Senior Jacob Trulock loved soccer so much, one NAHS student came up with a way to keep him memory alive.
“I started [the petition] because I was just thinking about a way to remember someone like Jacob and I knew that there were some soccer fields that didn’t have a name yet,” junior Harrison Knable said. “So I was talking with my dad who’s on the city council and asked him if it was a feasible endeavor to name one of the fields after Jacob.”
Trulock, who died in a hiking accident in April, was the captain of the NAHS soccer team and all-conference goalie.
The petition calls for NAHS’s new soccer field, projected to be where the current Green Valley Elementary School is, to be named after Trulock.
“There’s no better way to remember someone like Jacob than naming a soccer field after him because it will be in the community for years to come,” Knable said.
Currently the petition has just over 2000 signatures, according to Knable.
“It’s been a community effort. I’ve gotten equal amounts of signatures from students at numerous southern Indiana high schools,” Knable said. “It really hasn’t been specifically New Albany.”
Even though many schools in southern Indiana are rivals of NAHS, everyone joined together to help get signatures.
“It makes it more meaningful in that Jacob didn’t just affect people at NAHS, but his impact was around all southern Indiana,” Knable said.
It’s not only high school students who have signed this petition. A few politicians and the governor of Indiana have contributed to the effort.
“It’s more official in my opinion,” Knable said. “Governor Holcomb obviously didn’t know Jacob but I was at a dinner with him and we spoke about what had happened….and he asked if I would let him sign it and I said I would be honored.”
Knable is confident it will pass and looks forward to the significance it will hold to NAHS students, present and future.
“The biggest thing with having [the soccer field] named after Jacob is you have all these NAHS fields named after people that students have never heard of,” Knable said. “But these kids who will be playing on the soccer field, they knew Jacob.”
Although Knable has gotten a lot of positive attention for his actions, he gives credit to his community.
“It’s been a big group effort. All I’ve done really is enabled other people to be able to go out and collect these signatures.”
Corporation policy dictates that the person must be deceased for a year before a formal memorialization.
“I get a lot of people who come up and thank me for what I’m doing but I’m just a very small cog in the machine,” Knable said.