Crisp October air, inky sky dirty with stars, and the warmth of bodies surround you. Green field illuminated, the roar of the students of Broomfield High School under Friday night lights echoes out across the town:

I believe that we will win, I believe that we will win, I believe that we will win.

Broomfield High School: prestigious academics, performing arts, powerhouse athletics. We consistently produce the top teams in the top league in the biggest division in the state. And the heart of the school? Elizabeth Kennedy Stadium, where the Eagles football, track, and soccer teams win games and take names annually.

Rewind fifty years.

A different field lies under the same crisp air and inky sky. Different (and many fewer) bodies surround you, though the school spirit doesn’t seem to lack from it. This is Broomfield High School under Friday night lights, a 1A school in a nameless stadium, in 1962: the first year it was established. And at the front of the stands in her very own letterman jacket, where she was every Friday night, was Elizabeth Kennedy.

But she wasn’t just Broomfield’s biggest fan. She was an English teacher with a grandmotherly disposition about her, recalls alum Linda Tanguay, Class of ‘66. “She was stern but then she’d come up and give you a hug and say, ‘You are just great; great job’… She reminded me of my Mom that way.”

In a time when personal-professional boundaries were much more lenient, Kennedy was able to make a direct impact in students’ lives. “Mrs. Kennedy used to let us girls come over and we’d stay overnight on a Friday night” to make food and read books, remembers Tanguay. But it wasn’t just the girls Kennedy connected with – “even the guys and the coaches liked her”- a result of her caring personality and contagious school spirit. The kind of personal relationship Mrs. Kennedy had with her students is what every good teacher strives to have; the impact she had on the Broomfield community is the impact every good person attempts to make.

After her retirement in 1973, the Stadium was dubbed “Elizabeth Kennedy Stadium.” Yet even into old age, Mrs. Kennedy continued to support her Eagles at every wrestling match, track meet, basketball and football game. The stadium bearing her name remains the one place where people of all ages and interests come together in support of their friends, neighbors, and classmates.

One town, one team, and countless Eagles have been brought together under the luminescent lights of a Friday night.
May the cheering never cease, may the legacy never die, as long as those lights shine.