A small community that won a big national contest came together on Saturday to celebrate and to kick off a new future on their brand new, refurbished soccer field.
Munro Park in North Sydney, N.S., received a serious facelift after winning a $250,000 prize for coming first in the nationwide Kraft Heinz Project Play contest in 2015.
"It's the culmination of two years of hard work, and we have a beautiful new field,” says Northside Soccer president Sandy Cantwell-Kerr. “The kids are going to be playing on it 20 years from now."
With the money matched by the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, the once falling apart field received upgrades that have made it weather tight.
"Looking at the rain we had the past year, I don't know if we would have been able to use the field if we hadn't done the work to it,” says Cantwell-Kerr. “It was in really rough shape before the big flood of October. And now it's pristine.”
With hundreds on hand, Saturday was a carnival-like atmosphere,
"This really showcases what can happen when a community comes together and comes together for a common cause," says Georgina Gray of Kraft Heinz Project Play.
It turns out the park and the kids who play there aren’t the only winners. More than $100,000 work of Kraft products has been donated to the North Sydney Food Bank.
"They're actually going to be dispersing to food banks across Cape Breton Island, so we're really, really excited about that initiative," says Gray.
For the kids, it's not only a sparkling new place to play soccer, but a life lesson about what can be accomplished when people come together.
"It was somewhere I came as a kid. Somewhere many, many people here came as kids, and now our kids are here," says soccer coach Brett MacDougall.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Ryan MacDonald.
