Sports

Coombs Foundation to Help Fund New Scoreboard

A new scoreboard will be delivered to Hatters Stadium this fall and installed during an away football game.

Hatboro-Horsham School District is $30,000 closer to covering the cost of a new scoreboard for Hatters Stadium. 

The school board, during Monday night's meeting, approved a sponsorship agreement with the Edward Taylor Coombs Foundation to fund, over a four-year period, what amounts to roughly half of the cost of a new scoreboard.

The remaining balance, estimated to be about $30,000, will be funded through ad revenue on the new scoreboard, permitted under a sponsorship and advertising policy that the board approved last summer.

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So far, the district has secured three confirmed advertising sponsors for the six available slots. The Run Around, Bagel and Bread House, and AstroTurf will each be billed $2,500 annually for advertising. 

The board, in March, hired New Jersey-based community marketing firm Advantage 3 to focus its advertising and sponsorship efforts on Hatboro-Horsham High School.

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“It is our goal to generate $15,000 in additional revenue per year, which would pay off the district’s portion of the scoreboard in a little over two years,” Robert Reichert, the district's director of business affairs said in the release.

Officials said previously that the high school's 21-year-old scoreboard is not Title IX compliant, only records football scores and would be cost-prohibitive to retrofit.

Former Hatboro-Horsham School Board member Eric Coombs, the father of 2010 Hatboro-Horsham grad Edward Taylor Coombs who died in a car crash two years, ago, first announced in June that the foundation established in his sports-loving son's name would help purchase a new scoreboard

Since beginning in the fall of 2011, the foundation has provided thousands in scholarship funds to area graduates, including more than $25,000 to 15 Hatboro-Horsham High School graduates in 2012.

“We just feel that it is our responsibility and it’s something that my son would want,” Coombs said previously of his offer to help. “I ask God every day, ‘what am I gaining out of this?’ What I’m gaining is to help our community.” 

The new scoreboard–which will be named the Edward Taylor Coombs Scoreboard–is expected to be delivered in four to six weeks and installed during an away game this football season.


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