The Weyburn Minor Football League is excited to soon be able to play games on their brand new field.

The grass is all laid and looking fantastic, and any day now there will be kids playing football and various other sports on it.

"The field right now is in it's finishing stages as far as being able to use it," said Jody Kerr, President of the Weyburn Minor Football League." We're very happy about that. The city is currently working on connecting our building to it's sewage and water. Which is one of our necessities for sure. After that we will be beefing up our road and our parking lot area, so that when people come to view they'll have a place to put themselves. Then within the next two weeks, shortly after the long weekend in August, power to where our poles and lights are going to go will be put in. Then basically over the next 30 days or so, we'll have our building ready to go with change rooms and bathrooms. We'll have our lights up and running to light up that field for games and practices. We'll have parking for all of our wonderful spectators. It's just amazing to be there for the last leg of it."

The field could be played on right now, however it would be quite difficult at night without the lights. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to bring the whole project together.

"We are still a year or so away as far as getting a big storage building for our equipment and getting a little tower at centerfield for viewing," added Kerr.

One of the biggest obstacles that they have faced would be the lack of funding. The Weyburn Minor Football League board have done everything that they possibly could do to raise the funds, but with the size of this project it was inevitable that it would take a while to get the wheels in motion.

"To raise the funds for a project like this, it had to be a long-term thing," said Kerr. " When you're a community organization like this, you can only do so many fundraisers and tap on so many shoulders asking people for money so often. So when we do have big events we try to push them really hard. Those fundraisers have come through in the past quite well though. The biggest thing is just making sure that we have enough money for the things that we're putting in. There's definitely still a need and we will be meeting to discuss what the next stage is and figure out how much the next phases are going to cost. We're probably looking for another $30,000 plus, but by far the biggest amounts are behind us. We've really been taking our time to make sure that we do it right and we've been using our local contractors as well. They're the ones whose children will be using the field so getting them involved is definitely the best action."

A lot of the work has been going on behind the scenes all throughout this massive project. With their hard work and dedication the dream is now becoming a reality.

"It's been three different boards that have been through the planning and building process, with lots of people behind the scenes," Kerr added. "You gotta have teamwork to be able to build something this big. I was just taking a look at it today. We got some fertilizer on it and it just looks beautiful, a nice dark green. The city kept the sprinklers running on it when they could on a nice rotation, so it's real healthy. It's going to be great come this fall I think."

Minor Football will be starting up in the middle of August, but they'll be doing their best to limit excessive use of the field at first to reduce the amount of wear and tear on it.

"We will use it when we need to," said Kerr. "But if we don't have to use it we'll just let it sit so the grass can grow stronger at first. We still have our space at Jubilee Park that the city allows us to use and we will coordinate with minor soccer. We're hoping, if the schedules work out, on September 23rd will have all of Weyburn's football team play a home game that day. Will try to make it so that our two peewee teams are able to play each other that day as well. We'll really try to get a whole day of events together and maybe have some other things going on too."

President Jody Kerr wanted to make sure that sport's fans would try to clear an upcoming day in their calendars.

"There will be an announcement coming up this week about an event that we will be hosting on August 19th," added Kerr. "I can't really release any details at this moment but it's going to be a large-scale event hosted in Weyburn. Minor Football is going to be the big beneficiaries of it with lots of local and provincial Partnerships being a part of it. So if local football fans could keep that August 19th day open they are sure to not be disappointed."