A Push For The Francis X. Sweeney Gymnasium

Vonn Hartung doesn’t want Francis Sweeney’s memory to die.

Hartung, 72, graduated Waterford High School in 1960 as part of the school’s first graduating class. And while his life has taken him around the world, with his last 29 years spent in Puerto Rico, he will never forget Sweeney, Waterford’s longtime athletic director and man who began the athletic program at Waterford High School.

Now, he wants to rename Waterford High School’s field house the Francis X. Sweeney Gymnasium. However, the Waterford Board of Education has a policy that does not allow it to name anything involved with the schools after anybody, leaving the district with generic names like Veterans Field. 

Ask Hartung, and he says that creates a school district without a soul. Great people like Sweeney should be remembered, so future generations have a role model to look up to, he said.

“Our town, Waterford, needs to honor its people,” Hartung said. “We need, more than ever, people to look up to. We can’t live in a generic town.”

Meanwhile, Board of Education Chairwoman Kathleen McCarty said she would “look into it.” She said similar requests have been made in the past, and there was a fear that not everyone would agree on the name that was picked, or there would be people wanting every room in the schools named after somebody.

“Traditionally, we’ve never done it,” McCarty said. “We’ve just really shied away from it because there are so many different individuals who deserve to be honored.”

However, McCarthy said she is open to “listening,” and she promised to bring it up at an upcoming meeting of the Board of Education’s policy committee. She said in years past, “the majority had not wished to do it,” but she said she was “not closed” to anything.

Sweeney

Sweeney began working in the Waterford School District in 1951. He would stay on for 28 years, and during that time created Waterford's athletic department. Sweeney coached nearly every sport the school ever offered and became Waterford High School’s first athletic director.

After his retirement, he stayed involved, as he frequented Waterford sporting events and became a member of the Waterford Recreation and Parks Commission. On Dec. 14, 2012, he died at the age of 86.

However, what separated him was not his creation of athletics at Waterford for both boys and girls, but his love of the students he taught, Hartung said. Hartung said he himself was not a great athlete, and yet had a very close relationship with Sweeney, a man who truly cared about the people around him.

“He’s always been a person to look up to,” Hartung said. “A lot of us didn’t have good home lives and stuff and he was a beacon to a lot of us kids. He was a person who cared and you knew he cared.”

The Push

Hartung, with help from fellow Waterford High School graduate Charles Johnson, have put together a petition to get the field house at the high school renamed after Sweeney. And on Monday afternoon, a friend of Hartung, Bill Simons, began a Facebook group pushing for the cause, and there are already more than 240 members.

Hartung said he plans on getting as many signatures and backers as possible and then going to the Board of Education to get the field house named after Sweeney. He said he can’t understand how the field house at Waterford High School is a better name than the Francis X. Sweeney Gymnasium, as his suggestion both honors a great man and gives students a person to look up to.

“I can’t understand where the Board of Education is coming from,” Hartung said. “It sounds like mediocrity to me, like this idea that everyone gets a trophy. We just want to do what’s right.”

To join the Facebook group to get the gymnasium named after Sweeney, click here.