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St. Edward will play at NIU Friday

St. Edward's homecoming football game won't be at home, but the Green Wave will get a chance to play in a special place Friday night.

Athletic director P.J. White said Monday the Green Wave will host Walther Christian Friday night at Huskie Stadium on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. The sophomore game will be at 5:30 p.m. with the varsity contest to follow.

"If you can't have it at home then NIU is better than anywhere else that's available," White said. "If we're going to salvage anything out of homecoming at least this will be a neat experience for everyone."

This will be the third straight week St. Edward has had to play away from its own Greg True Field due to the lawn care company contracted to take care of the field accidentally using weed killer instead of fertilizer at the end of August, which killed all the grass on the football field.

St. Edward played against Guerin Prep at Geneva High School last week and White said Geneva would have been fine for this week but the Vikings have a home game Friday night against St. Charles East.

NIU had contacted White a couple weeks ago offering to help if it could.

"They called me and said they had seen it on the news and if we needed a place to play they'd help us out if they could," he said. "Geneva was awesome and a great venue and we would have been happy there again but they have a home game this week so I reached out to NIU and they said they'd love to help out."

White has actually coached on the Huskie Stadium field. As an assistant coach at Batavia, he was on the field when the Bulldogs won the Class 6A state title in 2013 at NIU. NIU was also the longtime home for DeKalb High School games before DeKalb built its own field.

"It's a little further away for our fans but it should be a neat experience," White said. "I'm hoping it will be a fun game for the kids and should be a cool thing for everybody."

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