Just more than a year ago, on November 2, 2006, 412 Rehoboth students lined up on a bare patch of red sandy earth in a section of their school’s campus that until then had been deep right field for an overgrown and outdated softball field. Together with Rehoboth staff, volunteers, and various Rehoboth supporters, they sang, prayed, heard speeches, and turned over that dusty red earth with gold-painted shovels, together dedicating that section of God’s world to be the future Rehoboth gym, in what even then seemed an impossible dream. And after the dedication, life went on as normal that afternoon: first graders traipsed excitedly ¼ mile across campus to the 47-year old “Keith Kuipers Gym” for one of their favorite classes of the week. After school, both boys’ and girls’ basketball teams waited around school for the volleyball team to finish their 2-hour practice, before they could share the short sideways courts with both male and female JV and varsity teams. As was typical after a late practice and a long drive home across the reservation, many RCS student athletes would not arrive home until almost 9:00 PM to eat dinner, complete chores, and finally sit down to homework.

Over the ensuing months, while visiting athletic teams again avoided RCS’s dingy locker rooms, refusing to shower because there was only ever cold water, RCS elementary kids rejoiced in the enormous hills of dirt that gathered while one construction crew after another came through and left their mark on the new gym’s ever-growing walls. They grew to know and love the Rockford Construction crew chief, nicknamed “Shaggy” and his beloved dog, Mr. Bojangles, and waved at him from their buses. They watched mesmerized while cranes floated steel beams high across New Mexico’s blue sky, landing them 44 feet up, where the new gym’s roof line would soon tower over everything else on campus. They gossiped during recess how the new gym’s auxiliary gym was rumored to be “their” gym, and they wouldn’t have to share their precious gym time with the big high school kids.

Meanwhile, those basketball fans fortunate enough to get tickets to any popular RCS games shoehorned next to each other into the old gym’s bleachers made for 400, while the NM Activities Association decreed once again that the RCS gym was too small and unsafe for any post-season tournament play. Although RCS fans loved the Keith Kuipers Gym and celebrated it as a place for coming together, to remember and retell the old accomplishments, they eagerly watched the new gym growing—and growing more quickly than anyone actually thought it could happen.

Fast forward through nine rapid months of actual construction time, to November 10, 2007, and once again a large crowd gathers outside on Rehoboth’s campus, this time to “untie” the ribbon wrapped around the new gym’s gorgeous all-glass south-facing entrance. Many in the crowd carry trophies and banners taken just minutes earlier from the old gym’s trophy cases, to be placed proudly in the new building, reminders of the school’s rich athletic heritage, to be carried on under a new roof.

A seemingly impossible dream for so long, the new “Rehoboth Sports and Fitness Center” was made possible through encouragement and lead gift of $5 million from Rich and Helen DeVos of Amway Corporation. When they visited RCS and toured the campus two years ago as long-time donors who were invited to give the commencement address, they asked RCS administration what their dreams were for the school’s campus. They were told a new gym.

“We went home and prayed about this, and wanted to make this happen,” DeVos said to the more than 600 gathered in the gym for the dedication. “We’ve got to stop being second class just because we’re Christians,” he continued. “For so long, our Christian school systems have always gone cheap. We wanted to build a first class place to the glory of God.”

The 43,000 square foot facility was built to glorify God in a multitude of ways. The building includes an NBA-sized basketball court 10 feet longer than the old gym’s court, bleacher seating for 1200, an auxiliary gym with plans for an indoor climbing wall, a first-class fitness facility, and a generously sized lobby and concession stand. But it also houses a new acoustically advanced band room three times larger than the old one, sizeable band storage and director’s office, and another mixed-use classroom for the high school persistently outgrowing its current building. After researching a host of other gym facilities, RCS officials and architects also included generous storage areas for sports equipment, and—at the request of Mr. DeVos—more toilet stalls for female sports fans than males.

“This is our window to the world,” DeVos continued, “a new showcase, a building with a purpose. People will come here just because of this building, but then will get into the presence of God-fearing people who love Jesus, so they too might learn the love of the Lord, and the only peace that can be found in Him.”

Likewise, RCS staff view the new facility as much more than just beautiful new walls and soaring ceilings, but rather as a bridge for better serving RCS students, for reaching out to their families, their communities. Sports—especially basketball—in the greater Gallup region have been able to break down racial and economic barriers in ways that few other things have. Furthermore, with a majority population of Native American children who are 280% more likely than their Anglo counterparts to become diabetic, the school takes seriously the mission to educate the body as well as the mind and spirit.

“It’s a facility in which we’re committed to [educating] the way Christians ought to when it comes to sports and athletics,” Ron Polinder, Rehoboth’s executive director, said. “This facility recognizes the interest and joy that sports bring to our greater community.”

Myron Postma, Rehoboth’s athletic director for 21 years, appreciates the building as an amazing new tool for teachers and coaches to better disciple RCS students to be the best possible Christian adults they can. In his speech at the dedication service, he quoted evangelist Billy Graham, saying “One coach will have more impact on a team in one season, than a regular person will have in a whole life time.”

Evidence of that quote stood before the crowd assembled in the person of Keith Kuipers, former Rehoboth teacher, school administrator, and beloved coach, for whom the “old gym” was named.

“The history of basketball was only 25 years old when I started,” he recalled. “I remember the first coffee cans placed all over the fence posts [when I lived] in Zuni.”   Earlier that morning, Kuipers had carried the 1977 boys’ basketball state championship trophy he had won as a Rehoboth coach, but commented that that victory was not really the highlight of his 81 years. “Anywhere there’s a group, there’s always some of my boys there,” he continued. “I love to see them at work in the community as elders in church, teachers, ministers, or doctors in the hospital. My greatest joy has been to see all that development.”

 Read the Gallup Independent coverage of the event here