Marmion will break ground on new field house
Marmion Academy's annual Red and Blue Fall Sports Kickoff Friday will be extra-special this year, with the school breaking ground for the Maurice and Gertrude Regole Field House.
The public is invited to the 6 p.m. ceremony at the Catholic boys high school at 1000 Butterfield Road, Aurora. After the ceremony, the kickoff commences, including scrimmages by the football and soccer teams and introduction of Marmion fall sports teams and Rosary High School cheerleading and dance squads. Concessions and season football passes will be sold.
The 30,000-square-foot field house will be attached to the east side of Alumni Hall, Marmion's current gymnasium building.
It will have three basketball and volleyball courts; a four-lane 160-meter track and a six-lane 55-meter straightaway track; high-, long- and triple-jump facilities; and batting cages. There will also be storage rooms for athletic equipment. School officials expect it to be finished in time for the 2011-12 school year.
The cost is estimated at $5 million. A bequest from the estate of Gertrude Regole is the lead gift. The school's development director declined, at the Regole family's request, to specify the amount. An article from the November 2008 edition of Marmion Magazine, posted on the academy's website, indicates it was $3 million.
"We are very honored to name this building for them," said the Rev. Charles Reichenbacher OSB, the development director.
The Regoles, who farmed hundreds of acres in what is now eastern St. Charles, sent their three sons to what was then Marmion Military Academy. Maurice Regole died in 1990; Gertrude died in 2005. Much of their farmland was sold over the years for shopping centers and business parks, although the family homestead still stands on the southeast corner of Kirk Road and Route 64.
Gertrude and Maurice Regole also donated the land for St. John Neumann Catholic Church in St. Charles. And in 2003, their son Edward and his wife, Vivienne, donated 34 acres of land in northwestern Illinois to Marmion, the sale of which paid for renovations to Marmion's swimming pool, now called the Edward and Vivienne Regole Natatorium.
The field house is the last piece of Campaign Marmion, a five-year effort to upgrade facilities and shore up finances. The campaign has already completed an upgrade and expansion of outdoor athletic amenities, including new tennis courts, additional practice fields for soccer and football, and new baseball fields. This summer, the second floor of Yender Hall was turned into the Science Center.
The $25 million campaign also included improving roads, parking lots, storm sewers, electrical service and water service throughout the campus; and raising more than $10 million for the annual and endowment funds.
Marmion also has a goal of turning Benkert Hall, a former dormitory, into a classroom building, and building the Welcome Center, including a new student chapel. It is still raising money for those projects.
Alumni Hall will be outfitted this fall with new bleachers that will expand the seating capacity to 1,400.
Actual construction of the field house begins next week.
"It has long been recognized that Alumni Hall, 'our family room,' is far too small for a very active Marmion family," said Headmaster John Milroy in a prepared statement. "The new field house will provide relief for the many competing time demands."
Marmion Academy started in 1933 when Benedictine monks from the St. Meinrad Abbey were asked to take over running the Fox Valley Catholic High School for Boys on Lake Street in Aurora. In the late 1940s Marmion Abbey was formed, and in 1952 the abbey moved to the Butterfield Road site. In 1959, it opened residential facilities for its boarding students, and in 1971 closed the Lake Street campus and consolidated operations at the Butterfield site. In the 1990s the school dropped "Military" from its name, although it still has an ROTC military leadership program; and in 2003 it closed its dormitories. The school enrolls about 500 students.
For more information on Campaign Marmion, contact Reichenbacher at creichenbacher@marmion.org or (630) 897-6936, extension 242.