Just a few weeks shy of the start of football season, the Goshen Eagles’ booster club sponsored a Meet the Eagles event for parents, athletes and community members to meet the Goshen booster club and have a chance to sign up for a membership.

Michael Redmon, booster club president, said the booster club helped sponsor the team buying equipment, sweatshirts or other items they would need.

“We’re just letting everyone meet the teams, letting them meet the kids,” Redmon said. “We’re here to raise money for them. We just wanted to talk to other parents, get them to join. It’s kind of like a membership drive. It can be anything. The special equipment they need. We try to, for every child that participates, instead of doing trophies and stuff, we’ll buy them sweatshirts. We just try to do things for them that are going to help them out and build team pride and moral.”

Memberships for couples are $20 and single memberships are only $10, but Redmon said while the membership fee seemed like a small price to pay, it meant a lot to the athletes.

“Everybody has one vote and say in everything,” Redmon said. “It’s $20 for couples and $10 for individual memberships. We make a little money off that, but the biggest thing is getting everybody involved. The more people we have involved, the easier it is with the amount of events that we do have going on. The three big fundraisers that we do are our cash drawing, deer hunt right at the end of the football season and this year we’re hoping to add a turkey fry at Thanksgiving. We’re going to do the deer hunt again this year at the beginning of January. The deer hunt last year, we did it for the first time, and we had to turn away people because we just didn’t have enough landowners to take them to hunt. For the turkeys that’s going to be a lot of work. And, with the drawing we have to sell 250 tickets for $50 each, and that takes a lot of work to sell those.”

Those wanting to sign up for the booster club and missed the event are being asked to call Redmon or to talk to an athlete, coach or come to the next booster club meeting to participate.

“They can call me at 672-3703, and if the kids are participating, we send out text messages about meetings and all that. So just come out to the meeting and get involved,” Redmon said. “The way we look at it, these athletes represent their families, they represent their school, they’re representing all alumni and they’re representing our community. They put out the effort and all that, and it just makes them special. We just want to make sure they have the best of everything.”