CLEVELAND, Tenn. - For nearly three years the Cleveland High School basketball teams have been what Kato Kaelin once was - just a houseguest looking for a place to crash.
The Blue Raiders have been homeless since late November in 2013 when the school's gym was condemned, and since then they have practiced or played "home" games at 12 sites in and around Cleveland.
"People have been generous, but you always feel like you're stepping on people's toes," Cleveland boys' coach Jason McCowan said. "You just don't feel comfortable. The kids have been tougher about it than us. They just show up and play."
Before practice each day, coaches and players for the boys' and girls' varsities, junior varsity squads and freshman teams gather the equipment and meet at either Cleveland Middle, one of the local college gyms, the YMCA, a local church or the volleyball gym to get in an hour or so of practice time. They've even used the band room, which of course has no goals but at least allowed room to work on defensive spacing.
McCowan's wandering Raiders even had one practice bumped when they arrived at a church only to find out there was a kids' birthday party already in full swing.
Their "home" games are mostly played at the middle school, but more effort actually goes into those than a road trip. For home games the team has to load up all the equipment - basketballs, water bottles, towels, uniforms, chairs, etc. - and arrive well before tipoff so the coaches can sweep the floor and prepare the gym for the game. Once the game ends it's another two-hour ordeal to clean up the gym and reload everything to go back to the high school.
"We've had to move wrestling mats out of the way, work around leaky roofs, forgotten basketballs or water bottles and had to send someone back to the high school for those, and it just seems like there's a new headache every day," said McCowan, who has coached Cleveland for nine years. "It's forced me to become a lot more organized, because we have to coordinate with the girls' teams on who gets to practice where, at what time.
"This has been the craziest thing I've ever been through in my career, because there's not a book on how to deal with it or anybody you can call and ask for advice on when your facility gets torn down. If I've learned anything in the last three years, it's to be flexible."
McCowan was the one who noticed a chunk of cinderblock had broken off behind part of the stands of the 50-year-old Raider Dome in the fall of 2013. Once Cleveland administrators brought in structural engineers to inspect the gym, they were told it was unsafe and the entire facility was condemned.
The Raider Dome was built to house 700, but Cleveland High's enrollment currently stands around 1,400, so the school was already in dire need of a new facility even before the old one began to crumble.
When construction is completed on the nearly 60,000-square-foot Raider Arena in April, it will seat around 2,700 with plenty of extra space for an overflow crowd along the walking track that encircles the upper level. Not only will the new arena have a college-level 94-foot floor, but when the bleachers are pushed back against the wall, it will open up enough space for two 94-foot practice floors. The new facility also will house six classrooms with glass walls that look out over the gym, a weight facility, six boys' and girls' locker rooms complete with team meeting rooms, a joint laundry room, offices for physical education teachers and coaches, a state-of-the-art sound system and a large center-hung scoreboard.
"It's been difficult - to get your stuff together and have to move around for practices - plus we don't really have any kind of home-court advantage because we don't have a home," said Lady Raiders senior Shawnia Anderson. "It was heartbreaking to be told the new arena wouldn't be finished in time for us seniors to play in it. I'm a little jealous, honestly, about the underclassmen getting to play in it next year.
"I've walked in there and (Raider Arena) is going to be amazing. But there's a part of me that's sad about the old Raider Dome having to be torn down, too. Everybody around here played in that gym at some point, so we all have a lot of great memories of it."
Contact Stephen Hargis at shargis@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6293.