Parish center to be named after former UA coach and wife

Core team members Terri Pesnell, Bob Mahler, Brian Wood, Darlene Martucci, Mark Prenger and Rafael Merida discuss their next meeting at St. Joseph Church in Fayetteville Sept. 2.
Core team members Terri Pesnell, Bob Mahler, Brian Wood, Darlene Martucci, Mark Prenger and Rafael Merida discuss their next meeting at St. Joseph Church in Fayetteville Sept. 2.

FAYETTEVILLE — St. Joseph Church is planning a new activity center for the parish, and an aggressive capital campaign that kicked off this month is expected to close by year’s end.
The Norm and Caroline DeBriyn Activity Center will provide 31,000 square feet of space for the school and the parish, and parish leaders hope it will be open in time for the 2010-11 school year.
The center will provide additional classrooms, a gymnasium and a performance area for the school as well as meeting space for other church groups not related to the school. The school’s art classroom will move to the new building and the music program will get a dedicated classroom, and, when Father Bradley Barber decides it’s time, the school will also add eighth grade to the curriculum.
“We’re excited, and we hope the whole church is excited about it,” Brian Wood, a Fayetteville lawyer who serves as co-chairman of the parish core team, said about the new building. “We’ve been needing a gym for so long (where students) can go inside and do indoor sports.”
The center is being named to honor long-time parishioners Norm and Caroline DeBriyn, well known within and outside the parish. Norm DeBriyn is the now-retired University of Arkansas baseball coach and Caroline DeBriyn taught at Springdale High School for many years.
“We’ve had so many different people … who wanted to honor Norm and Caroline,” Wood said. “They’re so well respected.”
Parish business manager Paul Warren echoed the sentiment, noting that baseball alums “talk about Norm not as a coach but as a father figure.” Norm DeBriyn, he added, is “one of the most humble people you’ll ever meet. … He doesn’t want to be ostentatious.”
The couple is active in the parish and many other community activities. Norm DeBriyn is one of four special ministers of Communion in the parish, meaning, in the absence of a priest, he can hold a Communion service, Warren said. The couple regularly bring Communion to parishioners who cannot attend Mass and Norm DeBriyn recently began the diaconate program.
The project’s been several years coming and is another step in the multi-phased construction plans parishioners expected when they moved in 2002 from a location near the city’s downtown area to a larger site on the east side. A new building opened at that time houses both the school and the church. When Mass attendance requires, walls in the sanctuary are pushed out to allow additional seating in the area used as a school cafeteria.
Warren said the chapel seats 900 people. “But you wouldn’t want to just recreate” a sanctuary of similar size. “The design we want (would seat) 1,500 people.” Warren estimated a church of that size would cost $8 million to $10 million, currently beyond the means of the parish.
“You would need pledges of $6 million to $8 million. We’re not large enough to do that yet,” he explained.
The addition of another grade level –eighth — may also help progress toward the creation of a Catholic high school in northwest Arkansas.
“It will be up to Father Barber when we finish (the activity center) whether he wants to do that (add eighth grade) right away,” Wood said.
Warren said best “guesstimates” for the cost of the new building are $5.7 million. Church officials hope to get pledges of $2.5 million to $3 million from parishioners in the next three months and to cover the balance with grants from non-parishioners and foundations. Among those who will be asked to contribute are non-parishioners who have children in the school.
“We need to keep the cost down” as much as possible, Warren said, adding that the project will be “value-engineered as best we can.”
That, he explained, means considering various options to reduce costs. It was a strategy used on the existing building, which came in about 3 percent over budget.
Diocesan approval for projects like the DeBriyn Center is a three-step process, Warren said, and St. Joseph Parish has already gained preliminary approval for the first step of consideration. The second submittal to the diocese requires a meeting with the architect and that meeting is scheduled for Sept. 23, he added.
Wood said the capital campaign is expected be completed within four years.
“After we pay everything off, we want to move to Phase III,” construction of a free-standing sanctuary.

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