Don Kidd, left, stands with Robert Bates, Mayor Ken Tedford Jr., Ralph Ratti, Don Hardy, Gary Archie, and Jim Taylor after presenting the mayor with this award.
The Sagebrush Empire Pop Warner football group presented Mayor Ken Tedford with a special award on Wednesday in the council chambers of the mayor’s office.
The award was a thank you to Tedford and the city of Fallon for hosting and sponsoring this year’s Jamboree event, according to Robert Bates from Pop Warner who presented Tedford with the award.
“This award was presented to the mayor as well as to the city of Fallon for all that they do for us,” Bates said. “We’ve host our jamborees out here the last four years and they’ve contributed and helped us out on the fields, and with pretty much everything else. We have over 2,500-3,000 kids out here on one day and that’s a large event, so it takes a required effort by everybody to do it and the city of Fallon helped us out with it, so we wanted to give them a thank you.”
In addition to providing the grounds for the Jamboree, Bates said the city of Fallon has also helped support them with port-o-potties, security force, parking regulations and issuing permits.
“They’ve just done so much and helped us out immensely to make that one day event that is huge for our league into a giant success,” Bates said.
In addition to Bates and Tedford, Don Kidd, Ralph Ratti, Don Hardy, Gary Archie and Jim Taylor also attended the ceremony from Pop Warner stood for a photograph with the mayor holding the plaque presented.
“I think it’s important, like I mentioned in there earlier, to have this group of guys who support these kids,” Tedford said after the ceremony. “I think football is a good program that teaches a lot of discipline to these young people and not whether they win or lose, but how they teach them during each season. And I know they’re successful at what they do, but it mainly teaches them life skills and keeps them off the streets when they’re practicing and playing on the weekends, and those are good things.”
The mayor said the city is also supportive of those types of events due to the number of young children to Fallon from all over and that it was nice to get an award like this to show that Pop Warner acknowledges Fallon actively supporting them.
Tedford said he and the city would like to see more future events involving youth programs, and that he is supportive of all that would bring.
“Similar to the jamboree, I think in the future we would like to see basketball tournaments, volleyball tournaments, softball tournaments,” the mayor said. “We’ve supported rodeo events in the past, and at one point Silver State International Rodeo was here in our city, and we were a huge supporter of that event when it was in Fallon. Events like that, I think you’ll always see the city supporting events like that and trying to push those, and now that we have the (Venturacci Park) gym that we share with the county, I think you’ll see is trying to push more events towards that gym.”
“It’s hard to do since you have to kind of get in that market and so many are in that market,” the mayor said on the challenge of volleyball and basketball events specifically. “But I think this is a great community to do that, a community that loves kids and likes to support their activities.”