LIBERTY, INDIANA — The Preble Shawnee Athletic Boosters organized the 54th Annual Camden Day Golf Outing held on Friday, June 26, at the Liberty Country Club in Liberty, Indiana.
The Preble Shawnee Athletic Boosters raised $5,164 in support of Preble Shawnee athletics with over 100 golfers present on the green.
Preble Shawnee Board of Education member Gary Rader said everyone is appreciative of the support they’ve been given considering the recent impact on local businesses due to COVID-19.
“It was pretty neat seeing all the businesses after all the struggles they’ve been through, they didn’t even hesitate to donate to us,” Rader said. “We usually try to ear tag something that the money that we raise is going to go towards, and this year we’ve picked the game clocks for the football field.”
Though this was just the third year that the Preble Shawnee Athletic Boosters have operated the Camden Day Golf Outing, it has been an institution in the community for over half a century.
“It started in 1967. Used to be they’d shut the town of Camden down, literally,” Rader said. “Every local business would shut down and come over and be a part of it. Everything, including the banks, the local restaurants, I mean, when you rolled through Camden on Camden Day, it was a ghost town.”
Three groups of four women teed off first at 8 a.m. followed by 16 groups of four men at 11:30 a.m. Rader said the turnout was so high that they had to turn away some groups who were interested in playing due to current safety restrictions at the Liberty Country Club.
“Great turnout. It’s great to see people. Everybody was kind of anxious to get out of the house and do something from being cooped up. It’s just great,” Rader said. “Great group of people to work with and I look forward to donating my time to get this thing put on every year.”
Rader also noted that it is a unique opportunity for members of the community to interact.
“It’s just kind of neat seeing the different generations. We’ve got people here that’s almost 80 years old, and then we’ve got kids that were on our golf team from last year that graduated that’s 19 years old,” Rader said. “So, just the age range and you sit and see the kids that are 19 years old having conversations with the guys that’s 80 years old, it’s pretty neat to sit back and just watch.”
While the focus of this fundraising event is for fall sports, Rader also acknowledged the lost seasons for spring athletes.
“I felt so bad for all the seniors that just got cheated out of their senior seasons. We had some local kids that were — they had serious chances of winning state titles,” Rader said. “We had a young man on our tennis team, he finished third in the state last year as a junior and he had a really, really good chance of competing for that this year and due to the COVID-19 thing, he didn’t even get a chance to do that. So, you know, it was frustrating.”
Overall, Rader said the support from the community has been great, and with the $5,164 raised on Friday, they’ll continue to positively impact Preble Shawnee athletics.
“Oh, it’s great. I want to give a shout out to Dane Sadowski. He’s our athletic director and he’s went over and above as far as our athletic complex out there,” Rader said. “We’ve got numerous new things, but he kind of headed up getting all new scoreboards for the baseball and softball complex, new speaker system for the football field, gymnasiums, getting a new intercom system in there right now. I mean, just everything you could think of he stepped in and he’s took the bull by the horns and he has really made our complex there at Shawnee something to be proud of.”
