Two years removed, Seymour is in last stage of rebuild

March 04-- Mar. 4--It's a briskly cold winter day in Iowa. Inside the main office of Seymour High School, a new item has been put on display on the secretary's counter. It's a trophy that reads: "2019 Girls Basketball Bluegrass Conference Tournament Champions."

Paul Hinners, the head girls basketball coach and teacher at the high school, walks into the office to grab papers from the printer before quickly admiring the trophy that his team won the night before. The secretary pulls out a container full of brownies she made for girls in celebration of winning. She jokes that she supposes Hinners deserves some as well for coaching the team. Hinners graciously accepts one, maybe two, brownies before thanking her and heading back to his classroom.

This is Seymour.

A small rural town in southern Iowa that was hit by an EF-2 tornado back in 2017, causing significant damage to the high school and forcing a complete rebuild of the school's two gyms. You wouldn't know it from the people or the kids, but from the outside, you will still see ongoing construction as they continue to rebuild.

"The sports area is the last thing," Seymour Superintendent Brad Breon said. "The band room and the junior high gym will kind of be the last thing. Right now they are working on the high school gym."

The area will now feature several new additions such as a new concession stand for the gym and for football games. Brand-new locker rooms have also been inserted along with a new elevator that has been added to help connect the high school to the gyms.

The junior high gym now has a regulation size floor (it didn't before) and it will feature a new stage that will be used for several other events.

The high school gym floor is down and painted but the bleachers have not yet been installed. Seymour brought a section of the old gym floor to add to the new gym. It will bring them a little piece of the old to add to the new.

"The school did have to put additional funds into it because we did have to expand a little bit as we were redoing it. The new addition and the elevator will be about the same cost ($6.4 million). The entire project and everything is close to $11 million, which was mostly covered through insurance," Breon said.

In the absence of these two gyms, Seymour has been forced to look for alternate options. Practices and even P.E. classes have been forced to be shuttled back-and-forth to the old Neely's building, an old warehouse that Seymour has transformed into a temporary gym featuring a basketball floor, basketball hoops, volleyball nets, pitcher's mound and even a weight room.

Without a home gym to play at, Seymour has had to use its neighboring districts as temporary homes. Taking a 20-30 minute bus ride to "home" games isn't ideal. Neither was a stretch this season where Seymour was scheduled to play three home games at three different locations in the same week.

"We have to travel to a lot of different places to have home games since we haven't had a home floor to play on," Seymour high school principal Jamie Houser said. "We've been thankful to Centerville, Moulton and Moravia for helping us out a lot the last two years. We're lucky to have surrounding districts that have been great to us."

The adversity hasn't bothered the kids, who continue to thrive and go about their days as if it was a part of their routine.

"They've been great. They've stepped up to the plate and just kind of went with the flow and they've helped out when we've needed them. They've been pretty resilient through the whole thing," Houser said.

"The kids have probably been better than anybody else," Breon added.

Seymour plans to have graduation in the high school gym. It will be the first event held at the gym in over two years. They expect the rest of the new area to be complete in time for the start of the next school year.

After two years of going through adversity while rebuilding, what will it be like when the gyms are finished and things return to normal?

"I don't think we are going to know what normal is. It's going to take us some time to get used to functioning normal again," Houser said.

Seymour should be excited to finally have a place to call their home again. They have rallied around each other over the past couple of years and have thrived through the adversity.

"We'd like to thank the community, the staff and everybody for being understanding," Breon said. "It's been a two-year process and they've really come on board and we're really appreciative for that and we couldn't have done it without them."

Colin Peters is a sports reporter for the Daily Iowegian. He can be reached at [email protected] or by calling the newsroom at 641-856-6336. Follow him on Twitter @ColinPetersDI.

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