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Ballard Bombers turn focus from sports to community clean up after Monday's derecho

The Ballard Bombers fall sports teams have spent the last five days helping clean up their community one house at a time.

HUXLEY, Iowa — “It’s kind of crazy. This is the kind of thing you hear about but don’t really see especially since we were locked in the high school when it happened we just saw it all it was just like astounding. It was like wow," said junior football player, Kale Krogh.

At that moment, football became secondary and going to work to help their community was priority number one.

Krogh said, “Since the storm hit today was the first day that we’ve had football so we’ve been focusing all of our time cleaning people’s yards and helping out.”

It’s not just the football team. All of the fall sports at Ballard have gone to work. Friday it started in Cambridge at Michael Peterson’s home.

“To come here and help me is a lot I really appreciate it," said Peterson.

It took less than an hour to clean up,

“It would have took me at least another week.”

The Bombers weren’t done there. Josie Fleischmann explains how it all works.

“Everyone gets together and carpools meets at houses you meet up with parents in the community and everyone sends out houses and then everyone goes to that one next so it’s pretty cool because you get a huge group of people and move house to house.”

It’s free of charge.

“We’ve been cleaning up cutting trees, bringing them to the road so the city can take care of them trying to get it out of people’s yards so that they can get in it," said Krogh

But there’s plenty of payoff for these young men and women.

Fleischmann said, “Well we had one lady yesterday I mean she teared up she was crying. She was like I can’t believe this, this is too much just all the work we’ve put in that was probably the best compliment we’ve gotten. You can just see the appreciation in their faces.”

“Yesterday there was a house we helped at and the guy thought we were a clean up crew charging and he about started to cry when we started to help him and it was free labor and he was so happy and a joy to have us help,” said Krogh.

It’s Iowans helping Iowans and there’s only one way to sum it up.

“Iowa nice there’s no better place to live than Iowa."

RELATED: Baxter Bolts clean up destruction left behind by Monday's derecho

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