It’s a Friday night in late September, and the homecoming football game in Pagosa Springs is underway.
Fans and family are cheering; glow sticks and pom-poms wave from the stands.
The visitors are trailing, the Pirates are sailing: It’s 28-0 with just a minute to go.
“Pirates log homecoming win over Monte Vista,” the headline will read. Coach Nathan Morales thanked the crowd.
“We’ve gotten a lot of support and we love it,” he said. “We want a lot of people here ‘cause we feed off of our crowd and that really helps us. So, the more people we have in the stands, the better, for sure.”
But rewind the game clock. See the players scramble in reverse. It’s 0-0 with hours left to kickoff. Monte Vista’s bus is just pulling into town.
Greeting the opponents are passing cars emblazoned with Pirate jersey numbers, storefront windows adorned with banners and painted slogans of local support.
It was a moment Aubrie Limebrook had imagined months before, when she and a group of fellow parents and community members gathered together as part of a reenergized, partly reformed Pagosa Springs Athletic Booster Club.
“We’re a small town,” said Limebrook, a longtime resident and mother to three student-athletes. “There’s no reason we can’t have that community feeling.”
To help stoke it, club members took to downtown Pagosa Springs in the days leading up to homecoming, enlisting the support of local businesses while embellishing windows with rallying calls in support of the home team.
“Having those businesses be a part of [homecoming] was huge,” Limebrook recalled, “so that when Monte Vista rolls into town, it’s like, ‘OK, they have this school spirit, from the businesses to the kids to the parents.’”
Painted on one of those windows was, “Small town, big spirit.”
According to Limebrook, it’s been the club’s mantra, mission and marching orders ever since.
A resurgence
Although the booster club has long been a staple of prep athletics in Pagosa Springs, Limebrook recalled how membership declined in the aftermath of COVID-19, how some volunteers felt stretched too thin and on the brink of burnout — herself included.
“People are so busy and COVID got weird, and then people didn’t come back to volunteering,” Limebrook recalled. “We just lost a lot of manpower, a lot of volunteers, a lot of hands, a lot of energy.”
When some months before the start of the 2024 fall season the president and vice president decided to step away, the club found itself at an uncertain crossroads.
“There were talks of, maybe it’s just too much, maybe we disband and give the money back to the school district,” Limebrook remembered. “We kind of had that moment.”
But sometime before summer, Limebrook startled to the recognition that she wasn’t ready to let the club go.
“I was like, ‘I think we can do this,’” she said. “Why not? I don’t want to see it go away. It’s huge, it’s such a value to the schools, to all these athletes.”
In a bout of “perfect timing,” Limebrook’s friends now had children entering high school, others had children that were close and she was able to successfully coax many of them to July’s back-to-school meeting.
“Before that, I’d say we had four to five people at a meeting, 10 at the most,” Limebrook said. But at that July meeting, 25 people showed up, all saying, ‘We can help now.’ They’re just amazing friends and amazing people.”
Limebrook assumed the club’s vacant vice president role.
“It was exciting, it was new energy. It was people wanting to do more, wanting to talk about ideas,” she said. “For those of us that were kind of burning out … their energy has reenergized us.”
A club for every sport
Alongside new president Curtis Nehring, also a parent of student-athletes, Limebrook and the club’s roster of volunteers began focusing on making small strides toward some big dreams — namely, tending to and fueling that community spirit and fostering an inclusive sporting environment where everyone is welcome.
“In our mind, our vision for booster is to boost spirit and to keep that Pirate pride feeling,” Limebrook said.
“That’s the whole point of what we’re trying to do,” added Nehring. “Support the kids, support that spirit, support the community.”
The homecoming window displays were a part of that effort, as were the pom-poms and glow sticks. Turnout for this year’s homecoming game was higher than Limebrook and Nehring remember in years’ past — even drawing tourists — and support remained strong throughout the season.
As Morales noted, the players and coaches could feel it.
Fundraising for the club, which most visibly takes place at home-game concession stands, helps to purchase items like snack bags for away trips, end-of-season banquets, state sendoffs and more — all in addition to athletic program wish-list items that may not otherwise receive full funding from Archuleta School District.
Once Pagosa Springs High School Athletic Director Chantelle Jordan approves initial funding requests, coaches head to the club to pitch their ideas and program needs. According to Nehring and Limebrook, funds from the club go toward renewable assets that stand to benefit teams for seasons to come.
“It’s anything that’s coming to us that the coach feels is necessary and that [Jordan] has approved that will benefit the team and all of the athletes,” Limebrook said. “It’s something that will come back and be there for the next year and the next year.”
In addition to things like uniforms and warmups, the club has recently helped purchase advanced technologies designed to capture games, swings and strokes for later analysis by coaches and players.
“It’s starting to dovetail into the kids now having film to submit to colleges,” Nehring said, adding that when it comes to funding, the club tries to focus on what will have the biggest, most immediate impact.
“We really want to spend the money on the kids as fast as we can so that they get the benefit [before graduating],” he said.
Nehring and Limebrook have also made a point of highlighting sports with less-visible presences at home, hoping to add a little wind to the sails of Pirate swimmers, bowlers, golfers, cross-country harriers and more.
“Sending goodie bags, sending little pom-poms for the parents that are going … We don’t have home swim meets because we don’t have a pool, but we can still send our love,” Limebrook said, “so everyone feels that boosters is behind you.”
It’s an added “oomph,” as Nehring described it, that goes a long way toward contributing to athletic success, and one that can result in a win for the entire community.
“You think, ‘Oh, we’re just handing out glow sticks at a football game,” Limebrook said, “but, in the long run, just the impact, you’re bringing more people in [who say], ‘Oh, this is fun, I was going to go do something tonight that I maybe shouldn’t have and I went to the game instead because it was so fun.’
“All of those little things I think will have a bigger impact. But in the moment it’s like, we’re just taking these small steps.
Take the weight room at Pagosa Springs High School as an example.
This fall, the club partnered with a local community member to purchase new equipment for the space, resulting in a surge of interest from students throughout the district.
“There’s way more kids in the weight room, way more activity,” Nehring said. “Some of them are athletes, but there’s a good chunk of non-athletes, kids working out in jeans that are just kind of feeling their way out, having never really done it, which is cool.”
Limebrook added that the improved space is “bringing girls into the weight room, who before would have been like, ‘I’m not going into that place, ever,’ that are now feeling welcome and like, ‘I can do this, too.’ All of those little things, I think, will have a bigger impact.”
And if booster club can help fund initiatives like the weight room, Nehring and Limebrook suggested, that means the school district is freer to direct money toward other sports-related opportunities that in other districts might be more rare.
“Our kids pay almost nothing to be able to participate in sports,” Nehring said, “whereas a lot of kids in these other communities are putting up a couple hundred bucks a sport to be able to afford jerseys and equipment and things like that.
“If the booster club is able to fund things like uniforms, that means [the district] has more money to do these other things — paying for hotels for kids when they’re at state and all that. It’s a very collaborative thing.”
Back from the brink of dissolution, Limebrook and Nehring noted the club is always looking for new volunteers — and the commitment may not be as demanding as many might think.
“Really what we’re looking at is like an hour a month,” Nehring said. “It’s silly things people don’t think about, like one more person in the concession stand just goes so far.”
“It’s nice to have all these people and their different skills,” Limebrook added. “I’m hoping eventually we’ll all look back and go, ‘OK that was cool. It started slow, but look at us now.’”
The Pagosa Springs Athletic Booster Club meets every third Wednesday of the month. For more information, including how to get involved and to sign up for the club newsletter, send an email to contact@pagosaboosters.org.
garrett@pagosasun.com
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