Chesterton soccer players and coaches, past and present gather for a day at first alumni game, a showcase of former talent and a shiny new stadium

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Former and current Chesterton boys and girls soccer players will remember this past weekend for more than watching Spain score a defensively dominant 1-0 win over Argentina in extra time in Sunday’s World Cup final.
They’ll remember Saturday as a day they spent with old friends at Chesterton’s new jewel of a soccer stadium for the first alumni game.
The brainchild of current girls coach Ben Forgey, drew nearly 50 former players who were happy to hear that the plan calls for it to become an annual event. He said he came up with the idea “probably about five years ago. It felt like something that we needed to do, but it’s not easy to do.”
Especially so the first year, but Forgey pulled it off by enlisting the help of boosters and several former coaches who recruited their players.
“Last year we were building the stadium and I thought it would be a perfect time to make this a priority,” Forgey said. “We’ve got great support from our boosters right now and they were willing to help me with whatever I needed to get it going. So I thought with the new stadium let’s use this as a springboard to get this alumni game going. With a lot of hard work from them, we put it together.”
The day featured food trucks, a screen to watch the World Cup third-place match, a co-ed game played by alumni, with mass substitutions every 10 minutes, and what Forgey called, “miniature maroon and gold games for our boys and girls current high school teams so that the alumni could see the talent we have here at the school right now, and vice versa.”
Alumni wore T-shirts with their names and graduation years printed on them.
“I’m so happy,” Forgey said. “We had such great feedback, the vibe felt really good and it just felt nice.”
New boys coach Will Fortenberry will play in Portage’s alumni game Saturday.
“I think it was awesome,” Fortenberry said of Chesterton’s first alumni game. “Great numbers. It was a fun, friendly vibe. It was good to see.”
Past coaches who showed up for the event included Kip Walton, Ismail Attallah, Jamie Sensibaugh, David Galloway, and assistants Tom Biel and Silvio Spann.
The event in general and the stadium specifically were big hits.
During Walton’s nine years as coach of the girls team, the Trojans first played their home games at the middle school, then shifted to the grass field where the new stadium is located.
“It was fantastic,” Walton said of Saturday. “Everybody enjoyed themselves.”
As for the field, he said, “Night and day from when we played our games there. In late summer the field was hard because it was dry. Then later on in the season when you get the rains and stuff you’d always find nasty, soggy spots and mud puddles and stuff like that. What they have now is so much better, so much better. Now they’ve got the turf on there and it’s beautiful. It’s really good.”
Walton described himself as old school and said at first he didn’t like the idea of the new field having artificial turf because it would be too hard, causing too much pounding on the knees and ankles.
“Then when I walked on it it was nice and soft,” Walton said. “The way they had it laid out with the white lines for soccer was really cool, really, really nice.”
Walton said he enjoyed visiting with two of his former players and reminiscing with Attallah and Sensibaugh.
As a 1994 graduate, Jason Ruge was the oldest of the former players to play in the game.
“It was a blast,” said Ruge, who had three generations of his family watching from the stands, including his mother, Dawn Ruge from the food pantry. “It was phenomenal. They did a great job of putting it all together, I didn’t hear any negative words there. Everybody had a great time. The new facility is so amazing. Everything was structured great, it was a lot of fun, it really was. It felt so good to get back out there. I played for a long, long time, but I’ve taken a little break for the last few years, so to get back out there and run around was amazing.”
Ruge said there were players he had coached in the Duneland Soccer Club playing.
“There were a couple I hadn’t seen in a long time,” he said. “That was what it was all about, seeing a bunch of faces you don’t see anymore and getting to catch up with them and then to play was a bonus.”
Ruge said he’s old school and still prefers a grass pitch to turf, but understands that’s not the way of the world anymore.
“The turf on it is really nice though,” Ruge said. “Everything about it is good, the field, the facility, the bleachers, all the equipment they have to train with, all the goals, the different rebounders, it’s phenomenal. It’s so much above what we had way back when I played and it just keeps getting better. It’s so nice to see because the program does so well on the girls and boys side.”
A 2021 Chesterton graduate, Addy Joiner is the girls program’s all-time leading scorer with 113 goals and finished her career ranked fourth all-time at Valparaiso University with 24 goals.
She works at a wealth management firm in Chicago and lives in Oak Park, a suburb that borders the West side of the city.
Joiner said of Valpo U, “I cannot speak more highly of that program and that school. I had a great experience.”
And she had a great time Saturday, spending much of the day with former teammates Annalisa Hackett,
Nikki Groceman, Carly Balas and Liv Hansen.
“We used to be so close and time did its thing and we all have been doing our own thing so it was really nice to have a reason to come back together,” Joiner said. “You graduate high school, you move on, and most people go make their own new friends. We’ve been meaning to spend time together, but having a function to attend that makes it happen makes it so much easier.”
Of the stadium, Joiner said, “Oh my gosh I had no idea it was done. It looks so great. The turf looked super new, super clean, the signs and the buildings, all of it.”
She remembers well when that wasn’t the case.
“That grass used to be very bumpy and if it rained we would slip and slide in the mud,” she said. “It’s great that they have turf.”
Beyond the stadium and the pitch, the sense of ownership for the players will be big as well, according to Joiner.
“It’ll be great for them to be able to spend time there and not have to share it with anyone else, have an actual space that’s theirs to call home, not a football field that they’re borrowing,” Joiner said. “It’ll be great for team bonding, team culture.”
All parties agreed that as word spreads about what a good time was had by all at the first alumni game, future ones are bound to draw even more players to participate.
Even Mother Nature lent a hand, with the smokey air from the Canadian wildfires greatly subsiding for the big event.
Forgey summed up the vibe in five words: “It was a beautiful night.”