photo by: contributed

Baker University football players Cooper Dill, Grayson Quick, Brandon Pena, Rocky Juarez and Jeff Moore are pictured on Feb. 15, 2022, while helping out on a project to build a new boardwalk at the Baker Wetlands.

Rotary club members and college football players may seem like an unlikely duo, but this week the two groups made a perfect team.

On Tuesday, some members of the Jayhawk Breakfast Rotary Club were out at the Baker Wetlands working on an ongoing project to add a new wheelchair-accessible boardwalk to the wetlands, when five players from the Baker University football team showed up.

The Rotary Club, which has donated funding and volunteer labor to the project, is at a point in the work where in order to preserve the wetlands they are not able to drive in the loads of lumber needed to construct the boardwalk. Instead, lumber needs to be carried in by hand or taken by wheelbarrow into the site.

Chuck Blaser was among a handful of rotary members and other volunteers working Tuesday, and progress at moving the multiple pallets of lumber needed for the boardwalk — some of which have gotten wet and were thereby made even heavier — was not exactly sailing along.

“Carrying things on our back wasn’t our idea of what we ought to be doing, since most of us were a bit older,” Blaser said.

photo by: Chris Conde

Rotary volunteers Chuck Blaser, from left, Doug Paul and Bob Rhoton install slats on a new boardwalk on Friday Jan. 14, 2022, on the east side of the Baker Wetlands.

But when the football players started lending a hand, progress certainly picked up. In a couple of hours, the players — Cooper Dill, Grayson Quick, Brandon Pena, Rocky Juarez and Jeff Moore — were able to move about five pallets of lumber to the needed areas, and even ended up helping put some of the boards in place.

Baker Wetlands Director Irene Unger said that once the project got to a certain point, there was not a good way of moving material into the site. Unger said because they are trying to clear a minimal amount of vegetation, they were not able to use heavy machinery to transport the pallets of lumber. Unger, noting that many of the Rotary Club members are retired, said she reached out to one of the football coaches hoping she could round up some volunteers to help out.

photo by: contributed

Baker University football players Cooper Dill and Brandon Pena help out on a project to build a new boardwalk at the Baker Wetlands on Feb. 15, 2022.

Unger said she’d told the Rotary Club volunteers she was trying to get some of the football team out, but she wasn’t sure how likely it would be because of player schedules and football practice. But she said the five players, who were accompanied by two coaches, head coach Jason Thoren and assistant coach Brian Boyle, showed up and put in even more work than expected.

“They were there for a couple hours, just moving lumber for us into the site,” Unger said. “And what that does is then our volunteers that are building it, they can work a lot faster because all the materials are right there.”

photo by: contributed

Baker University football players Rocky Juarez and Grayson Quick secure boards as part of a project to build a new boardwalk at the Baker Wetlands on Feb. 15, 2022.

Once complete, the boardwalk will be about 1,200 feet long and pass through the Night Heron Shallows on the east side of the wetlands, as the Journal-World recently reported. The new boardwalk is scheduled to be complete sometime this spring.

Blaser said though they do have some younger volunteers who help out, most of them are retired, and they really appreciated the football players showing up. He estimated some of the biggest pieces of lumber probably weighed about 40 pounds and needed to be carried about an eighth of a mile. He said it was not easy work, and he estimated the players were able to move about 30% of the lumber that needed to be moved onto the worksite.

“We’re going to see it to the end, but that certainly helped a lot,” Blaser said. “That made our ending date get closer.”