Saints football team clears Nicollet County Fair horse barn in record time

For Nicollet County Fair volunteers, taking down the dozens of hefty, metal gates in the horse barn can take between 10 to 12 hours. For the St. Peter High School football team, it took under 40 minutes.

On Wednesday, Sept. 18, around 45 members of the Saints football team lent their strength after practice to help clear out the hose bar so the space can be rented out in the wintertime. What’s typically an arduous task for volunteers was made easy by the young players, who organized themselves into teams of four to lift out around 190 heavy stalls in rapid succession.

“If you realized how heavy they are, a bunch of old men can’t do this, we’ve got to have machinery to do it,” said Fair Board President Don McCabe, who watched with amazement as he and other volunteers saw the barn cleaned up in record time. “It would have taken us at least 10 hours to do it, especially if we were doing it by hand.”

For the Saints, the work proved to be no trouble at all and the players quickly turned the task into the game. As each group of players shouldered the gates toward the edge of the barn, they were surrounded by teammates clapping, shouting and cheering them on.

”It felt good, we really had a good system here,” said Team Captain Derek Guth. “We kind of split of finto groups and went off to make it as quick as possible.”