ROCKFORD—“You think dad was watching today?” asked Lou Bachrodt III as he smiled for the camera outside the new Lou and Irene Bachrodt Center for Health and Fitness at Boylan Central Catholic High School.

In 1959, his parents were asked by Bishop Loras T. Lane to chair the capital campaign to build the co-educational diocesan high school. The school welcomed its first class while still under construction on Sept. 7, 1960.

“For the next 40 years, my father served on the board at Boylan,” Patrick Bachrodt said at the Jan. 19 dedication ceremony. If you wanted to learn about Boylan, he added, “all you had to do was sit down with my mother and father for (he paused) about five hours” to learn more than you ever imagined.

His comment brought laughter from the audience at the afternoon ceremony, and also a bit of awe at the couple’s devotion to the school. It was Lou and Irene’s dedication that prompted their sons to give a $1 million fund-matching challenge to the Imagine Comprehensive Campaign’s final project. More than 10,000 donors took up the challenge and exceeded the match.

The resulting Bachrodt center is an 18,100 square foot, two-court practice gymnasium. It will provide practice space for student-athletes and for physical education classes. Bishop David Malloy prayed and blessed the new building during the end-of-the-school-day ceremony that included comments and thanks to the Bachrodts from Boylan Catholic President Amy Ott.

Student Council president, Matthew Cyrs described his basketball experience in the new center, saying, “I can personally assure it is just as great as it looks!”

He added that the center “will serve generation after generation of Boylan students to come.”

Patrick Bachrodt also noted the connection of past, present and future at the dedication, expressing his hope that when students see the names of his parents, they will remember what they stood for, and will strive to be the “Saints, Scholars and Champions” of the school’s motto.

The dedication event concluded after the band, at the prompting of Principal Jerry Kerrigan, played a “rousing school fight song.” An appreciation dinner for the donor family followed later that evening.