Members of SPARK, Austin’s dog park committee, attended Friday evening’s Austin High School wrestling match at the Ole Berven gym for a special reason.

On May 12 last year, varsity wrestling coach Bill Kinney and his team put in eight hours of hard labor in the hot sun helping SPARK members and a handful of volunteers erect a 5-foot high chain link fence around the new dog park’s perimeter.

The team would accept nothing in return except lunch on site, so the SPARK group showed up at the AHS wrestling match against Faribault on Friday and presented at halftime a framed certificate of appreciation to Coach Kinney and his team.

The dog park, at the south end of Second Street SE, is busy in all seasons and all weathers, “but we never could have opened May 12, right on schedule, without these wrestlers’ vital help,” said SPARK spokesperson Megan Burroughs.