t do any work, or guarantee anything, without doing a study themselves,” Gibbs said. “Think of it like this, if I’m a heart doctor and the man beside me is a heart doctor, and you have a heart problem, I’m not going to operate on you based on what he might think is wrong with you.”
The cost estimate to install the base layer and the Astroturf was $640,000-$700,000. Depending on the amount of site work that needs done to mitigate the water issues, estimates for the entire project ranged from $1.2-1.7 million.
Board Chair Jim Breedlove asked the board for consensus to have the Macon County Board of Commissioners look into renovating Zachary Park on Buck Creek Road to accommodate a soccer field that could be used as an interim facility until the Highlands School field can be remediated.
Wilkes was not in support of the Zachary Park field hosting middle and high school soccer games.
“First, that is not a school facility, it’s a county parks and rec facility and we would have to bus kids over there for practices and games which I don’t think anyone wants to do,” Wilkes said. “I also don’t want to see us get in a situation where the county spends money on that field to make it playable, and then says that’s good enough, and the project here at the school never gets funded.”
Highlands principal Sarah Holbrooks was also skeptical of using Zachary Park for school athletics in lieu of fixing the field at the school.
“The soccer field here isn’t just for hosting a few soccer games every spring and fall, we use it for PE classes as well,” Holbrooks said. “After school every day there are kids out there running around on that field. Highlands is a little different culturally from other schools, a lot of our kids walk here in the morning, they stay after school and play with their friends, and they walk home at night… Think of our soccer field here at the school like Franklin High School’s football field. You wouldn’t build a football field for FHS that’s miles away from the actual school building.”
Breedlove clarified that he was not trying to get the board to drop the soccer field project at the school, but rather show support of the county making the Zachary Park field usable in the interim.
“I think we all want to see the soccer field here at the school fixed, and we will certainly keep that on our capital priority list, but I’m not confident that project is going to be done in the near future,” Breedlove said. “We need to have a place to host home games if the field here is unplayable, and if the county is willing to do that, we should ask them to do it.”
The board gave consensus for superintendent Josh Lynch to advocate for the Zachary Park project with county manger Warren Cabe at their next joint budget meeting.
Wilkes requested that representatives from Astroturf Corporation come to a future school board meeting to discuss their bid to install a synthetic field, and discuss the site work that may be needed to move the project forward. Gibbs replied that he would ask the company to send a representative to the April school board meeting.