About 75 high school students, members of cross-country teams at Pioneer Valley Interscholastic Athletic Conference schools, gave up part of their Patriots Day holiday to help clear brush at Stanley Park which had been brought down by the Halloween Storm.
Tom Stewart, the championship director of the annual PVIAC cross-country championship match, said that he saw the disruption wrought by Mother Nature during the unseasonable snow storm in October and he contacted the coaches of the high school teams who participate in the race and asked them if their teams would “give back to the park” that hosts their event.
“The response was overwhelming” he said and reports that students from the Westfield, Ludlow, Longmeadow, Cathedral and Hampshire Regional high schools turned out yesterday morning to pull branches and trees into piles so that park staff can more quickly remove the debris.
“The kids really worked hard” Stewart said.
Blake Croteau, the captain of the boys cross-country team at Westfield High School, said “it was pretty cool” working with kids from other schools.
“It was almost like a competition” he said, “to see who could pull the biggest tree out of the woods.”
He claimed that the competition was won by a mixed squad of Ludlow and Westfield runners.
“We probably had 25 people with it (the biggest tree) on our shoulders” he said. “It was pretty big.”
Croteau said that the runners mostly cleared a section of the east end of the park.
“We didn’t clean up the trails we run on” he said.
“We cleaned up a lot of the area where people walk around by the rose garden. They’ll see a big difference” he said.
Croteau’s coach, Ralph Figy, said “Everybody looks forward to the race” at the park and said that the runners worked hard at the project. “They got here about nine and they just left, at 12 o’clock” Figy said. “They did a hell of a job.”
After their workout pulling brush, the students paused for hot dogs before leaving the park and the rest of their holiday.
The hotdogs and fixings were donated by the Westfield Police Association, a charitable group supported by the city’s police, and the hot dog rolls were donated by employees of the East Silver Street Big Y store, who also sent a contingent of volunteers to help the runners pull the brush from the park.
Figy said that a representative from the Calloway Golf Products plant in Chicopee came by the park at the start of the cleanup with 50 pairs of work gloves for the runners.
