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Scott Fowler, The Charlotte Observer
BOONE, N.C. — Shortly after Hurricane Helene devastated much of Western North Carolina in late September, Appalachian State football coach Shawn Clark decided to see what the damage looked like in Boone.
Going one way, the road leading from his home was completely washed out. Going the other, the road still existed. But it was blocked — not by one downed tree, but by 14 of them.
“It normally takes me 12 minutes to get to the office,” Clark said. “That day, it took six hours, and I couldn’t raise my arms the next day.”
Clark and his neighbors cut a slow, grueling path with their chainsaws that day to Highway 421, one of the major thoroughfares in the college town of Boone (pop. 20,000), which has an economy largely based around the university and the tourism industry.
Now, close to a month from when Helene first made landfall in the U.S. and began wreaking havoc, Appalachian State is about to play its first home football game since the storm.
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First the university reopened Oct. 11, then in-person classes resumed Oct. 16 and now, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Kidd Brewer Stadium will be full of black and gold as the Mountaineers host Georgia State.
The place looks gorgeous in October, as it always does, with the changing fall leaves providing a backdrop to what ESPN named over the summer as one of college football’s top 25 college football stadiums in America. (Clemson was the only other team in the Carolinas to make that list).
But Saturday — which will be App State’s first home football game in 37 days — won’t be a typical gameday at “The Rock.” And no one is pretending that it will be.
“I think we’re all excited to have a game at home again,” said Appalachian State running back Anderson Castle, a Boone native who once attended Mountaineers games as a kid sporting an Armanti Edwards jersey. “Football means so much to this town, and it feels like it’s been forever since we’ve played a game here.”
Eat local, App State urges
The 1 p.m. game time Saturday was set in part so fans can come and go in a single day without straining the local hotels, which still contain some displaced residents and visiting aid workers. It’s also meant to allow fans with tickets for the Helene “Concert for Carolina” benefit Saturday night in Charlotte to be able to use them.
Appalachian State is encouraging its fans to eat at locally-owned restaurants and buy their tailgating supplies in the Boone area, too, as businesses that have been badly hurt both by Helene and by the lack of visitors coming to football games and “leaf season” try to recover.
“We are trying to be helpful and not harmful here,” said Doug Gillin, Appalachian State’s athletic director. “There have been a whole lot of conversations with a whole lot of stakeholders to get to this point, before our chancellor (interim App State chancellor Heather Norris) made the final decision.”
There were serious talks about moving Appalachian State’s final three home football games this year to either Wake Forest or UNC Charlotte. Both schools were willing. The first home game immediately after Helene — originally scheduled for Sept. 28 against Liberty — was canceled and won’t be made up.
But as the power came back on and the roads were cleared, Appalachian State ultimately decided it could host its final three games safely. This weekend it will try to provide what Clark called “a sense of normalcy” to the campus and the local businesses that depend so heavily on fall Saturdays. Homecoming was moved from Saturday to the final home game on Nov. 23, however, to allow for more time to prepare for the additional traffic that event entails.
Boone, education and tourism
David Jackson once was Appalachian State’s radio play-by-play football announcer — he was on the mic the day App State upset Michigan in 2007 — and still calls 3-4 Mountaineer games a year on ESPN Plus. His main job, however, is serving as president of the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce, and he knows what the town and surrounding Watauga County does best.
“We host people,” Jackson said, referring not only to football games, but also to ski season, choose-and-cut-your-own-Christmas-tree season and escape-the-heat summer season. “And we educate them. Host and educate: That’s our lot in life.”
The App State football team — which won three consecutive FCS national championships from 2005-07 under legendary head coach Jerry Moore — has long been weaved into Boone’s fabric. And Jackson knows as well as anyone what an App State home football weekend means to Boone’s economy.
“You’re talking about a couple million dollars easily,” Jackson said, “and that’s probably an underestimation.”
The most important tourism month for Boone is October, slightly edging out July, Jackson said.
“We’ve often said that October is when you make your hibernating money,” Jackson said.
So monetarily, keeping the games in Boone rather than moving them to Winston-Salem or Charlotte was significant. “We just needed to be sure we could do it safely,” Gillin said. “And we think we can.”
Tourism — and life in general — is rebounding in less hard-hit areas like Boone and Blowing Rock. I drove around Boone on Monday. Other than a Walmart in a low-lying area off Highway 321 that was damaged and remains closed except for its pharmacy, I didn’t see a lot of obvious evidence of storm fallout. The stadium itself seemed untouched, although the trees aren’t quite as beautiful in places as usual owing to Helene’s impact.
“A large part of our community looks fairly unharmed,” Jackson said. “And it has also been almost a month (since Helene). But you can also go five miles down any road up here and still find devastation.”
Still, nearby tourist attraction Grandfather Mountain reopened Wednesday. Watauga County schools are scheduled to restart on Thursday. Some of the prettier parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina are getting close to reopening.
But it can’t be a free-for-all after so much tragedy. Helene’s impact on Western N.C. was monstrous. The state of North Carolina was reporting 96 verified storm-related fatalities as of Wednesday.
“With a football game, you’ve got a date and a time and a place for 25,000 or 30,000 people to be somewhere,” Jackson said. “That’s compared to saying, ‘Hey, you know, some of the parkway is open, the roads are open. Let’s just go and go see all this stuff.’ That’s what we don’t need right now. We still have infrastructure being repaired and patchwork things being made more permanent fixes. We’ve got road crews and power crews all over the place, working on critical infrastructure.”
As far as the Mountaineer players, 28 of Appalachian State’s 117 men on the roster had serious water and/or power issues in the days after Helene, according to Clark. No one was hurt, but several players and coaches were displaced from their homes.
Kaedin Robinson, App State’s leading receiver and a captain, is from Asheville — one of the places that got hammered by Helene. For a while, he didn’t know the fate of his family and friends there.
“I couldn’t reach them for a few days,” Robinson said. “And then I called my parents and got them, but it was breaking up. I knew they were alive, but I didn’t know if they were stranded somewhere or if they were in the house. I didn’t know anything.”
Fortunately, Robinson’s family turned out to be OK.
Free meals and Wi-Fi
And Appalachian State’s campus proved to be a beacon in the first couple of post-Helene weeks. When many people in the region didn’t have Internet access, the university did, and so lots of people came to the campus for its Wi-Fi.
The on-campus meal service made food and served it for free to whomever showed up, ultimately serving tens of thousands of free meals in the weeks after Helene (my son, an App State junior, enjoyed a couple of those dinners himself).
The App State Disaster Relief Fund quickly got up and running and has distributed more than $2 million to members of the university community facing hardships because of Helene. Dozens of football players volunteered to help, unpacking and organizing donated goods at a local church and helping to load helicopters flying to more remote areas of the mountains.
As for Saturday’s actual game, it has great symbolic significance but is only of average importance from a football perspective. Both App State and Georgia State are 2-4 overall and 0-3 in the Sun Belt, with each hoping for their first conference win. App State hasn’t had a great year so far by its standards, with a minus-10 turnover ratio and a 66-20 loss in its most high-profile game, at Clemson.
App State star quarterback Joey Aguilar is among the nation’s leaders in passing yards per game but he also threw four interceptions in his last game, a loss at Louisiana.
App State wants to win Saturday, of course. But whether the Mountaineers do or not, hosting a football weekend successfully will feel like a victory.
“Our community has been through a lot,” Clark said. “We’ve learned they’re resilient and that we have a lot of great people who have had each other’s back here in Boone. … So it’s going to be a great day — for App State, for Western North Carolina and for Boone.”
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