When a family donates the money to build a major facility, they often reserve the right to name that structure or provide other restrictions. Sometimes these requests are minor – an equal number of bathrooms, for instance – while other times they’re significantly more esoteric and unique (the University of North Dakota’s Ralph Englestad Arena chief among those endowed facilities).
Now, a high school is celebrating the surprise funding of a major new sports facility and readily embracing a truly unique restriction that comes with the donation funding the stadium: It will have to build a pink visitor’s locker room.
As first reported by the Des Moines Register, Bondurant-Farrar (Iowa) High is scheduled to be the recipient of a generous $3 million donation earmarked for the construction of a brand, spanking new football stadium. The money for the stadium is being donated by the Lohse family, among the recent Powerball loterry winners. The Lohse’s oldest son is a sophomore on the Bondurant-Farrar football team, and his parents wanted to do something to help the program.
As it turns out, the Lohse’s are also diehard University of Iowa football fans. As a result, the insisted on one rather peculiar restriction for the Blue Jays’ new stadium, forcing the construction plans to include a pink visitor’s locker room, just like the one at Iowa’s famed Kinnick Stadium painted Pepto Bismol pink.
“I was sort of half joking and half not I suppose, but they said they’d do it,” Mary Lohse told the Register. “It’s supposed to put them in a certain soft frame of mind … it will certainly give all the players something to talk about.”
Naturally, that “frame of mind” is a passive one, with the pink locker room meant to weaken a visiting team’s morale and resolve. It remains to be seen if that will come from the pink locker room at Bondurant-Farrar, but the school was more than happy to incorporate one as a prerequisite to earn such a significant donation.
“It not only gives us the opportunity to accelerate the stadium project, but to advance other plans for projects within the district as well,” Bondurant-Farrar School Board president Kristin Swift told the Register. “We’re very excited about this opportunity.”
That’s more than anyone can say for visiting teams at the stadium as soon as it opens.
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